Is the problem the leaders or the led?

Author: Moses Khisa. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

  • When reminded of this seminal and prescient statement, made more than three decades ago, Mr Museveni has rather sheepishly clarified that he meant leaders who stay in power without being elected by the people! This is to justify his own shameless long rule, insisting that he is elected by the people every five years.

President Museveni is on record having defined the problem of Africa, and Uganda in particular, as not the people but the leaders who overstay in power. 

When reminded of this seminal and prescient statement, made more than three decades ago, Mr Museveni has rather sheepishly clarified that he meant leaders who stay in power without being elected by the people! This is to justify his own shameless long rule, insisting that he is elected by the people every five years.

This is an old, ad nauseam, question, whether the plight of a country like Uganda is down to the calibre of its leadership, primarily the holders of state power. 
Writing earlier this week, Columnist Nicholas Sengoba concluded that ‘Countries like Uganda will never overcome their predicament if they don’t first solve the problem of leadership.’

There is no doubt that leadership makes a difference. Societies world over have had extraordinarily gifted and talented individuals who engineer revolutionary changes not just in politics but in economics and society more generally. 

Some individuals have the intellectual resources, charisma and wisdom to drive transformative change and bring about desirable outcomes for the broader public good. In Uganda, Mr Museveni has insisted it is him with the vision and wisdom to push the wheels and deliver Uganda from its ‘third world’ status to a developed world of material prosperity and wellbeing. 

As it turns out, Uganda’s problem is precisely the thinking that one individual has the magic to turn around things and deliver the change we clamour for. False conviction.

Leaders do not come from nowhere nor do they operate without social context. 
Leaders and leadership are often reflections of society. The nature of social relations, societal norms and belief systems impact the form of leadership and the calibre of leaders a society gets. There is an old saying that societies get the leaders they deserve not those they desire.

Today, Uganda faces an enormous crisis of leadership. There is sheer lack of imagination and inability to think creatively in tackling the problems we face. The current political class, from parliament to the presidency, local governments and ministries all combine to constitute perhaps the lousiest crop we have had in a long time. 

The chief ruler at the top, an otherwise gifted strategist with a big-picture intellect, is way past his sell-by-date, visibly unable to muster the kind of sharpness and energy that match today’s intractable problems. 

He was in fact on record in a 2012 interview with NTV’s Patrick Kamara, reasoning that after 75 years a leader does not have the vigour to run a country. The missing bit here of course is not just being 75 and above but having been president for more than 30 years uninterrupted. It is impossible not to wear out and get rusty, not with the extraordinary demands and pressures in dealing with problems of a poor country where a president literally solves every problem.

With a ruler out of his depth at the top comes an underwhelming cabinet line-up that is big on numbers but short on depth, lacking leaders who would bring freshness of thought and innovative ideas to turnaround things. 

Today’s cabinet is a hotchpotch of Museveni’s old courtiers, some sycophants and hangers-on, a few truly competent folks but who are there and about in the muddy and mafia politics of the day unable to do much.

Perhaps the worst of it has to be located in parliament where the numbers are astonishing but the calibre of ‘honourables’ in the house is as appalling as you can find, perhaps bettered by the line-up of ‘lord-councillors’ next door at City Hall. You have to feel for Erias Lukwago. 

On a good day and under normal circumstances, Jacob Oulanyah is an astute and fitting speaker of parliament, but today he holds that position more as a hired hatchet-man. Not much can be said of his deputy: she is just in the wrong place.

One can go on all day with this, but the bottomline is we simply do not have the kind of leadership we desire; we pretty much have what we deserve. If we can’t demand better from those in positions of leadership, what we get is exactly what they believe we deserve. 

The values, habits, ethos methods of work exhibited by leaders, whether in politics or business, are very much drawn from the pool of society and are a reflection of the overall social landscape. In the end, leaders are a tiny fraction of the society from where they emanate. 

The led are the real society that produces the leaders and in the broad scheme of things, it is the former who must make a difference. It has to be a collective force that rejects the existing mediocre leadership and pushes for a new and desirable system and set of leaders.