Mwenda was rightly wrong on NRM 

Journalist Andrew Mwenda’s article ‘Government by loot’ in The Independent was well reasoned. I nodded my head throughout the piece like I was listening to my favourite song, Rest of the Night by Natalie Cole. 

Beyond the musicality of his rationality though, Mwenda’s arguments became contradictory in the last paragraph. 

“Over the last 30 years of increasing political contestations in Uganda, we have witnessed the progressive attrition of public-spirited persons in our politics. In their place we have seen the gradual and consistent growth in the share of crooks elected to public office. This is the more intriguing because Uganda has a very high anti-incumbency bias. Only 30 percent of incumbent MPs get re-elected. In the current Parliament, only 105 out of 556 of MPs were in the last Parliament,” he writes. 

Then he adds, “In Uganda, those who don’t steal enough to placate the myriad needs and demands of their constituencies lose.”

By this last sentence, he implies that the 70 percent who did not make it back to Parliament were public-spirited. Otherwise, they would have made it back if they weren’t; they would have won. Yet to imply that 70 percent of any previous Parliament was public-spirited would presuppose that the said attrition Mwenda notes is false.  

That said, I am not trying to be captious with what Mwenda wrote. Instead, I will look for the silver lining in our people preferring the corrupt to the clean, as told by the gospel according to Mwenda. 

If we go deeper, we could argue that the nature of our neo-patrimonial state demands that while our public servants eat, they must also spread the wealth. Not only by placating the voter by catering to the needs and demands of their constituencies, but by allowing for shifts in who gets elected as a failsafe against this feeding frenzy not being spread across the board.

Thus the turnover of elected persons is also high because there is tacit agreement between the elected and voters that when one leader eats for a certain period of time, that leader should make way for another one to do the same for another period of time. 

This creates a sort of unstable equilibrium where, if every leader gets to eat on behalf of those who elected them, the system gives every voter a vested interest in it. 

However, this only stops at the parliamentary level in Uganda.  

The presidency is clearly not affected. If it were, then we would have had at least three presidents since the promulgation of the 1995 Constitution. 

Therefore, if we are to accept this high rate of anti-incumbency bias as symptomatic of our system, then we should also accept that if we changed the president every so often, we would be acquiescing to the needs and demands of the voter in the context of our patrimonial politics.

By this token, President Museveni has been ‘rigging’ elections because his continued incumbency contradicts the frequent need for changes in guard below his office. 

Sure, you may argue that his office is the exception to the rule as are the 30 percent in Parliament who seemed to survive the proverbial axe at the last election cycle. 

But if that were true, why does the State ransack the government coffers to bribe votes and increase the security presence at each presidential election? 

The beauty of our current “politics of the belly” is that it demands change so that everyone presumably gets to eat. To make it run more efficiently, then, we need President Museveni to let somebody else “eat” at his level and then we shall perfect an imperfect polity.

Mr Philip Matogo is a professional copywriter  
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