Writer: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
After a ruling elite has made dishonesty and impunity essential characteristics of its governance, it should expect questions about the truthfulness or motives behind virtually all its policies, claims and actions.
As a smart and patient player in the game of political power, President Museveni seems to have developed a three-phase model through which some of his more controversial policies are driven. The first phase is: Implement. Second phase: Lag. Phase three: Reverse, suspend or delete.
During the lag phase, he appears not to be concerned or involved, but he is lying low, with his ears and eyes wide open, monitoring public opinion from television, radio, newspapers and trusted agents, who do not necessarily include all his ministers.
During this lag phase, if he realises that the policy is a political liability, he milks whatever he can milk from its implementation as he works out who to blame when he moves to Phase 3. The lag phase can take many years, as we can see from policies related to land, electricity, agriculture, hospitals that often bring death, the insanely discriminatory teachers’ salary structure, the size of government, boda bodas and security torture outfits.
Or it may take a few days, as we have seen from the Automated Express Penalty System (AutoEPS), which the President has described as ‘rubbish’ before swiftly moving to Phase 3, suspending its operation.
If he had not been eyeing votes in the 2026 elections, the President might have moved with less speed after motorists protested the exorbitant penalties against a backdrop of bad roads and generalised traffic chaos.
In a nutshell, President Museveni readily deals in policies that are poorly thought out, but tactfully prepares himself to roll back those policies if it suits him. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, every course of action, however deplorable, adds value to the country’s GDP, and every counter action also adds value.
This sounds rather absurd. But take an example: If the government hires and pays a local contractor (or agent) to plant trees or place several dog-houses in the middle of a road, that work will enlarge the country’s GDP. When the government hires the same contractor (or another agent) to remove the obstacles, this action and its fees will also make the country’s GDP bigger!
In Uganda, there are people (usually senior government officials or their collaborators) who deliberately buy land and build modern structures in tracts along which a new (or widened) road will pass, precisely so that those structures may be destroyed and the owners compensated at inflated values. Up we go, GDP!
This weird aspect of GDP makes it hard to tease out and separate good GDP from bad GDP, or good GNP from bad GNP, and measure the quantity of true progress, especially in countries that are (technically) incompetent, (morally) very corrupt and plagued with gross socio-economic inequality.
Finance minister Matia Kasaija can reel off glossed statistics suggesting that Uganda is racing ahead, but ordinary Ugandans are being bumped on potholed and dusty roads.
In their neighbourhoods, they see one or two people getting richer, while hundreds struggle in their old poverty groove or even get poorer.
Would you blame the citizens who believe that the policies Mr Museveni dismisses as ‘rubbish’ are deliberately presented as gold by his NRM fishermen to exploit and confuse them, making them more vulnerable?
For once in that state, isn’t it natural for them to beg for intervention by the ‘saviour’, President Museveni, who everybody knows is the ultimate controller of the same NRM political machine?
The writer, Alan Tacca, is a novelist and socio-political commentator.
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