Is Uganda a paramilitary, or military State?

The poet Alexander Pope once wrote: “A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”

Before we go any further, it would be only fair to remind you that in Greek mythology, the Pierian Spring of Macedonia was sacred to the Muses (those who inspire divine poetry). Uganda must take Pope’s advice.

You see, all he is saying is that if you want to do something, do it not in halves. Do it whole.

That way, if you are going to tell the truth, there will be no half-truths. And if you are going to meet anyone partway, do it fully.

In brief, finish the work; otherwise unfinished work will finish you, as they say.

Our government is part civilian, part military. So we must make the decision to go wholly military or wholly civilian, there is no common ground between the two. You either have one or the other. 

Accordingly, we must peer into our past to see which model works best for us and then choose, again, accordingly. 

As things stand, we are suffering from inertia because government has one jackboot in the barracks and another in civil matters. That’s why we do not know whether we are coming or going.

Take a look at Poland, for instance.

It has been divvied up several times. Namely in 1772, 1793, 1795 and 1939, four territorial divisions perpetrated by Germany, Russia (later as the Soviet Union), Prussia, and Austria, by which Poland’s size was progressively reduced. At one stage, the partition of 1795, the state of Poland ceased to exist.

The second Polish Republic was created in 1919 only for Germany and the Soviet Union to once again carve it up on September 29, 1939.

Today, Poland is building up its military might to make sure it is not harrowed by its past again. Within five years, Poland is projected to have one of the biggest militaries in Europe.

The country thus chose between being a history taker or a history maker. 

In choosing the latter, it looked at its past in order to preserve its future. 

To choose is to plan, President Museveni said in the 1990s as he invoked a Kiswahili proverb to outline his vision. 

Today, his government has failed to choose between Uganda having a military government or a democratic State. 

Without a detailed-oriented approach to governance, we are thus floundering on the reef of muddleheaded leadership.

His government must decide.

I would personally choose a democratic State, but I am not the one holding the guns. 

Political power grows out of the barrel of the gun, Mao Zedong once said. 

It is hard to imagine the National Resistance Movement (NRM) borrowing so much from that Chinese revolutionary but failing to appreciate that quote. 

To be sure, it must be its guiding light; ideologically speaking. 

So why is it camouflaging its militarism in civilianism? Does the party think that the military and the civilian can be conflated? 

To answer that: no, they cannot. 

The two are oil and water in the way civilian rule, ideally, receives its orders from below while military rule, typically, gets its orders from above. 

If there is a compromise, that compromise is what we have today: poor governance choreographed by rudderless government. 

To put paid to this situation, the government must stop behaving like a guerrilla treating each day it survives as a reason to rejoice.

Instead, it must set a firm foundation rooted in governance which seeks not only to survive but to thrive, too.

Mr Philip Matogo is a professional copywriter  
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