The joke of a presidential debate

Earlier this week, the Inter-Religious Council of Uganda (IRCU) pulled the plug on plans to conduct presidential debates for the upcoming futile national election for president. 

The IRCU brings together Uganda’s leading religious denominations. 
In the recent past, its leaders have pursued efforts aimed at a national dialogue on Uganda’s present and the future of the country.

 Not much substance came out of this latter initiative. Part of the problem is that the IRCU lacks the moral credibility and institutional autonomy to mediate Uganda’s political problems. 

Both the individuals and their respective denominational institutions are heavily implicated in the political mess that Uganda is engulfed in, either unwittingly as passive actors or directly as active players. 

Museveni’s politics of co-optation and compromising just about every individual and institution using material inducements has not spared religious institutions and their respective leaderships. 

This has meant that whether as individual denominations or working in concert under the IRCU, Uganda’s religious institutions and particularly the individuals at the top, lack the spine to exact their moral force in challenging and questioning excesses of the Museveni rule. 

As beneficiaries of the current system of spoils and being complicit in a rogue regime of rule, the men and women of the collar and cap are bereft of the intellectual and moral gravitas to speak truth to power, and provide courageous leadership in times of dire moral crisis. 

The larger and corrosive damage of Museveni’s long reign is the destruction of credibility and integrity in just about any institution that matters and obliteration of any alternative centre of power that would stand up for the public good. 

Because everyone has to run to the ruler for handouts or the handouts are dangled forcefully as to be irresistible, across the socio-political spectrum, independent-minded voices and autonomous entities have become nearly extinct.

 
This is a critical part of the larger crisis we face today, and will grapple with for long. It is also the context within which to construe IRCU’s announcement calling off plans for conducting presidential debates. 

The officially stated reasons are the Covid pandemic and resource constraints, the former a cheap excuse, the latter predictable. In the past, foreign donors have invested money in activities of IRCU, including sponsoring presidential debates in 2016 and actions to ostensibly lead the quest for a national dialogue and political transition.

 Perhaps the Ugandan government too has thrown in money, may be unofficially and through Museveni’s usual undercover channels that ultimately grant him tacit control. 

Yet one has to wonder why anyone would put their money and time in organising a presidential debate in Uganda. 

To debate what? And who to debate who on the debate stage? For one, the incumbent ruler loathes competition. He sees the Opposition not as worthy and legitimate contestants, but rather as irritants and unserious characters who deserve no platform to engage in peaceful, civil public discourse.

  His inclination is to be the sole candidate and lone actor in speaking to the public and delivering long, winding lectures instead of having a robust debate in which he can be questioned on his record of 35 years of ruling the country.
 
It is precisely because of his attitude that he deploys the police and the military to scuttle activities of his opponents during campaign time even as he maintains the latitude to do anything unfettered and freely from the day he is sworn in to the next election day. 

There is no meaning in conducting a debate with a ruler who sees himself as a saviour on a divine-like mission and who has no time for the inconveniences of being put to task and challenged by opponents on matters of policy and principles.

 
When he participated in a presidential debate in 2016, Mr Museveni insisted on precluding Dr Shaka Ssali from asking him questions! The whole debate, if one can call it one, was so scripted with no direct and biting question put to the ruler. 

It was quite evident that the organisers, IRCU, had acquiesced to a format and style that the ruler wanted. In a real debate, the moderator determines and asks questions. It cannot be the organisers or the candidates to decide on the questions in advance. 

Bottomline is that the current political environment, and especially the personal predisposition and attitude of the incumbent ruler, simply cannot allow for anything approximating a reasonable presidential debate.

Mr Khisa is assistant professor at North Carolina State University (USA).
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