Uganda needs a balance of power 

The world, at odds with itself, appears to have cast itself in the unhappy role of outrider to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

You recall those mythical yet very real hooded horsemen (this word is not gender-neutral, women are not historically pestilential), they are four forbidding biblical figures who appear in the Book of Revelation. 

According to biblical lore, if you may, they are revealed by the unsealing of the first four of the seven seals. 

Each of the horsemen represents a different facet of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine, and death.

However, with war serving as the matrix of human suffering in current affairs, the four horsemen may be combined into one. In this sense, war is not a unilateral phenomenon but a quadrilateral one. 

This brings us to peace.

That is because war and peace are two side of the same thing in view of the absence of one leading to the presence of the other.

To bring about peace, we may refer to the 1942 idea of US president Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, better known by the familiar FDR. 

This idea was the four policemen post-war council. 

After World War II ended in 1945, this idea maturated into praxis.  The “Four Policemen” consisted of the “Big Four” countries that FDR believed would serve as custodians of the hard-won peace.

Each country of the four would circumscribe their spheres of influence to pull off this starry-eyed initiative.

Britain would superintend her colonial possessions around the world and Western Europe, the Soviet Union would corral Eastern Europe and the central Eurasian landmass, China would supervise East Asia and the Western Pacific and the United States would keep overarching watch over the Western Hemisphere.

As a proviso, all other countries other than the four policemen were to be disarmed as a preventive measure against any more turf wars on a global scale. 

In summary, the world would have four policemen to arrest the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, no less. 

As a concept, it was flawed in that we could not be sure that the four policemen would not go rogue and mount, as it were, the horses galloping humankind to the abyss. 

Still, the underlying principle here was that we should have strategic balance based on the parity of a multipolar geopolitical map. 

This multipolarity would offset the bipolarity that comes with East versus West and the unipolarity that comes with Western or Eastern hegemony. 

In the process, Vladimir Putin would have no reason to be in Ukraine and the West would stop stirring things up in the Middle East. 

Then, assuming that multipolarity superseded the need for only four policemen, underdog continents such as Africa could also have a seat at the table of world powers. 

If multipolarity was a global policy, it could trickle down to the national polices which suffuse the politics of individual nations. 

By this token, a country like Uganda could have multiple centres of power and thereby balance the forces of Opposition and government towards a democratic dispensation.

Indeed, the biggest problem we have in this country is not that leaders tend to overstay their welcome. The biggest problem is that we do not have mechanisms in place to ensure that leaders are not welcome to overstay. 

If, however, we put those mechanisms in place as part of a wider global political culture, we could ably answer the late Tony Benn’s immortal questions: What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?

Mr Philip Matogo is a professional copywriter  
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