UGANDA’S STATE AND THE FUTURE

UGANDA’S STATE AND THE FUTURE

At  54 years for females and 52 for males, Uganda has a relatively low life expectancy, although many Ugandans do not even get to 50. For some that do, it is cause for celebration and introspection as the person takes stock.

As Uganda marks 50 years of independence, the civil society has partnered with The Observer to take stock of the country today. Kiggundu Henry starts us off by asking about the state in which the country finds itself.

If our 49th year was any indication, one would worry quite a bit about the state of Uganda. Just months after February’s general elections, the country was on fire, with soaring food and fuel prices and the opposition-led ‘walk-to-work’ (W2W) protests.

The government responded with a violent crackdown that attracted national and international dismay. With continuing economic and other challenges pinching,  protest continued in other forms: the media briefly boycotted government functions over the heavy- handed policing of W2W. Lawyers protested at the High Court against the undermining of the rule of law and judicial independence by the Executive.

There was industrial action by teachers, government medical workers and university lecturers, city traders (over increasing costs of doing business), and marches and vigils by NGOs and the women’s movement.

Many citizens look to government for credible solutions to the real economic and social difficulties they face. Instead, in 2011, we saw lukewarm official response to demands for relief, unclear explanations alternating with overbearing statements, and sometimes crackdowns.

There was little to inspire confidence of commitment to balanced development and social justice. Several actions led the government into public-relations-disaster territory, and the country into uncertain times - spending billions of shillings on fighter jets amidst food scarcity; a proposal to donate a chunk of Mabira forest to the Mehtas for sugarcane growing; a $3m budget for the presidential swearing-in and a $300,000 presidential donation to a primary school in a neighbouring country amidst claims of lack of money to improve teachers’ conditions.

Over Easter 2011, various religious leaders called for good governance. Unlike their call for better elections management before February, immediately following which the Inter-Religious Council of Uganda was roundly savaged by the President, this call apparently was more or less ignored.

Fortunately, many religious leaders have continued the call for better governance. Ugandans long subdued by a violent history and the rule of strongmen are normally a quiet, long-suffering folk.  This time was different: debate raged on blogs, in newspapers, on broadcast media, at press conferences and on the streets.

It spilled over into Parliament, where a legislature that had drifted into distress and disrespect under successive executive onslaughts, re-discovered its spirit with bipartisan activism.  The 9th Parliament took up its constitutional duty and called the Executive to account on various issues: qualification for appointment as ministers; corruption in a myriad of deals (including procurement/non-procurement of bicycles, ‘compensation’ to so-called businessmen for non-existent investments, and opaque management/alleged corruption in the nascent oil sector), wasteful public expenditure and too little public resourcing of social services including maternal health and education, etc.

Week after week brought scandal after scandal, with two common denominators: consistent loss of huge sums of taxpayers’ money, and involvement in decisions on those schemes and scams of very highly-placed public officials. By year’s end, these events had claimed the scalp of some ministers, including one in relation to theft of government broadcast equipment. A new terminology entered our political lexicon, regarding the meaning of ministers ‘stepping aside’ or not, and claims of selective prosecution of political leaders floated around.

Also, the government prepared a bill on public order management, strongly advocated by the police boss but nearly universally condemned by local and international agencies as unconstitutional for aiming to lockdown lawful civic engagement. The relationship with the Executive threw into sharp focus the role of informal (party caucus) as opposed to state institutions like Parliament in determining issues of national interest.

Within the ruling party, there was serious debate on internal democracy versus ‘discipline’ over the attempt to prevent NRM MPs from discussing the importance of presidential term limits. ‘Radio Katwe’ abound with rumours about infighting over presidential succession, and through all this, the poor, suffering citizen, mostly living on barely two thousand shillings a day, continued to walk, albeit without tear gas, to work – for those who are employed.

Unfortunately, not many youth can count themselves in this group and the much-heralded Youth Empowerment Fund has done little to change the situation.  And for many internally displaced people returning home from camps of over two decades of war in northern Uganda, livelihood remains a serious issue, worsened by, among other things, anxieties about land-grabbing and the previously ‘little-known’ nodding disease.

By the start of 2012, many of the issues and tensions remained unresolved. A poll by Afrobarometer found very little confidence in the government’s commitment and capacity to address these issues.  Among different campaigns by civic actors to put the country back on track is one to reinstate presidential term limits, interestingly also a recommendation of an experts’ report on the East African Community political federation adopted by the EAC summit in November 2011.

As October 9, 2012 approaches, there is cause for concern with rising ethnic tension and fragmentation, widening socio-economic disparities, and failure of the ties that bind citizen to state and to each other, the ‘social contract.’  Many features of a failed state appear to be emerging in this country, an issue that should make any serious Ugandan leader pause for thought and consider whether a change in political culture should not be a national priority.

The question we face, and which writers from civil society and elsewhere will explore in the next few months in the run-up to Uganda’s 50th Independence anniversary, is what all the individual cases of rot, corruption,  institutional failure point towards.  If Uganda was a company, wouldn’t it have wound up due to bankruptcy?

Indicators of states vulnerable to failure

Social indicators:

•    Demographic pressures, poorly managed;
•    Mass forced movement of communities  as refugees and internally displaced peoples due to violence or competition;
•    Legacy of vengeance-seeking group grievances due to unresolved injustices, impunity and exclusion and public scapegoating of groups;
•    Chronic sustained brain drain and flight of the middle class.

Economic indicators:

•    Uneven economic development along group lines, for example, in education, jobs and economic status, reflected in different poverty levels, health and education indicators between communities;
•    Sharp and/or severe economic decline as seen, for example, in currency decline or failure of the state to meet financial obligations to citizens like pensions and salaries;

Political indicators:

•    Criminalization and/or delegitimisation of the state due to issues like endemic corruption, profiteering by ruling elites and resistance to transparency, accountability and political representation;
•    Progressive deterioration of public services that serve the people and use of state apparatus like security forces, central bank to serve the ruling elites.
•    Widespread abuse of human rights with authoritarian, dictatorial or military rule in which constitutional and democratic institutions and processes are suspended or manipulated.
•    Security apparatus as ‘state within a state’ with impunity, state terror against ‘opponents’, and state security agencies serving interests of the dominant military or political clique.
•    Rise of factionalised elites as a result of fragmentation of ruling elites and state institutions along group lines and promotion of ethnocentrism by ruling elites.
•    Intervention of other states or external entities in the state especially militarily, but also intervention made possible by excessive reliance on donor support.

Kiggundu Henry is a Lawyer and the Director Legal Link International (LLI) Also a governance, gender and human rights expert. Among other things,