Tyranny of numbers and why we need to worry about a bullet in the chamber

Were the violent scenes in Parliament last week a law-and-order matter of enforcing discipline or a tremor from an active volcano containing the groundswell of disquiet over the country’s political direction?

Seen primarily through the rules and procedures of Parliament, it is a case of the former: A bit of argy-bargy which escalated into handbags and worse, but really over bureaucratic choices of which motion ought to have been heard first, whether the Speaker was fair and even-handed in dealing with dissenting views, and how to remove disruptive members.
This is a simple explanation, understood by even those who are unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.

But it does not tell the whole story or explain why ‘honourable’ Members of Parliament, not only in Uganda, can act so dishonourably.
Scholars at the Hertie School of Governance and the University of Kentucky researched legislative violence in several countries, including the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine, among others.
They found that parliamentary brawls, far from being spontaneous and unpredictable, have method to the madness: They are more likely to occur where there is a “credible commitment problem”; in other words, where conflicting sides are unable to convince the other side to believe that they will stick to an agreement reached through peaceful bargaining.

They found that if the bargaining was over future power or involved an external factor, the risk of violence was higher because both sides were inclined to believe that they would gain more from fighting than from negotiating.
There are many parallels, but three stand out.

First, the decision by the House leadership to go back on its word and entertain private members’ Bills instead of waiting for an omnibus constitutional amendment Bill from the Executive, created a commitment problem.
Secondly, the NRM front and back benchers, comfortable in their numerical supremacy, showed no indication of compromise, say in promising to support other private members’ Bills, including those from the Opposition, in order to avoid a filibustering or break the deadlock. Why compromise when you can win alone?
Third, this left the numerically weak Opposition with a higher incentive to disrupt proceedings than debate alternatives.

This isn’t dissimilar to football fans who force the abandonment of a game they see no hope of winning, and where they believe they have suffered some injustice. If we can’t win or you can’t win fairly, then we should all lose!
Yet the fight in Parliament is just one small battle in a prolonged and widespread war over constitutionalism and the rule of law in Uganda. It began before the ink on the 1995 Constitution had dried, with legal challenges to the one-party ‘Movement System’, and then spilled into the constitutional amendments of 2005. Over the last decade, the key fights have been over institutional independence and integrity, and the separation of powers.
The Judiciary was the first to capitulate to the Executive’s overreach with the 2005 Black Mamba commando raid and the subsequent hiring of cadre judges some of whom notoriously dispensed legally dubious, but politically convenient judgments.

Political opponents and dissenters followed in short order on a short leash at the end of which stood the expansive Public Order Management Act. Subsequent legal and administrative diktats brought the media and civil society organisations to heel.

Meanwhile, the perks of patronage and gains from gerrymandering continued to buoy the NRM’s fortunes: Between 2006, when the first multiparty House was elected, and 2016, it grew its share of parliamentary seats from 64 to 69 per cent while the combined Opposition parties declined by a similar margin to 13 per cent.

With a super majority in Parliament, friends in the Judiciary and in full control of the coercive (and rewarding) tools of the State, there is a danger of Uganda’s democratic aspirations collapsing under the weight of majoritarianism and NRM’s tyranny of numbers. This is especially so where alternative views and voices, the pressure valves that allow minorities in democracies to breathe, are silenced or contemptuously dismissed out of hand – such as with references to access to military support; “the magye”.

Opposition MPs were wrong to destroy parliamentary property. Yet, in the absence of other spaces in which they can freely mobilise support for alternative views or seek justice, did their actions desecrate Parliament or signpost it as the venue for the last stand for democracy.
Only time will tell, but history is illustrative: In Ukraine and the US, legislative violence was soon followed by civil war.

We are far from such extremes, but when the matter comes up to the vote, it will pit the Man in the Street against the Man in the Suit. Hopefully we will not have a gun in Parliament – or a bullet in the chamber.

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