Will the NRM finally prove Jose Chameleone wrong?

In 2006, dancehall icon Jose Chameleone sang the introspective song Basiima Ogenze. Which, when loosely translated from Luganda to English, reveals the words: “You’ll miss me when I am gone.”

A few years after this song blazed a trail to a disco inferno, President Museveni employed his most plaintive voice to tell Ugandans that we would miss him when he was gone, too.
Many Ugandans were bemused, for many of us have missed him while he has been around. Most notably the ruffians who allegedly threw a stone at his car in Arua Town, and missed him in the process!

It’s true, having the President merely a stone’s throw away in State House may cause us to take him for granted. However, with every waking moment, there exists a heightened wish by many Ugandans that his term of office be abridged to an instant departure.

In particular, the President recently told a gathering that the NRM is here to stay and so we had better travel the NRM’s version of the proverbial yellow brick road.

Taken with the routine splintering of the Opposition (on pain of a monocracy) along with People Power’s launching of pebbles at NRM castles, an eerie feeling takes hold. And so what was left unsaid when the President said “the politics of the country have been resolved” cannot be easily gainsaid.

And what was left unsaid is that Uganda might be witnessing the end of history as posited in the book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), by Francis Fukuyama.

The philosophy therein proposed that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy – which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) – humanity had reached “not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

If Fukuyama’s work is adapted to Uganda, one might say that with the defeat of “fascism” as characterised by the ouster of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, Ugandan history is defined by a linear progression from one socio-political epoch to another to eventuate the final form of Ugandan government. Which, according to the President, is the NRM government. And so while Fukuyama was wrong about world history, he was right about Ugandan history.

And that’s why those who oppose these forces of history are purportedly like the legend of Sisyphus: constantly pushing boulders up a hill, only to watch them come rolling back down as soon they reach the hilltop.

So, with this Sisyphean futility becoming a Ugandan tragedy, apathy has set in. And Ugandans see no hope beyond conspiring with NRM rulers in order to gather some crumbs off the government’s high table of patronage.

By extension, Ugandans ignore a laundry list of political ills in favour of leaving the Opposition out to dry. For who are they to oppose history? Clearly, it is widely believed, the NRM is here to stay like the dead fox posing as a hairdo on Donald Trump’s head.
As a consequence, politicians have become patron saints to mediocrity while the public is complicit in this crime against its own humanity by voting and applauding these lightweights.

Even those who oppose this mediocrity mistakenly assume that waging another Bush War is key, without knowing that the UPDF will have more than 60,000 unsmiling guns pointed in their direction within a Kampala minute if they even think of storming Kabamba. So another war would be akin to placing their heads inside poet Sylvia Plath’s oven, and thereby expiring the way she did.

In the end, it will not be the big ideas that save us. To be sure, the Arab Spring was supposedly triggered in Tunisia when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after claiming he was slapped by policewoman Fedia Hamdi.

This fits in neatly with Aristotle’s aphorism: Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.

So it will take something small, unforeseen and previously unimaginable to shape the straw that will break the camel’s back.
And because revolution is the locomotive of history, as Karl Marx said, it shall roll beyond the end of history to demonstrate that every “end” presupposes a beginning in the manner that twilight implies dawn. So the NRM will do well to prepare its exit as it echoes the words of Jose Chameleone when he recently declared, “you should not miss a great fighter like me.”

Mr Matogo is content editor and writer with KQ Hub Africa
[email protected]