By Archibald Agaba
Kampala, Uganda: We may hate to admit it but in many ways we are not yet ready to move beyond the post bush war era. Tsun Tzu in his art of war stats; that one can know victory, but never achieve it. The achieving of victory lies in the ability to master control over what you control relative to what the enemy controls –read the book.
The thing about power is that it is more flimsy than most people appreciate. It relies on dynamics that are beyond the combined the control of the protagonist and the antagonist. Should the opposite number choose to reassess their options, it could spell doom for the other.
The power game is about control of resources, it is about defining them and allocating them, which is why it cannot be taken from you. Like a good chess player, the game is played in the mind. You give the opponent his appearance of losing pieces while slowly luring her/him into your trap. S/he, excited about minor battle victories is oblivious of the war that is being lost.
Power cannot be taken from you, only relinquished
As stated above the only true loss of power is in letting others define what your options will be, what your resources are and how they will be allocated. If you choose the safety of conformity, then opportunity to grasp victory will have been lost, if you choose the riskier option of liberty, then even with seemingly limited options, you’ll enjoy more freedom and safety than your perceived captor.
This reminds me of the story of the interviewees. They all walked in one after the other, greeted the secretary and proceeded to take their place next to one that came before them. Then in walks this one interviewee who after greeting the secretary proceeds to door and knocks and enters, living all the earlier arrivals dazed ad in disbelief. Needless to say, she got the job. Define your options.
We are all in this together…
When the Kenyans weighed in on their president’s view of the Ugandan elections, it marked a significant water shade moment in the Kenya-Uganda relations. For a long time, we have been taking about reintegration but for the most part that has meant little more than heads of state meeting and signing protocols. After this event, the people finally found a common interest, a shared identity and thus their single voice and spoke as one. For social media people the twitter wars between Uganda and Kenya have become a thing of legend. If there was any malicious intent in them, from that moment on they became nothing more than the jousting of long lost friends.
Ironically, back home to Uganda, one sees the total lack of identification with one another. I made great effort to observe the faces of the policemen and soldiers that poured out in mass to herd the sheeple back into submission. Save for a few, I did not see the ethnic group most people claim is controlling this country. I recognised most of the faces to be those of the very same people from regimes past. Which to me signals the obvious, the people that control this country have never really changed since the colonial era, only some of their order issuers have. Until all those so called disgruntled elements walk away from the regime or at the very least do what the Kenyans did, they are really supporters and promoters of the status quo –whatever one may think of it.
Ego Theory
Fifty odd years on, and Uganda-ns still struggling with the crisis of identity; without an identity it is impossible to have interests. Without interests why would you even want power? Our problem is no longer “the leopard” as some have taken to calling H.E. The whole savannah and their woodland cousins have taken to declaring the leopard as the problem. How can one leopard be the scourge of the entire grassland of 40 million and counting? Even with the help of the vampires and the hyenas it is impossible to over state how misleading this notion is.
Some have even taken to sounding the drums of war, as if more killings will end the killing. People that get excited at the prospect of war need to be shipped to the icy wastelands in the south (or north depending on how your globe is set). Clearly people that ask for war have little appreciation for the damage it does. Not only in material terms or human lives lost but of even greater value in culture and time lost.
Ms Betty O. Kamya and her “federo” advocates have a more accurate answer but even they fall short of addressing the elephant in the room and its oversized mess, the devolution of power. Formerly of the FDC; the first political entity to formally indorse federalism as a political platform since it was undone in the 1960s, she has since reverted to the KY clarion call of Kabaka Yeka in its many guises and taken to viewing balkanisation as-such as the solution to the problem of power dynamics in Uganda.
The FDC platform had the benefit of “broad based government” at its core, a principle its founder and key promoter has on many occasions reiterated as being the main reason for joining and parting ways with his former comrades in arms at NRA/M –ironically a key principle they organised around.
Where she and her ilk are right is in the diagnosis of the problem as one of power dynamics, where they are wrong is in the solution they offers to the problem. Federalism is an administrative system that devolves power from the centre by balkanising and giving autonomy to the created blocks. There are only two considerations to make when determining the nature of the block; 1- The standard upon which the blocks are divided, 2- The block’s ability to sustain itself.
America is often sighted as an example of the benefits of federalism, but I hope resent developments in that land of the not so free has shattered the illusions of the federalists. The Europeans are grappling with much the same question and have surprisingly stumbled upon a nugget of wisdom long forgotten that was shared by Pope Pius to resolve the ideological impasse that gave us the second world war and its many offshoots euphemistically called the cold war. Cold I suppose because the heat was being felt else where outside Europe.
The balance of power is not a new concept to humanity it has been around for much longer than lazy, ignorant or maybe just collusive scholars care to admit. The Vatican, the world’s largest repository of ancient African wisdom; shared yet another blast from the past – Subsidearity. It is a very simple and common sense solution, which may explain why its very difficult for sophisticated people to get it. It is governed by two fundamental axioms; 1- Decisions should be made at the level that is most affected by them, 2- The higher level should not do for the lower level what the lower level can do for itself.
Local Council Election
I will not even try to mince words here, if Ugandans were as “politically mature” as they like to claim to be, there would have been even bigger crowds at the polling stations on the February 23rd than was on February 18th. A single defeat does not and cannot deter you from an aspiration you claim to hold so strongly. More so, the likelihood that the rigging machinery would have been brought out against the local council leaders was low, and everyone should know that it is the local council leaders that actually do the work of running the country.
Remember that guy of questionable origin who was beating up his constituents for their own good? That was a LC 5 chairman. These are the people that steal 5,000 shillings from you every so often. Over the course of 5 years and multiplied over hundreds of thousands of individuals in hundreds of districts, that represents a redistribution of resources from the electorate to the elected that baggers the imagination. Someone asked me what winning by the numbers actually means if not China’s 1.2 billion to America’s 400 odd million. It means making a list of all the important details and checking off the list of items as you deal with them –like .
