Why cheap barbs on democracy are hypocritical

The practice, not so much the ideal, of democracy has become a convenient punching bag for everything that has gone wrong in our world, but especially in countries like Uganda that engage in democratic pretensions. 
Just as it is convenient to focus on the flaws and failings of democracy, so it is convenient to ignore the idea, indeed the deals, of democracy – what is democracy supposed to be about?

The easiest target for derision and denigration is the Western-style liberal democracy that foregrounds multiparty competition, media freedom and a vibrant civil society that casts a spotlight on the government of the day. 

Sections of the African intelligentsia, on social media and traditional media as well as academia, have for years chastised the West in its mission of promoting democracy in the face of cracks and credibility crises in democratic praxis back home in Western democracies. 

But it is not just the intelligentsia, it is the African masses too, disillusioned with the failed promises of democratic government where elected leaders who promise heaven while soliciting for the vote instead deliver hell once in political office. 

For the most part, the idea and ideal of democracy is patently absent in popular discourse: No one tries to ask what it is that we mean by democracy, with the result that democracy as an ideal is denuded, discredited and discarded. 

Consequently, among the elite, there is an incoherent attempt justifying autocratic rule; on their part, the masses are likely to clamour for, and celebrate, a military coup! Here, one can’t help but notice a jarring historical amnesia but also intellectual dishonesty. 

Amnesia because none of the problems we see today are particularly new; the failed promises of democracy, in fact the ugly side of democratic government, have been with us from a very long time. For Africa, one has to go to first decade of independence, the 1960s, to plot a clear pattern of how the democratic experiment floundered and folded. 

It is sheer intellectual dishonesty to disregard the fact that over the past more than half century, most African states have had more experience with autocracies of different stripes than democratic systems of any kind. 
Take the case of Uganda. Within five years following independence, the country trudged a path of creeping authoritarianism that ultimately culminated in the Idi Amin coup of 1971 and the onset of a full-blown military dictatorship for the next decade. 

Amin’s overthrow in 1979 ushered in a period of intense political instability through the short-lived governments of Yusuf Lule and Godfrey Binaisa, both picked for the job in a process of limited democracy, followed by the May 1980 military coup of Paulo Muwanga and company that oversaw the disputed 1980 elections. 

Ugandans need to be reminded that the man who rejected the results of the 1980s elections and went on to launch a brutal civil war, Mr Yoweri T Museveni, was the vice chairman of the Military Commission that overthrew Binaisa and ruled the country until the December 1980 elections in which he was a candidate. 

These elections brought back Milton Obote for the second time only to be overthrown by the military, again, in July 1985 and the Okellos junta that took out Obote was in turn chased out of power by Mr Museveni’s NRA rebels in January 1986. 

At this point, Uganda was a tortured country, arguably at its worst ever. The state eroded and society reeling, facing scarcity of basic goods and services. There was no democracy of any form, there had been non for very long. 

The new 1986 rulers promised fundamental change, re-establish a new social contract, give voice to the people and govern according to the wishes and aspirations of the citizens. Over the next two decades of ‘no-party’, Movement politics, we had some flashes of popular political participation and bouts of democratic accountability but not quite a true democratic system. 

The nostalgia about the Movement ‘no-party’ system harkens to a glorious past that never existed: throughout the first two decades of NRM rule, the ultimate goal was to consolidate power and entrench Museveni’s rule; it was never about expanding the frontiers of democratic government. 

Indeed, as the Constitutional Court held in its landmark ruling in 2000, the so-called ‘Movement’ was a disguised form of one-party state for the NRM behaved and acted as a political party while other parties were restricted to their headquarters. In essence, it was a travesty of democracy. 

Since a return to multiparty politics in 2006, we have had a mockery of the ideal of multipartyism. With the legislature stripped of its gravitas and reduced to a bloated site of elite accommodation, the legislature toothless and the executive now patently under an imperial presidency, to talk of democracy in Uganda today is to absolutely insult what democracy actually means.

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