Uganda is so divided, we can’t even agree on what to fight over

Can a country that is deeply divided down the middle find common cause and purpose to chart a common course for the future? That’s the lingering question one is left with after spending some time in Uganda.
Mainstream media are full of stories about factional fighting within almost every public institution and the Inspector General of Police has warned about “mafia” in the army and the security services.
Some of these divisions are shallow and territorial, between say egoistical officers in the military or the police shoulder-barging one another for favours or power. Others, such as the current disagreement over tactics and strategy within leading Opposition parties, might even be useful in the long-run in bringing about clarity.

Still some divisions are deep, entrenched and concerning. The most serious one is that the country is divided between the haves and the have-nots. This is both geographical, in the uneven development of different regions of the country, and doctrinal, in the widely-held view that real power – political, military and economic – is held by a small cabal of people held together by blood and marriage.
This then feeds into wider class divisions between the poor and the rich, which, at different times and for different reasons plays out either as a rural-urban divide, a divide between old money and new money, or between honest money and hot money.

To this add the divisions between big traditionally dominant tribes and smaller upstarts in previously vassal states, and within the big dominant tribes disagreements between monarchical and republican sentiments and within these blocs, disagreements over whether to seek rapprochement with other power centres, particularly the central government, or resist it.
Then there is the contest between foreign and local capital; between landowners, some whose ownership carries the pungent whiff of dubious provenance and land settlers with competing claims; between local patriots and foreign quislings – and not to forget the longer-running contest between the social democrats and the free market republicans, or between the one-partyists (yes, they still exist!) and the multi-partyists.

These conditions afford us at least two quick conclusions. The first is that the myth of the Big Church state in which all walked together under the ‘Movement’ umbrella in egalitarian bliss – cynical atheists holding hands with half-mad Pentecostals, republicans grazing their cows alongside monarchists in Ankole, Tumpeco-mug-wielding ministers waiting patiently in line in public hospitals with primary school teachers, et cetera – was stillborn.
There was never a rainbow, let alone a pot of gold; merit was always going to be found in one individual.
The second conclusion is that little, if any, consensus can be found in such a bitterly contested public space, even on matters that everyone agrees need to be fixed. How are people to support an admittedly forward-looking proposal to amend the land law to speed up public infrastructure investments if the biggest land-grabbers and speculators are the same people in government?

How can you generate consensus on developing a new school curriculum when some of the people proposing the changes take their own children to expensive schools teaching an international syllabus?
How can people who have profited from the large scale asset-stripping of the country preach reconciliation and plugging of loopholes without being seen as trying to kick away the ladder and stop the unwashed from rising from the ghettos to the suburbs?
The short answer is that they can’t, and they will not. It appears as if no space, no idea, no theory, no objective is uncontested in Uganda. The problem here is not the disagreement – societies advance through the contest of ideas – but that we have become a binary society that forgot how to debate and disagree without becoming disagreeable.

The origins of the second conclusion can be found in the first; rather than foster open debate and discussion, the Movement gagged it, sometimes violently and sometimes by that most draconian accusation of “using the wrong forum”.
We found out a long time ago that the Movement political system was designed, not to “put power in the hands of the people”, but to entrench the regime in power.
Now we are learning that a political ‘system’ that promised internal debate and consensus stifled all alternative viewpoints and left us so divided, we can’t even agree on what we want to disagree on and instead disagree on everything. The irony!
Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. [email protected] &Twitter: @Kalinaki