In typical Serumagic thoroughness, Serumaga meticulously, carefully mobilizes historical, economic and decolonial perspectives to make sense to this zombie-world blood-sucking inside parliament of Uganda.
The online campaign #UgandaParliamentExhbition shocked the country with the exorbitant and blatant levels of corruption exhibited. That people in opposition ranks were also quietly, greedily cashing in despite constant chants of reform, shocked many. Serumaga contends, however, that this should not shock anybody, since this is the design of the system.
Ordinary Ugandans – including myself – have not stopped asking: what is wrong with Museveni’s parliaments? Why is it that if one dug deep, one cannot find any clean individual in that house? Why is it that whoever enters that house, quickly becomes soiled and confused?
Serumaga, carefully, methodically, historically, plots a creation story, noting that the institution is the bribe itself, and Museveni, the colonial emissary.
BUSINGYE KABUMBA: TWO PUBLICS
Before Serumaga’s analysis was published, in an equally expansive essay in The Observer, last week, Dr Busingye Kabumba, poignantly, rightly arguing for federalism, reiterated the problem of two publics/attachment: mine and ours. Kabumba noted that for many Ugandans, there is no “real attachment” to the entity called Uganda, but to their ethnic political communities.
“Part of the challenge,” Kabumba started, “is that there is no real attachment to the money being stolen or misused, since it belongs to an entity – ‘Uganda’ – to which there is no real attachment.” Kabumba continues that “there is, however, real attachment to the political communities which preceded the Ugandan state, some of which are listed in the Third Schedule to the 1995 Constitution.”
These political communities, tend to form more “genuine and organic,” units, with better chances for “real accountability and good governance.”
To make his case more succinct, Kabumba cites some explicit and recent presence of “several Ugandas” with real attachment, against a thing called Uganda: the “Kayunga riots in 2009; the Bafuruki question that flared up in 2001 over the election of Fred Ahabwe; the Balaalo matter in Northern Uganda.”
Other examples included “the question of land in Buganda; and the most recent exposé of the raid by ‘Mama Bukedea’ upon the national coffers.” Indeed, like “Mama Bukedea” is doing things in her Bukedea, Museveni and co. will often return to their ethnic communities to vote before returning to Kampala to sweep.
Serumaga actually extends the call for federalism, noting that in fact Uganda needs not just one parliament, but several parliaments. In these regional, federalist parliaments, there will be not just attachment, but more space for debate and articulation of issues since legislators will have more than three minutes to make their contentions. Indeed, federalism was a key finding of the Odoki Commission, and this had promised an absolute reset.
SERUMAGA: FROM LEGCO TO PARLIAMENT
In telling the back story, Serumaga opens with the “original people power movement,” which he argues was “the mass uprising that began in the 1930s and ballooned into wholesale revolt by the late 1940s.”
This had presented “a real risk of anti-colonial armed rebellion, and the authorities responded with a clampdown.” Among other things, Governor Andrew Cohen found leaders with whom the colonial authorities could do business. These would be integrated into the LEGCO, not to do any meaningful work, but to grant them a little power to silence them.
The LEGCO was the first bribe to Uganda’s revolutionaries. Serumaga continues that “Not only did he expand this council to include many Africans, but some Africans were also recruited to senior posts in government as district commissioners, junior ministers and top civil servants.”
The bribe was expansive – and through this period of successive governments, with the exception of Idi Amin — and has only learned to reproduce the Cohen model, elite co-optation.
Serumaga then concludes that “the very establishment of the Parliament of Uganda through the adoption of the 1995 Constitution that creates it in the form that it is, was an act of trickery.
To talk about “bribery” in our parliament is to miss the bigger reality that parliament itself – as the primary channel through which the regime can widely, safely and continually interact with the political class as a whole – is the bribe.”
No wonder, you find political parties where “some members are in illegal military detention, while others have been disappeared and others confirmed killed, while others are accepting Shs 200 million to buy themselves SUVs, from the parliament established by the same military government.” This is a perpetual crisis.
HOW DO WE MOVE?
I rehashed these two wonderful comments (even at the risk of misrepresenting them), first so that readers here do not miss their importance, find them and read them. Secondly, that we need to seriously reflect on moving forward, especially folks organising
on the outside of political units.
My slight disagreement with comrade Serumaga is that now is the time to focus on creating a “mass political movement” as opposed to building ideologically guided political parties. Presently, the enormity of faith that young Ugandans and their leaders have in “political parties” in their current form is mindboggling. Perhaps a direct conversation with cult leaders might help.
Two things are urgent for me: (a) we ought to sustain these analyses and mobilize a mass of people uninterested in simple “a chance
to eat,” but actual reform, revolution.
(b) Reviving ‘people power’ in its original form and understanding that the revolution will come from outside parliament — and outside political parties — and will be led by public and peasant intellectuals using alternative platforms. Thanks Spire Ssentongo, Agatha Atuhaire, Kakwenza Rukira, Godwin Toko and many, many other exhibitors.
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University
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