Among them was the fact that when one gets hiccups, it is because he or she is the subject of conversation somewhere. I always wondered how President Museveni, a man whose name didn’t catch a breath in the local media, found time to address gatherings, as, going by the myth, he was supposed to be having multiple hiccups.
Museveni, the person, was and remains an enigmatic phenomenon whose allure has captured the imagination of both his rabid supporters and naysayers.
Discussions about him oscillate between matters of state and his personal affairs. It’s never a good meetup with friends if one of them, especially when perceived to have sources, does not intimate that they have a story about the president’s latest property acquisition around the capital.
Every enviable business that shows intensive demand for capital or prime land whose owners are suspect is said to be owned under the president’s aegis or that of his brother Gen Salim Saleh or members of his first family.
To many columnists and ‘analysts,’ the failure of Ugandan project can only be explained through Museveni’s longevity in power. This way of seeing has gained currency in the lecture rooms of political science, law schools and universities in general. To oppose Museveni is a fad, and it gets the hordes of like-minded people to consider one as both intelligent and patriotic.
Recently, while discussing Makerere University’s performance in the Times Higher Education in World University rankings, ranking members of a certain Kampala echo chamber concluded that Makerere’s decline in ranking was attributable to Museveni’s stifling of dissent on the ‘Hill’ through Prof Barnabas Nawangwe, the university’s vice chancellor, who is considered the administration’s mascot.
Clearly, none of the members looked at the variables associated with the ranking. This way of seeing issues passes off with an irrefutable air of common sense. It’s heavy on analogies and quite immune to critique. Those that ask questions on how these simplistic conclusions are reached are projected as either being in the pockets of those in power [state power] or too dull to see what is ‘very clear.’
To understand the miasma of our times, you ought not to look any further than scholar Luke Melchiorre’s title to his paper “Neoliberal Hegemony, Bobi Wine, and the Politics of Opposition in Museveni’s Uganda at the recently concluded Neoliberalism conference at Makerere University.
What, therefore, is the problem with this way of seeing?
This paralysis of perspective explains things by their effect rather than their cause. For example, why has violence been a major characteristic of elections in most of Uganda’s post-independence history?
For starters, violence predates Museveni. And the answer cannot be as banal as ‘selfish’ megalomaniacs that have held state power. Why Museveni, a westerner, won a civil war he waged in Buganda can’t merely be the work of a sorcerer or luck. Isn’t it rather pejorative to think that all ‘institutions’ have collapsed at the will of one man? How can one man run roughshod over all institutions in the country? Are Ugandans that weak?
Why do some historical injustices persist against certain communities? Ugandan anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani’s work provides insights on how to understand political communities. Understanding is predicated on critique, while lashing out, lambasting, and all the other easy things are grounded in criticism.
Aime Cesaire once said, “There are two ways of losing oneself: by a walled segregation into the particular or by dilution into the universal.”
Then our contemporary challenge is losing ourselves into the segregation of the particular. Particularly in the sense that we are confined to area studies that colonialism designated for us. Beleaguered under the behest of imperial power and colonial epistemes we look onto individuals rather than big ideas. This may explain the hunger for heroes to ‘sort our mess.’
This lack of a sense of wonder and curiosity always amuses me. Perhaps it is responsible for the framing of the wrong questions that inevitably give the wrong answers. Our native fights and bickering today are mostly about the distribution of the national cake, and for the most enlightened sectors of our society, it is about clean water, health, and electricity. Newly added to the menu is ecology.
Damning African leaders is not a worthy target. But one must not forget that our present crises—recessions, wars, or even famine, disease, or inequality are all produced by capitalism.
The symptoms of underdevelopment manifested in the periphery countries can only be addressed through a united front against capitalism.
Calls for transnational alliances are moot in a nation state order. This in no way meant to serve as an apologia for the likes of Museveni but, rather, as a call to arms to extend our critique to new and vital arenas such as unfairness in trade policies, globalization, and all its variants, among a myriad of other structural bottlenecks.
If we cannot find a way to frame the proper question for the crises of our time, then it may be better that we continue searching. But everything is not that bad when one looks at new voices such as Jerry Luyinda, Nnanda Kizito, Tigushamwa Ayebare, Fatumah Nabulya, Herbert Abaho, Jonan Twinamatsiko or the affable Tony Natif, to mention but a few.
They are using new modes of information technology to put fire under some feet and are rethinking dominant frameworks of knowledge and knowledge production.
joelmukisa13@gmail.com
The author is a lawyer, journalist and commentator on social, political, and economic issues.
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