Writer: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
As previously noted, the most cited piece of wisdom from President Museveni is probably his 1980’s observation that Africa’s problem is rulers who overstay in power. And the truth of that observation grows before us every day.
Not as frequently cited, but also significant, was Museveni’s projection of a Uganda that would advance (I suppose in his lifetime) to a country that makes machines, which are used to make other machines.
In a plant where major modern car parts like automatic gearboxes are made, you may marvel at the complexity of the transmission unit, but you will marvel even more at the machines that are deployed in designing, casting, tooling and assembling the gearboxes fitted in ordinary road-going motor vehicles.
It is machines in this league that Mr Museveni must have been visualising in the 1980s. Thinking about it, there is a very close connection between overstaying in power and failing to realise his vision of serious industrialisation.
Unlike any Asian tiger, Uganda is more markedly a multi-tribal, multi-ethnic and multi-religious entity crudely cobbled together by colonial rulers.
It is much harder to reach a consensus on broad interests and national leadership, and even harder to sustain that agreement over a long period than, say, in Singapore or South Korea, which are more homogenous.
Interests and challenges that would (ideally) be common are in fact coloured by ethnicity, tribe and/or religion, by identity. This is not necessarily evil. It is simply human.
Privilege, injustice and impunity tend to grow and follow the concentration of state power; usually not dramatically or conspicuously, but creeping. This ugly development, too, often expresses itself in the frames of identity, accelerating the collapse of any consensus.
The ruler who thrives on denying the development of that collapse and insists on staying in power can normally only turn to coercion and violence to achieve his objective.
Probably assuming that they are addressing a stupid public, National Resistance Movement (NRM) bigwigs often parrot the old NRA/M tenets of patriotism, pan-Africanism, socio-economic transformation and democracy that their party leadership more or less abandoned long ago.
After 40 years in power and the collapse of our consensus, the central idea in the heads of the ruling elite is simply to stay in power. Not power to advance patriotism, or pan-Africanism, or democracy, but power in its rawest form, in the capacity to enforce their own perpetuation.
The goal of socio-economic transformation has also been abandoned, or at least downgraded. Just as self-preservation is difficult in the wild where various predators are on the prowl, self-preservation in power, where many of the citizens have become (or are deemed to have become) enemies, is also very costly. It saps both mental and financial resources.
To control different sets of particularly inconvenient citizens, you might need loads of money to buy loyalty and sabotage the Opposition. Tanks and anti-riot squads must be permanently ready. You may need a gulag of fully equipped and staffed safe-houses and basements.
In the end, because of changed priorities, there is no focus, and neither enough local money nor an environment that encourages powerful long-term foreign investors to build a country that makes “machines, which make machines”.
Healthcare, primary school education and agriculture will remain broadly rudimentary. And the money to fix the tarmac roads around the city that have been dug to add dust to our potholes and traffic nightmares has vanished.
In short, precisely because of President Museveni’s unending rule, his vision of social transformation in a modern Uganda is condemned to remain a 1980’s fantasy.
Privilege, injustice and impunity tend to grow and follow the concentration of state power.”
Mr Alan Tacca is a novelist and socio-political commentator.
