This sad joke as Slavoj Žižek tells it (in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, 2009), underscores the absurdity of good-mannered “anti-radical” dissidents of absolute power. So, Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo would cynically ask: “if a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do?”
Whilst opposition parties, NGOs and other organisations understand the political-structural problems in Uganda— violent land grabs, an executive-colonised judiciary, rabid corruption, extortionist murders, nepotism, etcetera—their efforts to change the status quo are too tame for any consequence.
Ironically, these enthusiastic but naïve interventions actually sustain the status quo. By simply soiling the Mongol’s testicles in dust, the peasant actually augmented the rapist’s ego as a hard-boiled remorseless ruffian.
It is Stella Nyanzi who has pointedly called President Museveni a rapist—of the country and constitution—which is persuasive if we use the word to mean taking by force or fraud. See, in the event of electoral fraud, while opposition parties go to court, which declares the elections covered in dust, President Museveni keeps the power. In cases of egregious corruption (GAVI funds or the infamous handshake, etc.), courts/parliament embarrassed the thieving public servants who, nevertheless, ended up keeping their loot.
In the case of land grabs, court may sanction the compensation of the victim who actually ends up losing their land as if they had intentions of selling it in the first place. After the 2017 dramatic amendment of the constitution, opposition politicians signed up for more drama and fanfare in Mbale.
Many drug-addicted legislators were exposed. The ruffians who voted in favour of the amendment have only been threatened with loss in the next election, but the amendment stands!
As Žižek concluded on that Russian-Mongol joke, opposition forces “only succeeded in soiling those in power whereas the real point is to castrate them…!”
Like many other Ugandans, I have plenty of respect for the men and women behind the national dialogue agenda — our esteemed religious leaders, the elders under the Elders Forum and other NGO activists. But are their good intentions not predictable to end in only holding the testicles of those in power, and simply drag them into the dust while they actually enjoy their rape?
I am uncomfortable suspecting our elders and clergy as being engaged in this effort for the money injected in by the self-interested donors. I am also not comfortable accusing our elders of political naivety or cowardice to engage in actual Marxist challenge to power. But I am pained by their half-analysis of the situation, which borders on absolute mediocrity.
One does not have to be a curious academic or researcher to know that a great deal of the injustice and failures in Uganda are actually deliberate or a product of sheer incompetence. Land grabs (in Hoima, Kayunga, Acholi), environmental insecurity (threat to Mabira forest, dredging in Lake Victoria), women, sheikhs and other murders (IGP being implicated and arrested), judicial dependence (conflicted bail of Mumbere, genocidal arrests of Muslims as default murder suspects).
All these maladies have President Museveni’s State House lurking in the background—often as fetishized perpetrator and utmost beneficiary. One painfully struggles to understand the end-game of our senior citizens in the national dialogue playhouse.
Of course, at the end of the day, those in power will be embarrassed for their incompetence or selfishness. But it is nothing beyond soiling the testicles of a satiated rapist.
The author is a PhD fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research.