Hey, we can continue milking Western ignorance

Alan Tacca

What you need to know:

  • Classic formula. When one of the visitors (probably a Western-conditioned Asian) wondered aloud how their host had managed to transform Uganda, and President Museveni recited his classic formula of focusing on ‘common interests’ and rejecting ‘sectarianism’ and the ‘politics of identity’ (tribe, religion), I am sure his guests also reproduced the classic response of repeatedly nodding their heads.

For years after Field Marshal Idi Amin was overthrown and exiled in 1979, many people in the West kept asking Ugandans how Amin was running Uganda.
Travelling through the American Midwest in the spring of 1982, and introducing myself as a Ugandan, many Americans figured out that Uganda was in South Africa.

Do you get angry?
No. You get humbled. You realise that your country is a small matter on the global scale; that there are billions of people on this planet who would live quite happily if your country – and you – did not exist.
The oddness of Amin’s comical eccentricities and cold brutality was bigger than the country’s running political narrative. Although Uganda’s story was changing, the Amin image persisted.
But a positive image can also persist, even as the running narrative slides into hopelessness.

People interested in international affairs will strive to follow US president Donald Trump’s daily movements, and his thoughts tweet by tweet (which, incidentally, may not be the best path to understanding Mr Trump), but the same people are content to depend on the high-sounding speeches made by leaders of small nations five or 10 years ago, and on their performance of way back, when it comes to describing the condition in those nations.

Not for the first time, this occurred to me when I read stories of the interaction between President Museveni and two groups of military people; one from Britain, and another from an Indian military college. (See The New Vision, 25 May.)
Whether they were touring or studying or spying, that was their business; at least they put a smile on my face.

I thought, wow, here were foreign people thinking that my beloved Uganda was still leaping upward instead of tumbling!
In their apparent ignorance lay our PR dividend. Assuming they were not just flattering their host, I prayed that this ignorance remain; a godsend we and our leaders could milk.
When one of the visitors (probably a Western-conditioned Asian) wondered aloud how their host had managed to transform Uganda, and President Museveni recited his classic formula of focusing on ‘common interests’ and rejecting ‘sectarianism’ and the ‘politics of identity’ (tribe, religion), I am sure his guests also reproduced the classic response of repeatedly nodding their heads.

Thankfully, the visitors probably had neither heard the voices decrying a long record of nepotism, ethno-regional favouritism, nor heard tales of the enormous growth of the ‘tribe’ of the unemployed and other have-nots.
They could not ask how the politics of ‘interests’ became the politics of gangster greed, breeding so much more inequality, crime and impunity than the evil politics of identity.

The visitors apparently imagined they were in an earlier NRM-led Uganda, with the people and their property relatively secure, and justice and economic opportunities (reasonably) open to all.
The visitors had not even heard President Museveni lambasting those tempted to think he was a ‘servant of the people’, forgetting he was a freedom fighter working for himself and his family.
The visitors even emboldened the President to praise our healthcare system without expecting a challenge.

Similarly, if our foreign friends are not aware that in the DR Congo we fought other ‘peace-keepers’ and left as plunderers, or that recent UN and AU surveys show that only about 15 per cent of respondents in Somalia currently consider Amison (which includes our pet UPDF) a friendly force, then do not blame our ruling elite for milking the lingering narrative that used to portray Uganda as a model exporter of peace.