Liberation from ‘liberators’?: Uganda and the NRM

What happens to revolutionaries when they get into power? This familiar question was haunting me all of last week when I was back ‘home’ (I lived in Uganda from 1992–2005 and still hold a Ugandan government diplomatic passport). We were having the Africa retreat of the UN Millennium Campaign at the Imperial Botanical Beach Hotel (better known as the Clinton Hotel, with a Clinton suite and a Clinton Pavilion to show for it, because that was where President Clinton stayed during his 1998 Monica-de-stressing visit to Africa). We were in Entebbe in October with Millennium Development Goals (MDG) campaigners from 16 countries across Africa to celebrate this year’s Guinness world record-breaking ‘Stand Up’ action in support of the MDGs campaigning globally and especially around Africa. More than 50 million Africans in 40 countries participated in Stand Up this year as part of the 117 million participants in more than 130 countries across the world.

For an event that began with 14 million in 2006 to have grown by almost eight times in only two years with a more diverse group of people participating in it is proof, if indeed any is still needed, that the peoples of the world are outraged at the level of grinding poverty experienced by billions in a world where ‘there is enough to satisfy our needs but not enough to satisfy our greed’!

The guest of honour was a long-term comrade, a ‘historical’ member of the Ugandan National Resistance Army/Movement, a senior member of the government since 1986, a pan-Africanist and controversial public figure, and a man to whom I owe my life, who has fished me out of life-threatening situations twice. He was not disappointing in raising a lot of controversies about MDGs and how they can be achieved in Africa but some of his conclusions were most disappointing. As an ideologue of the NRM, he has displayed the kind of gross insensitivity to the ordinary citizen and ideological retreat that has characterised President Museveni’s long-term hegemony over the Ugandan state and society. They have stayed in power so long that they have all but forgotten their previous jobs, values, and visions. From heralding ‘fundamental change’ they have become apostles of ‘no change’. They have become reactionaries, tired revolutionaries exhausting the country they claim to have liberated. The challenge now facing Ugandans is similar to what is facing Zimbabweans, Ethiopians, Eritreans, and other post-liberation societies: how to liberate themselves from their liberators.

These liberators have now become establishment reactionaries blocking future changes. My good comrade reduced the attainment of the MDGs to ‘putting money in the pockets of individual Africans’. I have no problem with Africans becoming richer and having more money to in their pockets. But can we all make money like ministers? He went on further to state without any coyness or sense of decorum that ‘my children do not go to UPE [Universal Primary Education] schools’, adding that if he was sick he would not go to Mulago, the national hospital. If ministers do not use the services provided by the government of which they are members why should the public trust those departments? My comrade the minister was being honest, but that honesty also reveals how far the NRM oligarchy has travelled in the opposite direction of the fundamental change they promised. They are no longer changing the system because they are the system. The burden of change is now squarely on the shoulders of another generation. They are no longer part of the solution but very central to the problem.

The following day we had a public forum at the Grand Imperial on how Africa can achieve the MDGs in 2015. The speakers included Professor Augustus from Makerere University, Dr Tola from the Make Our Money Work For Us MDG/GCAP coalition in Nigeria, a young Ugandan woman/youth activist, our Global Director Salil Shetty, and me as the wrap up speaker. It was a well attended meeting, very passionate and most engaging with participants from a broad section of the Ugandan society and pan-Africanist constituencies. The consensus was that the MDGs may not be achieved, not because there are no resources but for lack of political will by African leaders for goals No1 to No 7 and the political leaders of the enriched countries who are not delivering on the eight goals.

The discussion was even more passionate. A participant who is a senior bureaucrat from the Ministry of Health of Uganda earned well-warranted opprobrium from the audience when he suggested that the meeting was just about noisemakers shouting the usual taunts about governance, accountability, corruption, and saying less about ‘the how question’. For a senior bureaucrat supposedly appointed as a qualified technocrat to go to a public meeting for ‘the how question’ raises questions about his qualifications. But his dismissal of the governance issues raise even more questions in the context of Uganda. A senior official from a ministry that is overwhelmed with corruption charges that led to the censure and sacking of ministers and exposure of grand corruption involving all kinds of well-connected people and their fake NGOs is the last person to be so pompous as to dismiss public outcry. But his attitude represents what is wrong with the NRM regime: their contempt for the ordinary citizen. They have stayed so long in power that they behave as though they are monarchs. Many of them hope to remain in power for as long as President Museveni is there. This is why Museveni and the NRM have no form of exit strategy. They cannot remember not being in power and cannot contemplate not being in power, whatever their citizens may think.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is general secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda, and is also director of Justice Africa, based in London, UK.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/