Our nation’s rulers are no longer pursuing any grand vision

Political leadership, especially at the national level, is pretty much about forging a common vision for a people or country and rallying the citizenry to collectively pursue with zeal, enthusiasm and vigour the realisation of that vision.

In making the effort to realise the national vision, political leaders have to further break it down into objectives, policies, laws and institutions that will facilitate the actualisation of the same.

Naturally, after crystallising the vision, a serious government should identify and train a critical mass of people with the requisite knowledge and skills to drive the realisation of the vision. Real political leaders understand that any nation’s enduring wealth is its human resources.

Nations that realised this and invested in creating a pool of healthy and knowledgeable human capital, transformed themselves into First World economies, in one or two decades.

Transforming a nation requires citizens who can think, write, do serious research and experiment on ideas in practical terms. To get citizens who are able to do these, the country needs to deliberately create an environment that allows her citizens to live and not simply survive.

This means that the country’s leaders should eliminate from amongst its citizens, existential challenges such as disease, illiteracy and poverty.

In other words, for real transformation to occur, citizens should be healthy, knowledgeable and relatively prosperous. It would, therefore, be expected of leaders of a country that is as rich with natural resources as Uganda, to create conditions that enable her citizens set sights on grand visionary ideas that would in the end translate to transformation of the country and its people.

The point needs to be made, however, that transformation of a nation must be evident in the physical, material, spiritual and psychological wellbeing of the citizens.

In practical terms this means that the people have access to quality health and education services as well as clean water, decent housing and balanced diets. Put differently, the population of such a nation should be healthy, prosperous, free and generally happy.

We cannot talk of transformation of a nation only from the limited prism of physical infrastructure development. That is the tragedy of our nation under the yoke of the NRM oligarchy.

The nation is trapped in the mental box of leaders who can hardly think beyond survival, constituency and electoral politics. From the lowest levels of local government leaderships to the presidency, our nation is ensnared with leaders who won’t imagine anything new.

In the past couple of weeks, Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga, a lady who on assuming the reigns of speakership of Uganda’s national assembly, was widely seen as having presidential pedigree, has been in the news mainly because of her intention to extend the tenure of the leadership of a parliamentary committee (Cosase) probing abuse of office and graft in Bank of Uganda.

That has elicited a lot of controversy especially from the leadership of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) who have argued, rightly, that extension of the tenure of the parliamentary committee would tantamount to contravention of the Parliamentary Rules of Procedure. We shall all wait and see how the deadlock will be resolved by the leaderships of Parliament and FDC.

However, Ms Kadaga was also in the news for another reason. She donated, before the glare of TV cameras, household items including mattresses, to an albino girl whose parents are apparently ailing from a-yet-to-be-known disease in eastern Uganda.

Let us be clear. It is not a bad thing for Ms Kadaga to help the poor, especially those from her home area of Busoga. But, should this be in front of all the cameras that accompanied her?

Would it not have been more decent for a person of her calibre, the third most important leader in our land after the President and Vice President according to government hierarchy, to do this quietly? Is that the best course of action the Speaker should take in helping such destitute people?

How sustainable is that in the wider scheme of things? Is that how the NRM government fights household poverty and ill health?

Ms Kadaga’s populist deed left no iota of doubt in my mind that the crop of rulers occupying the most important offices in our land cannot be relied upon to provide the leadership that is needed to transform our nation. They simply have no vision.