By Andrew Mwenda
The Saturday 3am SFC raid at the home of our pre-current speaker of parliament, Anita Annet Among (AAA), is unprecedented. The joint security operation at her home, confiscating anything and everything of value, including cash and other luxury items, speaks volumes. The action required bold decision-making and a stubborn resolution. And it is a vintage signature of the CDF, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba. Those who doubted him now know what kind of political animal Uganda has to contend with.
Muhoozi had tweeted his displeasure with the speaker for buying a $1m Rolls Royce. He then said the budget of parliament should be cut because it is wasteful. The ministry of finance should take that tweet seriously. Then he issued a statement saying that PLU, the civil society pressure group he leads, had retracted its endorsement of AAA and her deputy, Thomas Tayebwa. He said his choice of the new speaker is Oboth Oboth, the pre current minister of defense. He warned that he was not interested in any discussions. He would dictate.
Many Ugandan elites have failed or refused to understand the political animal that Muhoozi is. They are stuck in the politics of tolerance and compromise that his father, President Yoweri Museveni, has practiced for so long. It is a politics many Ugandan elites and non-elites have come to expect as a permanent fixture of our national life. But it is also a politics that has allowed well-organised demand groups to insist and get favors from the president, often at a high cost to the common good. Muhoozi rejects this kind of politics, not because he thinks it has necessarily been bad, but because he thinks Uganda has outgrown its usefulness.
Muhoozi appreciates that his father’s form of politics, characterized by many compromises and concessions to powerful interest groups, was important for the political reconciliation and social integration that Uganda needed in the first decades of NRM rule. For a country that had been torn asunder by civil wars, military coups and interethnic and religious conflicts, reconciliation required accommodation, forgiveness and tolerance that only Museveni could master. True, Museveni would [sometimes] employ hard measures to get his way. But that was rare – the president always preferred the carrot more than the stick. But this strategy of using the carrot increasingly consolidated a politics of corruption.
Uganda has recovered, the economy grown and society transformed. As a result, these constant compromises and concessions to powerful individuals and interest groups have increasingly become major liabilities. Today, the tolerance of corruption and incompetence which was critical for social integration in the early years has now become a source of social frustrations among young Ugandans seeking a better country.
Ugandans want a government that can deliver jobs and public goods and services, not one that constantly placates the interests of powerful ethnic, business and religious elites. Indeed, Muhoozi believes that the kinds of compromises that made state consolidation possible in the first three decades of NRM’s rule are now making it difficult for the state to pursue its project of economic transformation. And yet this project of transformation is the key to ensuring the sustainability of the state in the long term.
Therefore, people need to understand the raid on Among’s house in this context. It is not really about her. And that is what many analysts have missed. Rather, it is about the broader statement Muhoozi is making: that Uganda can no longer accept or sustain the politics of corruption, incompetence, patronage, bribery and appeasement. Rather, Uganda will insist that public officials follow strict rules and uphold the public spirit in public services. Muhoozi recognizes that this new politics cannot happen in the context of our inherited democratic procedures. This is especially so because we adhere too much to these procedures even when they serve little democratic (and most especially national) value.
Muhoozi is saying that there is a need to reassert the authority of the state over powerful ethnic, religious and business elites who use identity and money to mobilize political constituencies to control power in Uganda. Often, this power is used to divert resources from national purposes to serve selfish and parochial interests. He does not have overwhelming power over decision-making in Uganda. But he is determined to use the little power he has to send a message. And that message is that impunity cannot be tolerated; that corruption and incompetence that hide behind bureaucratic procedures and political sloganeering are injurious to the public good and will be resisted.
For instance, Muhoozi has severally expressed his personal frustration with many things going wrong in the country. He has complained about roads in Kampala City that are in a permanent state of disrepair. He has complained about national truck roads which are collapsing around us. All efforts to repair them have been met with bureaucratic inertia, indifference, apathy, corruption and, in some cases, outright sabotage. In frustration, Muhoozi has promised to take over the procurement and construction of roads. It is possible that people in KCCA and at the ministry of works, long used to Museveni’s politics of tolerance and compromise, think that Muhoozi is not serious. But like Among, they are going to be shocked by his intervention, and many are going to find themselves in jail.
One area that needs urgent change is the Ministry of Works and Transport. Muhoozi has expressed his frustration with the mess at Uganda Airlines, which has been solved by appointing an experienced CEO. Then he has promised to take over all procurement for roads. The people at the ministry slowing down work, obstructing presidential directives, etc. should take notice. And there is the issue of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) given to a Turkish company at exorbitant costs whose contract he has said he will cancel. These frustrations are going to lead to yet another showdown at KCCA and the Ministry of Works if officials there don’t style up.
Muhoozi has cleaned the ministry of defense and in two years, began and completed projects that had been in the process for donkey’s years. He has insisted the ministry be result-orientated and wants accountability for results, not accountability for procedures. Procedures are important. But they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. If adherence to procedures is used to delay or obstruct the delivery of public goods and services to Ugandans, that will not be accepted in the new political dispensation being born before our eyes. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
