Last Friday night, I got a belated invitation from the Uganda Youth Network (UYONET) to deliver a keynote presentation at a post-election dialogue scheduled for Monday, December 19.
Because the invitation was very late, I initially wanted to politely tell the organisers I wouldn’t make it. On a second reflection, however, I agreed. Thus, I had to burn the midnight candle to write the presentation, overnight.
I agreed despite the fact that I would not expect any financial recompense. I consider this part of my duty and obligation to my country, to the horizontal comradeship I share with fellow compatriots. But I thought this was also a great opportunity to try and impress upon a crop of young Ugandans their role and place in shaping national politics and driving the policy agenda for the country.
It appears that the organisers wanted especially to speak to youths associated with the two main opposition parties, the Democratic Party and the Forum for Democratic Change. So, the respective presidents for the two parties, Norbert Mao and Mugisha Muntu, were invited as discussants. Muntu delegated his former leader of opposition, Wafula Oguttu. Mao was patently late for the event but, nevertheless, spoke.
My message was simple and straightforward: if you must do something about our politics and policies, do it now. You have the fight. Most people who have profoundly influenced their societies and left their footmarks have done so when in the age bracket of 25 and 40.
The adventurism and idealism of youth years easily lead one to dare dream, to take risks, to imagine and act. At 40, the pangs of life start taking a toll and an individual starts thinking about their personal and family priorities.
I told this youth gathering that our country is trapped in corrosive politics and misguided policies. If there is one segment of society with the wherewithal to change the country’s course, it is them. They have the energy and the numbers, the resources and tools to create an impact, both in national politics and economic policy.
But to create an impact, young Ugandans must seek to fully grasp the crux of the problems we face as a country. Without proper diagnosis, they can’t come to grips with the appropriate collective response and solutions.
Is our problem a leadership crisis? Is there something fundamentally lacking about our society that makes our politics so perverted and our economics a big contraption? Are we condemned by our history? Are we merely victims of problems from elsewhere? In other words, what are the underlying sources of our bad politics and shallow economics? This needs deeper reflection.
At the Monday dialogue, the youths were on the back-foot. Wafula Oguttu faulted them for lacking basic organisation, seriousness of purpose and being easy prey for cheap political manipulation.
At another public event recently, someone bemoaned the shocking lack of curiosity by Ugandan journalists. Of course this is a bit of an exaggeration. But the observation is perhaps even truer for Ugandan youths as a whole.
The pursuit of ideas and information about not just our society but the world out there seems to be something that an average young Ugandan is not particularly keen on. Social media, for all its value and worth, is taking many young people down the path of misinformation and shallow-mindedness, unfortunately.
The Museveni government, on it part, has recently become overly jittery and anxious of the portent political threat posed by an army of unemployed youths in a highly-charged political environment.
The poverty of response to this problem is all glaring. Some monies have been thrown around through the ministry of gender. The state minister for youth and children affairs has taken on a rather populist knack moving around supposedly supervising youth development projects and pushing for accountability. It’s all a big joke!
The government has conveniently, if cynically, allowed the flourishing of the boda boda industry. I told the youths on Monday that this is a poisoned chalice. It’s simply untenable to have a huge swath of the country’s illiterate and semi-illiterate population flock urban centres to provide a basic transportation service.
Our country is a poor, peasant and backward society. It is not a post-industrial society where majority of the population can go into the services industry. As the eminent American political scientist Goran Hyden noted more than three decades ago, there are no shortcuts to progress.
If we are serious about structural transformation, the majority of our production workforce, the youth, both skilled and semi-skilled, must belong somewhere that matters to the economy. They must be in commercial agriculture, in value-added manufacturing and in real productivity instead of selling ancestral plots of land to procure a motorbike on which they both work and sleep, literally speaking.
The disturbing bit is that President Museveni actually understands this very well. He knows that the long-term solution to the problem of youth unemployment and hopelessness cannot be in haphazard development handouts or jamming the streets of Kampala with passenger motorcycles.
moses.khisa@gmail.com
The author teaches political science at Northwestern University/Evanston, Chicago-USA.