How NRM has left Uganda with a bunch of ‘Stepford Wives’

Daily Monitor on Tuesday carried a photo taken on November 6 showing a Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) street cleaner holding a placard with the words, “We wish Jennifer Musisi [former KCCA ED] was here. We miss you mom.”

The cleaners stormed the Authority’s headquarters in Kampala on Monday, demanding to meet the executive director, Ms Dorothy Kisaka, over non-payment.

We all hail the National Resistance Movement (NRM) for seemingly elevating the status of women in Uganda.

Indeed, we have seen the same NRM apply affirmative action in political roles by creating a parliamentary seat for women in every district.

This is all very well. But it makes little sense not to consider the sort of women we are elevating to top leadership roles in the name female emancipation.

In the past, the NRM did well by elevating exemplary women such as Winnie Byanyima, Jennifer Musisi, Jacqueline Mbabazi and others whose sense of femininity reflected the guts of Alexis Carrington Colby of the 1980s American TV series, Dynasty.

At the time of that TV show, Alexis’s character caused a furore with her power dressing. Especially when decked out in a broad-shouldered black-and-white suit, big hat with a veil and dark sunglasses.

She was the archetypal power woman of the 1980s, promoting her singular agency as a woman.

Revolutionarily, such a woman found a place in the early to mid NRM years as an impressive counterweight to any potential male fantasies of ever creating a patriarchy.

Many of us admired, detested or feared such a woman, depending on one’s view of a woman’s role in society.

Today, things have drastically changed. Many women we see in senior leadership roles are mere tokens of the NRM’s residual nod to women’s emancipation.

For the women we have in high office today are like robots following a script. Never possessed of an original thought, their public utterances betray a subservience that must meet some male misogynistic ideal of femininity: obedient and unopinionated.

To be sure, they remind one of the Stepford Wives, a 1975 thriller movie depicting a suburban paradise where modern-minded women are replaced by soulless androids.

As one of the cast members of the movie put it, “A Stepford wife epitomises somebody who is perfectly made up, looks perfect, and presents a very perfect façade.”

This ideal of femininity, as it were, epitomises the kind of women who serve the NRM government at a very high level. Sadly, such women can only be as competent as the men will allow them to be. This is why their brand of incompetence is a proverbial double whammy, representing their own and the men’s incompetence. 

Still, we must realise that if the NRM gave women power, it can take that power away.

Nonetheless, we see that that power was not the NRM’s to give to begin with.

The power belonged to the women. Only, they did not know this and thus allowed themselves to be manipulated into being poster children of NRM rule.

As a result, NRM is left with plaudits for helping along women’s emancipation. And Uganda is left with a bunch of Stepford Wives who the public now wants gone.

The façade of NRM rule is now coming apart at the seams with regard to genuine women’s emancipation.

This provides us with a crisis that we surely should not waste. Instead, let us use this as a chance to genuinely help emancipate women. Not only at the top, but at all levels.

Mr Phillip Matogo is a professional copywriter  
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