The degradation of Uganda

How electoral democracy has prostituted our governance and undermined the public spirit

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA |  Uganda is facing a moral crisis, a loss of the public spirit in public service. Public policy and actions no longer embody the public spirit. Instead, they reinforce a pattern of private advantage that is often harmful to the public interest. Public officials, elected and appointed, pursue their selfish interests in disregard to the public good. This should strike us as odd because our country has enjoyed significant democratic development over the last 30 years. I take democracy here to reflect two things [according to American political scientist Robert Dahl]: participation and contestation.

Political participation has grown by leaps and bounds; the country has almost one million elected officials in an adult population of 22 million. Political contestation is intense. For instance, in the recently concluded NRM primaries, 82% of incumbent parliamentarians lost their party flag. Out of 536 elected MPs, only 105 were in the last parliament. So, our citizens hold elected officials to account and penalize them for their corruption and incompetence by voting them out of office in every election. Yet this has not led to improved governance. Instead, it seems the more democratic participation and contestation, the worse the governance outcomes.

Public infrastructure in rural Uganda is crumbling alongside national trunk roads despite increasing state funding. Today, every community wants a district so that local elites can get access to private jobs and privileges at the expense of public goods and services. Our police stations and barracks, built in the 1960s and supposed to represent the power of the state before the citizens, are in a sorry state. They are old, dilapidated, dirty, and stinky. Our army barracks, another core institution of state power, are in worse form. Our soldiers live in grass-thatched mud huts—40years since NRA/UPDF “liberated” our country. Given that most of Uganda has shaded-off grass-thatched mud huts, it means our citizens are forced to downgrade to primordial living when joining UPDF.

Nothing is sacred anymore in our country. In the 1960s, Makerere University and Mulago Hospital were world-class institutions. Today, Makerere is a casino, and Mulago a mortuary; their physical infrastructure and their intellectual and institutional values eroded. Nakasero, Kololo, Bugolobi, Makindye and Mbuya used to be posh residential areas where ambassadors, rich businesspersons, successful professionals, etc. would reside and live upper middle-class lifestyles. Today their roads are filled with potholes and giant craters, turning them into rich people’s slams. Even Lower Kololo Terrace, the road below Kololo Independence Grounds, where we host foreign dignitaries, is filled with potholes. No sense of shame.

This lack of sanctity in everything has captured our fountain of honor—the state house as an institution and the president individually. Today, people pay to get meetings with the president. Others pay to get the president to write blue letters awarding contracts that are detrimental to the public good. Often, these blue letters are rewards to individuals and groups that delivered the vote in the last election or are expected to deliver votes at the next.

It is very easy to blame this tragic state of our affairs on President Yoweri Museveni personally. And indeed, as chief executive of the government, he and his confederates in the NRM bear a huge share of the responsibility. Yet I believe that more than the personalities of the players, Uganda’s governance crisis has its roots in the specific way democracy has evolved in our country. The president and all other politicians need money to win elections, and the most important concern is how to win the next election.

Democracy is an inspiring idea, most especially in its theoretical postulations. But in practical terms, especially in Uganda’s very specific context, I am inclined to believe that our current problem is not one less democracy. Democracy itself is a serious problem to our governance. Many well-intentioned people, Ugandan citizens and intellectuals, foreign scholars and diplomats, etc., will be horrified by my conclusion. But this is largely because democracy has become a secular religion that people follow out of unquestioning faith instead of empirical examination.

Free and fair elections accompanied by a free media and free association and assembly by a multitude of civic groups and political parties do not necessarily reflect the “will of the people.” Anyone following elections in Western democracies, especially the US, UK, France, Italy, etc., can see that all too often, it is those with money that effectively shape public opinion. They fund universities, mass media, think tanks, and other “knowledge”-generating institutions to produce ideas that justify their pecuniary interests. The voter is a mere pawn in a game of the rich to rig public policy to their advantage.

The same applies to Uganda, and in worse fashion. We are in an election period. The challenge for Museveni and his NRM is how to win over powerful and influential elites from the different ethno-religious groups in our country. These act as a bridge between the president [and his party] and their co-ethnics. The basis of this relationship is the exchange of material favors: direct cash payments, lucrative contracts, juicy public sector jobs, etc. This corruption, patronage, and nepotism are the way the system works, not the way it fails. And it is sustained and lubricated by democratic competition.

It is very hard to think out of the democratic box in large part because of the intellectual influence of the West on the rest of us. It is Western power, military and economic, that lodged Western ideas in our moral consciousness. The West has created a misleading dichotomy that you can have either democracy (which is modern and humane) or autocracy (which is inhuman and barbaric). A country that does not follow the Western governance script is labelled cruel and inhuman. A government that mimics this Western governance model is declared humane and civilized regardless of actual governance outcomes.

Consequently, there is little or no challenge to this Western ideological hegemony. Instead, we mimic Western democratic procedures even when they serve little or no democratic purpose. There are democratic deficits in the way Uganda is governed. This has led many Ugandans to think it is less democracy that is responsible for our governance crisis and that more democratization could lead to better governance. Yet more democracy would most probably make our country’s governance even worse.

Indeed, many of Museveni’s “authoritarian” tendencies hold the worst governance outcomes of democratic competition in check. Without his often cruel restraining “autocratic” hand, it is possible that a president entirely dependent on popular sentiments would make even worse compromises.

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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug