Beitrag vom 01.10.2011

The Independent, Uganda

Gravedigger problem: How Museveni's very success is now bringing him down
By Andrew Mwenda

Since April this year, President Yoweri Museveni's government has been under constant pressure. First, his main opponent, Kizza Besigye, led the Walk to Work protests that paralysed Kampala. By using brute force to crack down on protestors, the government helped the campaign generate considerable political momentum.

However, over the months Walk to Work has lost its initial steam and is now barely a crawl. But if Museveni had calculated his political problems would end if Walk to Work lost its bounce, he was dead wrong. Uganda has ever since been in constant crisis.

Walk to Work was followed by a strike by the Uganda Law Society; then women activists with pots and pans joined the fray. After that, it was the traders who closed their shops protesting the depreciating shilling. Then taxi drivers shut down the city, protesting high fuel prices.

As inflation reached a two-decade high at 21 per cent, lecturers at Makerere University went on strike, forcing the government to shut the university down indefinitely. Then teachers across the country went on strike, prompting the government to threaten to fire them all.

Medical workers have threatened to down their tools too, and city vendors in Kampala are threatening their own action. Against this backdrop is a campaign by environmentalists to save Mabira forest, which the president has allocated to a business family to plant sugarcane.

During the 2007 protests over Mabira, Ugandans beat up and even killed a couple of Indians because the president was giving the forest to an Indian business family. To save themselves, Indians are joining the Save Mabira campaign.

For many observers in Uganda and abroad, this continuing crisis, coupled with the inability of the government to do anything to halt what seems like a slide into chaos, is evidence that Museveni has "lost it” and is "out of touch with reality.” The mass media has cast him as an ageing dictator who has failed to lead.

All this is partly true, but only when you look at the superficial aspects of Uganda's reality. However, looking at structural fundamentals, this crisis is evidence of Museveni's success, not failure; the president should be happy with the protestors whom he should embrace rather than being angry at.

Throughout his political career, Museveni has always argued that the problem with "pre-capitalist” societies is that political struggle tends to get polarised along "unprincipled” lines of religion, tribe or even clan. The counterpoint to this, Museveni has always held, is that in capitalist societies, politics is polarised around "principled” issues of an economic nature; wages, prices and public policies.

His stated objective was to transform Ugandan politics from a contest over identity (religion, tribe and clan) into a contest over "real issues” that impact on the lives of people; things like trade policy, fiscal policy, foreign exchange policy etc.

Over the past 23 years, Museveni has presided over a rapidly growing economy and therefore a rapidly transforming society. Economic growth has led to rapid population growth, so the country is suffering from a youth bulge. But it has also led to rapid urbanisation; vibrant economic activity in cities has attracted many youth out of the idleness of the village to seek opportunities in urban centres.

Meanwhile, growth combined with government policy has led to mass education as student enrolment in private and public schools is at an all time high.
Education and urbanisation are liberating forces; they expose people to the mass media and through it to the outside world. This exposure produces high aspirations and expectations. So they begin to demand more.

The problem is that all too often, the rate at which aspirations and expectations grow is faster than the rate at which any economy is able to produce opportunities to meet them. This mismatch between the production of aspiration and opportunities leads to social frustration.

Here is the irony that confronts most successful and transformative leaders. The people who are frustrated with Museveni are not frustrated because the president has failed but because he has been successful.

They are able to make these demands because of the education and urbanisation that have been produced by his policies. The same people demand more not because Uganda is producing less but because their appetites are growing faster than the country can satisfy them.

Real crisis

Therefore, Museveni's real crisis is not one of failure to sustain economic growth but how to manage an economy that has grown sixfold in 20 years. He is like someone who began a small business that grows into a complex multinational corporation.

The founder may have been successful at managing growth, but the business reaches a level of complexity that exceeds his skills to manage it. It is possible that if Museveni appreciated this aspect of his rule, he would find it more fitting to retire and let those who are more energetic and skilled carry his work to the next level.

Of course, Museveni has been an unmitigated failure at the management of the public sector. So our public schools, hospitals and roads are all but dead or dying, that is, if they are not ghosts already. Public services like education, health and agricultural extension services suffer from chronic incompetence, absenteeism, corruption, foot-dragging and apathy.

Although important, these failures are not fundamental. The new social groups produced by an expanded economy are already organising political action to force the state to improve the work of the public sector.

What I am writing about is political economy, not people's daily life. The youth who has finished university and cannot find a job is not concerned about the opportunities for education that Museveni has created. He is bothered by the indignity and frustration of joblessness. The trader who has thrived largely because Museveni has fostered a liberal trade policy, takes that economic policy environment for granted.

Now he is asking for a stable exchange rate to keep his business profitable. The teacher is interested in better pay, not in the history that teaching jobs have been created and expanded because of Museveni's USE and UPE. Therefore, all these groups, in their perspective, see Museveni as a failure who should be kicked out of power, not a successful leader who should be supported.

Karl Marx expounded this paradox over 150 years ago. He argued that for the bourgeoisie (capitalists) to achieve their project of accumulation, they must of necessity produce a class, the proletariat (workers), whose interests conflict with those of capital.

The more successful capitalists are at accumulation, the more they produce a class of people who are being exploited by capital and therefore angry with it and plotting its downfall. Marx called this "the gravedigger problem.”

One gets the sense that transformative states too tend to create a gravedigger problem. Look at Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Ben Ali of Tunisia early this year. They were by all standards fairly successful leaders in fostering economic change. But it was also the problem that the generals of South Korea, the KMT in Taiwan and General Suharto of Indonesia faced in the early to mid 1990s.

Their policies had fostered industrial growth and with it social transformation. The social forces produced by such structural change formed the army of militants determined to bring them down. Students, industrialists, graduates who could not find jobs, workers, etc, are the new social forces that converged to dig the graves of their creators.

Social change

The problem of most transformative leaders is always the inability to match social change with political reform. Although Museveni has promoted rapid social change, witness the expansion of education and urbanisation, he has not promoted similar reform at the level of political institutions and practice.

Museveni still manages Uganda of 2011 as if it were Uganda of 1990, always organising and mobilising religious, tribal, sub-tribal and even clan groups as the central fulcrum of his politics. He calls such groups to State House for tea and dishes out personalised favours to them in order to retain their support and that of their followers.

Yet Uganda of 2011 has produced new social forces; traders and vendors, bureaucrats and politicians, students and industrialists, youth gangs and youth innovators, unemployed and employed graduates, Twitterati and Facebookers, activists and de-activists, mafias and freemasons, thieves and saints, money making churches and money losing ones, homosexuals and trans-genders; and it has produced the Red Pepper.

All these groups are now competing for space in the new Uganda. The old religious, ethnic and clan groups have not gone away, but they are dying, rapidly becoming a thing of the past, yet Museveni is still stuck with them.

Just look at the selection of his current Cabinet; it is filled with the old guard, men and women long past their 70th birthday. Now, it is always good to have such old people in government - they bring institutional memory and wisdom.

But when they form the most critical advisory group of the government, there will certainly be little room for creativity, innovation and reform. Meanwhile, one hardly sees anyone in the Cabinet and other high state offices who are representatives of the new and emerging social forces that are the future of Uganda.

During his campaigns, Museveni seemed to notice the influence of these new social forces and tried to court them using rap music, post-modern technology and money. Museveni's campaign was superior to all his opponents in the way it used new social media, mobile phones and music to stimulate enthusiasm in his candidacy.

Yet he has not taken advantage of the lesson of his campaign strategy. For immediately after the re-election, he fell back to the old ways of organising government, relying on old and dogged religious and ethnic power brokers to form his government.

Visiting Museveni at State House, Entebbe, or his country home in Rwakitura is reminiscent of a visit to the court of Nyungu Ya Mawe, king of the 19th century Nyamwezi kingdom in modern-day Tanzania. You will encounter delegations of traditional groups representing tribes, sub-tribes, clans, sub-clans, etc, who have come to meet the chief.

They are treated to food and drinks as they sit around for hours waiting to meet the president. Then he comes out and holds a five-hour meeting with them. This may be good to boost their sense of importance, but it is valuable time lost that could better be used to plan and strategise for the industrialisation that Museveni talks about.

The Ugandan president does not seem to realise that the era of personal rule is dead or dying. Uganda is so changed that only institutions can manage our current complexity. Yet Museveni seeks to sustain the old ways in a new Uganda.

Rather than be a bridge to the future, he has remained a bridge to the past. It is the tension between new demands and old practices that is causing constant political crisis. The new social forces produced by Museveni's reforms cannot understand his Nyungu Ya Mawe approach to politics. They see it as archaic.

As a consequence, Museveni has increasingly become a drag on the ability of the country to move to the next state of consolidation. He has stabilised the political dispensation, sustained growth, tamed the army, facilitated the growth of a large and diversified private sector, a large and educated middle class and thereby laid the structural foundations for transformation. Yet his politics has remained unchanged in the face of this structural change, largely pandering to old social forces and unable to bring the new ones to the centre of his politics.

The political crisis in Uganda is therefore a product of the tension between an emerging new society and the prevailing political institutions and practices. If Museveni has successfully modernised Uganda, his biggest failure has been inability to modernise his politics.