Who is ‘People Power’?

People Power erupted on the scene with the red fury of a brush fire. Then, suddenly, Bobi Wine held a torch to it and was its torch bearer.

Thereupon, people from the ghetto chanted ‘People Power, Our Power’ under the rippling flag of change. And, as usual, the authorities overacted by pulling out a bazooka to shoot down a red-bellied mosquito.

Fortunately for the mosquito, the authorities missed and instead shot themselves in the foot as People Power was able to point to a smoking gun as evidence of a lack of democracy.

So as People Power grows, one wonders who or what comprises its unpaid and rather unwashed ranks. And by wondering, it would be instructive to look at and tweak what the late Prof Ali Mazrui called Africa’s triple heritage.

By doing so, we can look at People Power’s heritage as a product of three major influences: First, an economic heritage born out of urban dispossession. Second, the heritage of disguised unemployment and third, the heritage of a potential reversal of fortunes.

The effects of this triple heritage is evidenced by the different types of individuals in People Power serving as recipients of these effects. And so, stay with me on this, People Power can be subdivided into three categories of persons: the good, the bad and the soon-to-be-ugly.

The good is personified by a lady, let’s call her Betsy, who is a 20-something-year-old secretary in a middling company. So cash flow has reached the water’s edge only to retreat in pay and perks.

Betsy, a Barbie girl in a Barbie world, doesn’t know Adam Smith from Adam. All she wants is to earn enough money to pay her bills and maybe get swept off her feet by a prince charming holding a ring, not a broom.
On her daily taxi commute to and from work, she hears other commuters rage against the dying of the light at the end of the economic tunnel. They hate the government and their hate has made Betsy take a closer look at Bobi Wine.

“He’s kind of cute,” she says to herself and, with those words, all other presidential contenders vanish as Betsy only has eyes for Bobi.

The bad are personified by Meddie. The elders call him a “dot com,” but his understanding of the digital age is laughable enough to be a dot com-Meddie. He’s a handyman who wasn’t known to be an academic dwarf in all the schools he never attended.

Blissfully unaware of history and public policy, he doesn’t know that the NRM rode to power on guns wielded by armed intellectuals. For example, Amanya Mushega abandoned a PhD course in the London School of Economics to chart a career path in the bush.

A sub-elite, Meddie doesn’t care. He believes red brigades of angry youth shall ensure that Uganda is the first country in modern history to stage a revolution without it being led by middle class intellectuals.
Meddie is “that bad man from Kamwokya” that Bobi Wine sang about and so when he vandalises other peoples’ property, he amplifies Lord Acton’s maxim, “great men are almost always bad men.”

The soon-to-be-ugly, personified by a guy called Moses, are the elites on the wrong side of their 30s and 40s.
Moses went to good schools and earns a decent wage. Yet Moses is petrified by the chaos he either saw with his own eyes, or through his parent’s tales about former president Idi Amin. Still, he recognises that Amin’s life presidency is awfully similar to Museveni’s eternal rule.

So he wants change, but his acculturation has left him fearful. And the safety valve for fear is inevitably violence. Thus Moses is growing ugly by egging on the Meddies of this world and reminding them that Bobi is a 1986 Museveni, but this doesn’t mean that he will degenerate into a 2021 Museveni.

Since Moses doesn’t have the courage to exit the pleasures of his job in order to demonstrate on the streets, he lives vicariously through the Meddies: who have nothing and so have nothing to lose.

This soon-to-be-ugly group is like the liberals during America’s racial segregation era and South Africa’s Apartheid night: torn between their consciences and conveniences to become schizophrenic beings who condemn what they cherish.

God, they say, is a trio. And so Betsy, Meddie and Moses might be lesser potatoes, but they’re capable of chipping away at the NRM’s hegemony.

Mr Matogo is content editor and writer with KQ Hub Africa
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