Controlling political consent in Uganda. This is a paraphrase of a new book launched on Tuesday at the Kololo-based Centre for Basic Research (CBR).
The 540-page anthology on Uganda’s February 2016 general elections was competently edited by Professors Joe Oloka-Onyango and Josephine Ahikire of Makerere University’s Law School and School of Women and Gender Studies respectively.
I must state upfront my conflict of interest: I am one of the contributors to the book; so, I am in the least-qualified to review it. Suffice to say that the book has already received high praises from scholars both in Uganda and in the USA where it was published and printed.
At Tuesday’s launch, the eminent political historian Mwambutsya Ndebesa and social critic Kalundi Serumaga provided incisive and thoroughgoing critiques of the book.
Given my conflict of interest, I wish to comment on two issues that are not about the content of the book: the spirit of the book project and the subject matter it addresses.
First, the book project was conceived within the spirit of CBR’s founding objective of providing a platform and forum for critical scholarship on important socioeconomic questions in Uganda and Africa more generally.
For the most part, scholarly production on and about Africa has been the business of disinterested academics tucked away in the walls of Western ivory towers.
More often than not, Euro-American scholars approach the study of African politics and society with all manner of prejudices and biases borne of a long historical tradition of misrepresenting the African continent to Western audiences.
Ugandan scholars who started CBR sought to open up the possibilities of rigorous and comprehensive knowledge production by Ugandans rather than remain on the margins as mere research assistants for visiting Western researchers.
Undoubtedly, the West maintains its scholarly hegemony due in large part to material resources that go into research work and the enabling environment for thinking and writing. But institutions such as CBR reveal the possibilities for African scholars to reassert the research agenda for key questions germane to our societies rather than abdicating the responsibility to foreigners.
Second, Controlling Consent addresses a most critical question of our politics: the hollow promise of democracy and rule of law. The parody of democracy under General Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement is something that engages the imagination of many Ugandans.
Through successive general elections, the ruling behemoth has maintained a grip on power by procuring the ‘consent’ of Ugandans using legal manipulations, subtle coercion and blackmail, and the blatant illegal deployment of state financial and security infrastructure.
In an impassioned review on Tuesday, Kalundi Serumaga implored Ugandans to introspect on the liberation promised and announced by our 1986 saviours. Pointing to a possible shortcoming of the book in sitting comfortably with the narrative of liberation, Serumaga underlined the close-to-two- decades period when the Ugandan military was practically an occupying force in most of northern and north-eastern Uganda.
The devious conduct of our ostensible liberators in committing widespread human rights violations during the war and the repeated fraudulent management of elections make for a scandalous claim to liberation.
It is time that Ugandans called a bluff on this narrative to forge a new national agenda. Here, nationalist intellectuals have a crucial role to play in laying bare the democratic simulacra superintended by General Museveni and articulating alternative paths for the country.
The Centre for Basic Research has previously made modest contributions and, in this new book, it has made another scholarly intervention. The process and activities leading to the publication of the book showed remarkable foresight and determination, especially on the part of the project coordinator and the editors.
For those familiar with the long and onerous gestation period leading to publication of an academic book, to have this book come out in the same year of the elections that it analyses is an outstanding achievement. Joe Oloka- Onyango offered extraordinary intellectual leadership and demonstrated that Ugandans can collectively define research agendas and produce top-quality scholarly work about our politics and society.
Finally, for all the criticism against the Museveni regime by a legion of strident critics including myself, there is always something for which credit is in order: leaving the critics be and at worst feigning tolerance.
Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda was invited as the chief guest at the book launch. He agreed to attend but failed to turn up at the very last minute, handing his speech to and delegating his colleague Hilary Onek, the minister for relief, disaster preparedness and refugees.
Onek duly read Rugunda’s speech laced with flattering praises for a book that is hugely-critical of his own regime and system of government. When he was done reading his boss’s speech, all that Onek could afford adding was that managing society is not like a linear equation: there is no straight line for managing socio- political questions.
This is a noble way of conceding the ground for criticism. But it is also the clever way that Museveni and his group have managed to absorb and soak criticism. Given the authoritarianism of the regime, such a highly- critical book would never have been allowed to be launched, let alone by the prime minister.
moses.khisa@gmail.com
The author teaches political science at Northwestern University/Evanston, Chicago-USA.