Kadaga is not just a beneficiary of favourable NRM policies for women

At the height of the Speaker race, more than 100 Members of Parliament and friends of Speaker Jacob Oulanyah gathered at the Sheraton Hotel. Many points were made. I will focus on two.
Ms Betty Amongi, the former minister for Kampala, strongly suggested that they were supporting Mr Oulanyah as women not because they did not like Kadaga, but because they loved Uganda more in a manner that implied Kadaga was Uganda’s biggest problem. 

She also spoke about how women were already benefitting from the favourable policies of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) for women, with Kadaga as a key beneficiary of such policies like it mattered little to have a woman head Parliament.
 
Ms Ruth Nankabirwa, the former Government Chief Whip, focused on Ms Kadaga’s personality and how it had ‘created too much tension in Parliament and with other arms of government’. 
These two submissions, are the best representation of the problem with women’s participation in politics, and why some people have difficulty appreciating the role of women at that level.

Ms Amongi obviously believes that a lot of women are benefiting from these policies but does not appreciate the extent to which women fought for these provisions, and has omitted to consider the period these provisions were brought on board, when the global policy shift was in favour of women’s participation in these arenas. 
Women are not mere beneficiaries of good NRM policies, they worked for it. 
The NRM found already eager women waiting to participate, who worked to ensure some barriers to their participation were lifted while instituting measures to make it possible and practical for more women to be involved. 

When I started conducting interviews for my research on women’s participation in public life in 2015, Ms Kadaga, Ms Nankabirwa, and Ms Amongi, who had been chairperson of  Uganda Women’s Parliamentary Association (UWOPA), prominently featured in those conversations. 
Generally, there was the sticking issue of the relevance of affirmative action for women to join Parliament. The charge was that a few politically privileged women had captured space that they use not to represent the women’s constituency but their self-seeking interests and accumulation of wealth. 

Whether women are going to use their new found power for the benefit of women is not a matter of having any woman there, because not all women are gender sensitive or care about the gender agenda in a similar way. It is the reason Ms Kadaga stood out for women.
People blaming Ms Kadaga for not doing enough to protect the public interest, appreciate little the extent to which structural obstacles for effective participation of women in politics have largely remained intact while inequalities based on gender and discrimination remain pervasive.
 
That Ms Kadaga managed some level of independence and respect for other actors in the political arena for which she is being punished must have come at a high cost. Someone told me, Ms Kadaga is being vilified for not allowing to be used in all possible ways, and had to be out of the way.
Ms Kadaga has no reason to apologise for contesting as an independent as Ms Nankabirwa has demanded. She only may for her sanity because while the President is not vindictive as he suggested, there are too many people in the NRM who would want her out completely. Instead, Ms Kadaga deserves an apology for the underhanded way in which she was pushed out. 

I am aware of the charges against Ms Kadaga, but few political women can stand on a higher pedestal.  In judging Ms Kadaga, one of my respondents put it best in 2015, we must remember that ‘Ugandan democracy is calculated democracy. And we need to accept that. We should not pretend about it. It is democracy to the extent that you don’t oppose’. 
We miss the point when we make this entirely about Kadaga’s performance and personality. She has immensely contributed to the NRM and those pro-women legislation. 

Ms Maractho is the head and senior lecturer, Department of Journalism and Media Studies at UCU. 
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