
The Ugandan online activism space has found a bolder and louder voice over the last three years, with platforms like X (formerly Twitter) offering a modern-day megaphone to citizens to call out their government for all manner of missteps, ranging from runaway corruption to rampant abuse of human rights to gross injustices like the trial of civilians in military courts and a litany of other abuses.
The growth of this activist movement, armed with nothing but a phone and some internet bundles, is a good thing to witness. It is brave too, in a country where anyone can be picked up by plain-clothed security personnel, arraigned before courts eager to dance to the state’s tune, and thrown away in overfilled jails for years on end.
However, the temptation to celebrate the emergence of citizen voices for good governance is facing a stillbirth in the form of intra-movement conflict, or, better put, factionalism in the activist ranks.
It’s not new to or unique to Uganda. Factionalism has existed for as long as activism has with more prominent examples from the US rights movements, the South African anti-apartheid movement and Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom movement.
The reasons for factionalism range from differences in approach, with some activists seemingly preferring a radical approach while others are more moderate; ideological differences, leadership disputes, personal relationships went bad, deliberate government planted discord and even the fight for a limited pool of funders.
The last one is rather disturbing and touches on a heated conversation about activism for pay; an alleged pay-for-play approach largely funded by the West. Some voices have called this “paid anti-government propaganda”, with the President calling some activists Western funded “agents of imperialism”.
It makes for sad reading but I’d like to think the situation isn’t intractable.
The voices writing Uganda’s activism obituary and predicting the country’s slide to hell in a handbasket might want to hold off a little longer.
They could be misdiagnosing the problem. We might need to step back and take a holistic stock of the whole situation.
We might actually be victims of social media's success as a tool to drive social transformation, complete with its amplified narcissistic tendencies and beliefs of moral superiority. Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural theorist, Slavoj Žižek has described this phenomenon in his works on post-modern subjectivity.
Over the years, the human condition and thought have been made up of people who create narratives that give people around them their sense of identity. Social media has taken this and put it on steroids.
Unfortunately, the social media cycle moves so fast that people often do not stop to ask themselves whether the narratives they’re being fed make sense.
Žižek argues that some people have been fooled into thinking their existence is revolutionary when it’s not, that they’re more morally superior than the rest of the mere mortals, all while hiding behind a carefully crafted false depiction of their own humility and moral superiority. People worship at the altar of themselves.
They’re constantly judging everyone else but themselves; from political choices to how they should do activism. This foments a culture of toxicity and mutual disrespect that erodes the kind of civic republicanism off of which successful social movements are built. We are all victims and practitioners of this behaviour.
Activism succeeds by curbing oppressive behaviour by calling it out and building popular narratives around reform. This “callout” culture is, sadly, built on shifting sand of self-assessed purity, self-righteousness and moral superiority over others.
Just as quickly as it can build better societies, the language of social justice can be weaponised to mirror the injustices and oppression it is, ironically, meant to fight.
It can be used to build narrow ally-ships, kill plurality of thought and approach and with it put pay to would-be successful movements. History is littered with examples of promising movements that turned out to be duds.
Uganda’s renewed social justice movement might want to take the historical lessons of failure as a cautionary tale and embrace a politics of “imperfection and responsibility” over a seemingly relentless pursuit for purity and a “my way or the highway” approach.
Our society’s very survival might just be pegged to finding this compromise.
The writer is team leader, Public Square
@TonyNatif