Uganda: No country for young people

On the morning of the last General Election in 2016, I reached the polling station at about 8am, because I had been told that the voting materials had not arrived. Online, it seemed that we weren’t the only ones who didn’t know how long we would have to wait.

I had already made up my mind on who I was going to vote for, purely based on the four manifestos/plans I had read. I ended up voting for someone else instead, when the ballot papers eventually arrived at 2pm – because of that day’s events.

There’s a moral in there, if you read up to the end. But first, when you go out to vote, what informs your decision on who you are voting for? Is it their age, tribe, values, promises, what you hope to gain from them – materially – their gender or your affinity to them? We’ll circle back to this as well.

You might also remember that on voting day, government had switched off social media and Mobile Money, forcing millions of citizens – and even government agencies – into back channels. One of the most underappreciated moments in Uganda’s Internet history is how the tech community inadvertently then swung into civil action sending out messages to the rest of us – technology illiterates – about what VPNs to use and beat the social media blockade.

Whether it was deliberate or out of necessity for connectivity, there was no one who needed to be online that wasn’t back within 24 hours. That intervention represented two significant takeaways for anyone with basic civic consciousness.

The first takeaway – which I don’t imagine the techies were conscious of – is to be found in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, which says, “One has not only a legal, but moral responsibility to obey just laws.

Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all.… An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saints Thomas Aquinas, “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”

As election season heats up, may every citizen be reminded of Mark Twain, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

The second and equally important takeaway is what young people can do, when they put their strengths and minds to it – especially with their backs to the wall. It is hard to make sense of the debris that is our politics and governance, especially if you are a progressive.

How else do you explain the perplexing policy pronouncements and laws that leave you wondering whether we are coming or going? One day, it is a ban on boda Bodas, another day an attack on artistes, the next day it is social media tax and then new constituencies, including special seats for the elderly, in a government bulging with dinosaurs.

Considering the obvious disconnect between the leaders and the led, it is a miracle that anybody can tell which progress is a result of deliberate effort and which is owed to the inevitable passage of time.

The onus then falls on the youth to offer leadership, in the middle of this abdication. The country that today’s youth are growing up in, the country we haven’t experienced yet, is nothing like the one their parents and grannies know about.

Their wars, worries and trepidations aren’t anything like their parents lived or imagined. But neither are their dreams and aspirations and contexts. Which is why young people should have a stake in discussions about where the country is going, especially because the law of averages says they will be here longer.

Long and short here is that even on voting day, at the polling station, it is not too late to change who you are voting for. Even more, in much the same way that the techies came through for everyone else when government initiated an arbitrary social media blockade, the more enlightened have a duty to inform and educate those that might not have the range, about the importance of showing up to vote for the best candidate.

Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds.

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