I agree with Mao on active election boycott

I read DP president Norbert Mao’s opinion piece in Sunday Monitor of November 10 entitled, “Active boycott is imperative when elections become an empty ritual,” and was happy that a major political player was beginning to think more seriously and courageously about Uganda’s Opposition strategies vis-à-vis causing change. Chairman Mao, as we fondly call him, wrote in part as follows:
“Imagine a soccer match where two teams face each other. One team is the reigning champion. The other team is the challenger that the trophy has eluded for decades. The reigning champion is captained by a player who is also the referee. He runs around with a whistle in his mouth. When he is in possession of the ball he blows the whistle to stop the match to frustrate challengers who seek to tackle him and dispossess him of the ball.
“He also clutches a red card in one hand. He brandishes the yellow card threateningly at any challenger.

Any challenger who dares tackle him is shown the red card and sent off the field. His boots have nails under the soles. He has no scruples about injuring anyone who comes too close to the ball.”
I couldn’t have agreed more with his analogy. Uganda’s Opposition political parties and change seekers have for ages been engaged in electoral and political processes that are superintended over by institutions expressly designed by the oligarchy to facilitate their perpetual stay in power, rather than levelling the ground for fair political competition.
This, as I wrote in Sunday Monitor of November 10, under the heading “Which way Uganda on citizen empowerment?” beats logic, common sense and even science.
No sane human being, let alone leader, can be doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Gen Mugisha Muntu puts it even better, albeit in a different context. He says: “You can’t plant lemon and reap oranges.”
In other words, it is foolhardy to be blindly optimistic that Gen Museveni’s regime can be somewhat, may be miraculously, overwhelmed through elections presided over by an Electoral Commission whose objective is to keep the regime in power.
For starters, this is not borne out of cowardice, pessimism or defeatism.

This is realism borne out of election experiences under the NRM since 1996.
I believe that leaders should possess the capacity to learn, unlearn and relearn. Put differently, leaders should have the ability to programme, deprogramme and reprogramme their minds and thoughts whenever it is necessary.
No army in the world fights a winning war using the same strategy, year in, year out.

If a leader has been pursuing a particular strategy to ameliorate a problem without success, he/she must definitely do an honest assessment and change strategy so as to win.
We need to be clear here. Hegemonic regimes create institutions that primarily serve their personal interests rather than those of the people and nation. The institutions serve the people and nation by default or when through that service, regime objectives are met.
Their objectives usually rotate around continued stay in power and domination.

Uganda is not an exception to that rule. Many of Uganda’s institutions serve the whims of the person of Gen Museveni and his cronies, not the country and its citizens.
It is, therefore, incumbent upon the people fighting for change to choose whether they can realistically cause change by engaging the regime through the institutions it created to perpetuate its domination and stay in power or employ strategies that are out of reach and or control of the regime.

This is a debate that all political parties and change seekers should, without sentiment or fear of contradiction, engage in and resolve. It won’t be helpful to run away from it.

The question is, do we genuinely believe that the Opposition political parties as they are today can overwhelm Museveni’s juggernaut in an election that is not free, fair or credible and take over power?
If the answer is in the affirmative then we need to discuss what should be done to achieve this.

If the answer is a no, then we should discuss alternative strategies to employ to achieve the stated objective namely, change of power.
I implore Chairman Mao to initiate this debate within DP organs and in the Opposition as a whole.

Mr Mugabe is a member of the Alliance for National Transformation party
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