Uganda 2019: Democratic poverty, and the politics of violence

Makerere University students decide to protest a fees increase. The government responds by sending police and the army to their dormitories at night to pummel them and destroy their precious property.

The videos and photos are shocking for the savagery with which the security officers attack the students, and the humiliation they subject them to.

The debates about whether the students were right to protest, the vexed issue of fees in general, and the strange private-public university creature Makerere has become, will be debated and remain locked in the country’s ever growing and polarised partisan divide.

Yet, in the face of the violence, there was hope. Ugandans after 75 years of brutality by its various governments, are still horrified by violence. Many years ago, while I was editor at The Monitor and William Pike was chief at New Vision, we were both at the Central Police Station (CPS). I don’t remember who had been arrested.

But I will never forget a casual but profound - remark he made as we walked away from CPS. He said after all the years he had spent in Uganda, the one thing he could never get over was just how violent even the most routine police or military operations were. He added, for good measure, that there seemed to be a “high tolerance for it”.

In Uganda, you can bet, the security forces won’t just lead a Forum for Democracy (FDC) or People Power female activist to the pick-up and help her in. There is a lot of kicking. Her blouse will be ripped off, her peeping breasts grabbed aggressively as she screams, and with her legs flailing and exposing her undergarments, they will hurl her in the back of a police pick-up truck like she was road kill.

If you are a Kizza Besigye, even after they have pepper-sprayed you blind, and broken your limbs, they will still step on your back with their boots as you lie limp on the cold floor of the truck.

Pike was right on the violence by the security institutions, but only partly so on the social tolerance for it. The acceptance of violence is mostly organised among those who fear losing their political and sectarian privileges, and therefore, think it is necessary for order – until it comes to their doorstep.

In the years before the Graduated Tax was scrapped, its enforcement was equally violent. It was common in the villages to see several men, their hands and waists tied with sisal ropes, being marched in a line to the saza headquarters, while being flogged by a chief. This begins to give us a sense of why the State is so violent.

Historically, the Uganda State has abysmally failed to govern by democratic consent. Ugandans have, like citizens in several other parts of Africa, become past masters of passive resistance, which has made it hard and frustrating for Kampala to extract surplus from them easily, or to win their obedience at low cost.

Successive governments have, therefore, resorted to solving this problem of a huge democratic deficit, by making the price of withholding obedience far higher than the cost of submission.
What the years of this savagery have done, therefore, is shift the breaking point for the people.
If the government of today has to break their resolve, it has to go a step further than the previous one.

Thus Obote I, in several respects surpassed the colonialists; Idi Amin surpassed the colonialists and Obote II; then the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) comes and a strange thing happens.
Uganda goes through the freest period of its political life, with a State that wasn’t predatory or menacing. However, factions of the State, continue to murder and rob. What happened?

For one, we had the sharpest divide over a new vs old Uganda, and how to respond to the lessons of our violent history. Secondly, the UNLF government had a strong anti-statist populist streak.
Thirdly, it was weak, with significant power held by the Tanzanian military, which didn’t have a subjective interest in unleashing mass terror on civilians.

Then Obote II came, and in places like Luweero, it outdid the colonialists, Obote II, and likely Amin. The Military Council of the Okellos kept the status quo, not having enough control to either do better, or worse.

Then President Yoweri Museveni and the NRM took over in 1986. For a brief period, they returned to some element of the UNLF period. Then, as the rebellions broke out, and after spending their goodwill, they fell off the wagon.

It is all now like a scene from that final chapter of George’s Orwell’s evergreen Animal Farm:”

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Mr Onyango-Obbo is curator of the “Wall of Great Africans” and publisher of explainer site Roguechiefs.com.
Twitter@cobbo3