The NRA/M gave us LCs, it is a shame to see them taken away by partisan politics

The ruling NRM party and the opposition FDC have both claimed ‘victory’ in the recent local council elections. NRM says it won about 84 per cent of the available seats countrywide – a remarkable result for a party that went into the race supposedly hamstrung by the controversial constitutional amendments as well as a raft of new and unpopular taxes. The Opposition claim that their final tally, whatever it is, represents progress from zero seats; the last LC elections were held 17 years ago, before restrictions on political parties were lifted. This is a bit rich.
On the face of it, this one goes to NRM on points by unanimous decision – but who are the real losers? Conventional wisdom suggests the Opposition’s inability to translate public displeasure with political and fiscal policies into electoral punishment reflects their mobilisational incompetence and institutional weaknesses. This is true in a sense, but it does not tell the full story.
To see why, we need to return to the beginning and see the LCs for what they were meant to be; ‘resistance councils’ in which villages ‘liberated’ by the National Resistance Army chose their own leaders to maintain basic law and order. The NRA/M rehashed the idea from the ‘Mayumba Kumi’ concept, itself borrowed from Tanzania by the UNLF government, and which allowed 10-homestead clusters to mobilise themselves either for self-help or self-defence.
The RCs established during the Bush War gave communities a sense of self-governance, served as a bulwark against the UPC Youth Wingers, and allowed the NRA, which had more military boots than political roots, to win hearts and minds. Both during the war and after the NRA/M came to power, the RCs, or LCs as they eventually became, were the most innovative and democratic representations of people-power. The method of voting by lining up behind one’s preferred candidate might have been enforced by the lack of money and structures to organise secret ballots, but it was brutally democratic: People liked you and voted for you, or they didn’t and voted with their feet to the next line. Village sorcerers to the left.
This raw earthiness was the LC system’s biggest strength. As time went by, it became its biggest weakness. Under the ‘Movement’ one-party system, people were, in theory, to be elected on individual merit. This notion was quickly exposed by the ‘selection’ to the first National Resistance Council, and then to the support offered to preferred candidates in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, as well as in the 2001 elections.
The LC1 is one of the most important political offices in the country, signing off on anything from passport applications to land transfer agreements. In its natural state, it allowed cream to rise to the top, favouring respected and respectable community leaders – the salt-of-the-earth types – over journeymen. After all, you need a permanent place of abode where people who need their documents stamped can find you. Village drunkards to the left.
The key element here is that the LC needed – both in deed and in practice – to be neutral. They were not expected to favour rich over poor, side with kinsmen in land disputes or refuse to sign a form for a neighbor with whom they might happen to have a long-running dispute over a village belle. This tradition of relative impartiality meant that the LC evolved, over time and in the absence of elections, a hereditary office. Our collective tragedy has been to politicise the LC office, especially at the grassroots. The Opposition probably meant well when they went to court a few years ago and successfully argued that all elections under a multiparty system have to be contested along party lines. This meant, as we have seen in the recent elections, that the seeds of political partisanship have been sown in an office whose job is mostly bureaucratic, not political.
This mistake could have been overcome or side-stepped if the decision to elect LCs along partisan lines was done by secret ballot, not by the ancient method of lining up behind candidates. What is to stop an LC chairman from refusing or delaying endorsement of documents presented by a well-known supporter of a rival party?
And, in a world where the distribution of farm inputs and local cooperative grants is overseen by partisan political appointees and State functionaries, spare a thought for those villagers who were seen in the queue of an unsuccessful opposition candidate. Cows will play drums in a rock band before they receive a heifer! Election losers to the left.
Our LCs should have been kept out of the partisan political fray. A unique and important institution has been smeared with the broad brush of partisanship. In this there are no winners, only losers. Consensus to the left.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.