In 2005, I was an undergraduate student at Makerere University when a South African poet was hosted in Lecture Room IV for a conversation on writing under apartheid.
This was 11 years after apartheid. Asked why he never wrote any love poetry in the 1980s when he was most prolific as a writer, this lovely man of letters – clearly cut out for love poetry – noted that “it was just difficult to write love under apartheid.” How do you even compose yourself when it is all pain, chaos and confusion around you, he rhetorically mourned.
“All we did was compose freedom songs, struggle poetry, and revolutionary poems,” he said.
The point he sought to make was that in times of crises, of war and complete insanity, and breakdown, one cannot afford the luxuries of love and emotion – of romance or even civility. Crisis imposes onto actors an own set of demands, requiring them to respond in that order. Desperate times require desperate measures, they say. Indeed, in a true Marxist spirit, men make their history under the material and political conditions in which they live.
One of the major pains for me nowadays is that a section of activists and political actors – deliberately or unwittingly – have refused to read the times: You cannot respond with civility to an oppressor who only masquerades as civil. One has to organise and meet their opponent on their own terms: Okukunamira omubbi (throwing your naked behind into the face of a thief ) in a big office is a logical and perhaps far smaller response to these thieves stealing our lives away.
Enter Isaac Ssemakadde: As the campaign for the presidency of the Uganda Law Society (ULS) enters its final course, and candidate Isaac Ssemakadde is clearly sweeping the charts, plenty of voices have queried his approach: his “bang the table” approach, his meticulously choreographed loudness, his costuming genius, and his overall rebel character.
Without the intellectual tools to appreciate the man’s otherwise sophisticated set of weaponry, these voices have sought to make the case that Ssemakadde is unfit to lead a society of supposedly “learned friends.” Something like, he is too noisy, unpolished. It is all uneducated talk, I should say!
But what many have mistaken for madness, or so-called uncultured behaviour is a spontaneous overflow of passion, a commitment to a discipline, and ultimately, a required response to the uncultured times we live in: of lacklustre public servants, cadre judges, corrupt lawyers and a corrupt bench, and an executive which has no respect for legal decisions.
PASSIONATE ADVOCATE
We all recall during the Covid-19 lockdown that most Kampala advocates cowed under the tyranny of the lockdown. But Ssemakadde and a couple others were in courts arguing and banging tables for their place – as an essential profession. Ssemakadde reminded the state that there were men and women in prisons – and many were being thrown in – and all these needed their attorneys for representation.
This demand had to be forcefully made as the times demanded. In a world where the law has been understood as accumulation by dispossession (thereby directly aiding the Yoweri K. Museveni tyranny), where even a plague will find willing lawyers to its defence, Ssemakadde has sought to distinguish himself, intellectually and performatively.
So, he dresses like movie characters, dines with the wananchi downtown, and oftentimes represents broke folks and trade unions. Ssemakadde, Eron Kizza, my attorney, Adam Ateenyi and comrade brother Male Mabirizi (and a few other folks) have actually demystified and domesticated the law for many deprived Ugandans.
Considering Ssemakadde is one of Kampala’s most brilliants and bravest advocates, had he focused on accumulation – like many others in the trade – he would be filthy rich. Dear reader, as a scholar of political economy, I have not encountered many lawyer folks – especially of this generation (2000s onwards) – who understand the connections and revolving doors of exploitation, national liberation, global capitalist pillage and the craft of the law.
Many have a positivist belief of the law to be internally-contained, and innocent. While some of us have been able to understand these things through many, many degrees, Isaac Ssemakadde, with just a bachelor’s degree, breaks down these complex phenomena in ways that require many supposedly accomplished academics to take classes under his feet.
This is genius. Consider for example: Ssemakadde was in Sudhir Ruparelia’s corner during his troubles with Crane Bank vs Bank of Uganda. While most Ugandans – including myself – see Sudhir Ruparelia as a plunderer (indeed, his shenanigans are well- known in many dissident circles), Ssemakadde understood that among all the banker thieves in Uganda – most of them foreign and milking Ugandans and taking abroad – Sudhir was perhaps the only one who positioned himself as native, and comfortably, informally worked with the local businessfolk.
Perhaps this was his major crime with UBA, and Bank of Uganda. And many local businessfolk dearly miss this shady Indian-Ugandan. In a world of capitalist shadiness, he was ours.
TRAGIC FLAW
Dear reader, I am not writing about a saint here. Comrade Ssemakadde has plenty of flaws – but I will call them tragic flaws to signal a special type of weakness. In tragedian drama, a ‘tragic flaw,’ is a blind spot born out of one’s own genius. Something like their genius is actually their weakness.
It is fair to say that Ssemakadde’s commitment to the liberating potential of the law is oftentimes difficult to understand – yet this ought to be a wholesomely wonderful attribute.
Not too long ago, Ssemakadde has his horses directed at our other geniuses, Dr Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, Agartha Atuhaire and Godwin Toko over the online exhibitions. I understood this as friendly fire as he challenged online activism to embrace more radical, more robust offline positions – including especially court battles. Something like that.
But writing to the funders of AGORA (an activist platform started by Ms. Agartha Atuhaire) demanding for or reporting lack of accountability remained a difficult step. What is undeniable are the structural pitfalls of becoming an NGO – to which AGORA ought to beware. In fact, USAID captured AGORA, and thus USAID would be fruitless seeking USAID intervention. What then was Comrade Ssemakadde seeking from this colonial outfit itself?
What becomes clear is that for comrade Ssemakadde, it is either a legal framing or nothing else. At least, that is how he percieves it. This is an understandable position as exploitation has come to craft and buttress itself through legal documentation. But this should never be understood as all other avenues of protest and contestations – however mild – are less valuable or entirely unnecessary.
The point I am making is this: it is this relentlessness, obsessiveness, indefatigability of folks such as Isaac Ssemakadde (add Male Mabirizi) that has often made our lives more liveable. Holding thieves in power accountable requires a certain strategic madness, some brave rebelliousness, and relentlessness. Sadly, ordinary folks often struggle to understand the resolve, motivations and drive of the rebels amongst them.
We turn to badmouthing them, judging them against our ordinary IQs. The Uganda Law Society is lucky to have Counsel Ssemakadde seeking to lead them.
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University
