Re-evaluate relevance of political parties
I read Norbert Mao’s piece titled “Political parties are key in democracy” in the Daily Monitor. It reminds us of the relevance of political parties in a pluralist democracy.
Mao observes that political parties galvanise the socio-political spheres in a polity through enforcing a set of core beliefs.
In adjoining this discussion, I emphatically assess that political parties in Uganda have been in abeyance for too long and have collectively lost their shine.
Mao presides over the oldest political party in the country – the Democratic Party. His sobering recollection could, therefore, affirm that his own party’s values have faded and is hard to recognise.
As a seasoned lawyer and politician, Mao has a commanding knowledge and experience in party politics where he is held hostage to a turbulent party environment.
One challenge is that reinventing parties that are subsumed in a chronically repressive environment and yet strives to partake in a sham democracy willingly becomes a major contradiction.
Youths reading Mao’s article become doubtful if political parties in Uganda actually adhere to any core values or perform those roles, functions or responsibilities as Mao articulated. When I read the article, I struggled to delineate between Mao’s ideals and parties’ realities in the Ugandan political context.
Uganda has 29 registered political parties. Some are sold like pancakes to the highest bidders. Most are briefcase elements for pomp and defections. Those established and barely functioning parties are themselves war zones - places for quarrels, fights, and protracted tribal wars; or even where to rebrand for meal cards politics.
Parties in opposition are known as the nexus of both physical and mental poverty. There are parties in Uganda that have built reputations as the political uterus in which potential NRM cadres are conceived.
The NRM regime has pulled out the gut material from all political parties and organisations rendering them clientele agencies.
When Robert Kyagulanyi bought NUP, some people lamented that the People Power sophistication had ended. This is how people have strayed away from parties.
Under Museveni, parties are like bars - enclaves for political hotheads to cool off. Talk about flattening the political pressure curve! Party leaders are mostly listening post for the ruling regime, making it hard to trust any of them.
Mao needed to move beyond validating political parties and reinventing their relevance for future generations. Parties in Uganda have outgrown their usefulness. It is time for movements that are not legally bound to the repressive laws of the regime to take centre stage.
Parties no longer command such ideological thrust and have alienated the majority of Ugandans from the democratic process. Parties are no longer repositories of trust and preferred engines for social transformation because they have not shown maturity or brought the desired change when all they do is fight for flagbearer position.
In the Ugandan context, no political party can survive in a political environment when it has no independent source of well managed and steady revenue.
Parties cannot contribute meaningfully to democracy when they are resource-constrained and operated on a non-democratic non-value basis. Thus, the sad realisation about Uganda’s political parties is that they are prone to imperialism and elite class collaborations with foreign donors and exploiters.
Mr Morris Komakech
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