Forgotten voters and the empty promise of our politics – part II

Last week, we explored Buyende, a small poor village in the heart of Uganda, whose promise and potential remain unmet. In the last five years, the village has been connected to the main power grid, and a borehole pipes water to the main street.

 But that progress is not the social-economic leap forward you expect or celebrate after four decades. On some measures the area has, in fact, not just stagnated but gone backwards.

 Although a major artery through the middle of the country, the road from Kamuli to Buyende has never been tarmacked. By the time milk coolers were delivered four years ago, more than two decades after they were handed out in other districts in the cattle corridor, the local dairy industry had collapsed. 

 Without good roads to move produce to market fast, or electricity to provide cooling facilities, the fish economy around Lake Kyoga also collapsed. The local primary school still has dirt floors. The crumbling walls have never been plastered, and large empty spaces pass for windows. 

 Electricity supply to the handful of public health facilities is intermittent. Without stand-by generators even simple surgeries go undone. Ambulances? What are ambulances? Poor health and education infrastructure have produced sub-optimal socio-economic outcomes. 

 School drop-out rates are high, and education quality low. Teenage pregnancies and overall fertility rates are some of the highest in the country. High population growth rates lock people into cyclical inter-generational poverty.

 The data show that places like Buyende are symptoms of a much more serious disease. In 2009/10 there were 7.5 million Ugandans living on less than two dollars a day. Ten years later, that number had grown to 8.3 million.

 In the last decade, the epicentre of poverty has also shifted from the north to eastern Uganda. It took Acholi region less than 10 years to shake off 20 years of war and overtake otherwise peaceful areas (Busoga and Bugisu) or those less affected by it (Bukedi, Teso, etc).

 It isn’t clear how much of it is due to the peace dividend in the north and how much is due to the stagnation of the east. In any case, Acholi started from a low base and also remains very poor. It’s a bit of bald men and combs, really. Many people in the north and the east remain under the poverty line or just totter above it. 

 The disease is politics. The political-economic equation we have built over the past four decades is not working. Despite voting for the incumbent and the ruling party by an average of 88 percent between 1996 and 2016, Buyende and the wider Busoga and eastern region remain destitute and desperate. 

 They’ve fared worse developmentally than areas that voted for opposition candidates (Acholi in 1996, 2001, 2006), those that voted like them (Bunyoro), or only slightly more for the incumbent (Tooro, Kigezi, Ankole).

 Clearly, social-economic rewards do not mirror electoral choices. In fact, one could argue that regions like the east that meekly vote for the incumbent are taken for granted. Those like the north that vote for the opposition and show capacity to challenge the state, including by use of extra-legal violence, are respected and get special attention to woo them. In our Machiavellian politics, it is better to be feared than to be loved.

 The obvious short-term conclusion is that regions like eastern Uganda should instead vote for the Opposition. There is no guarantee that the Opposition would win or reward political support more fairly and equitably if they did – but there’s very little downside. Things can’t get much worse than they already are.

 The current political system is built on the quicksand of lies and opportunism. It is a system in which an incumbent can run for re-election by campaigning against the failures of their own government. It is also a system which hands people power without the checks to ensure they exercise it responsibly, and on behalf of voters. It is a system of democratic rituals masking despotic practices. 

 Our historic challenge and responsibility is to fix the political system itself. The succession question should not be answered by merely changing guard as we did in 1986, but by fundamentally changing the management, distribution, and transfer of power. That will be the subject of the next (and I promise you last) part of this argument next week. 

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 

[email protected]

Twitter: @Kalinaki