The NRM that Could Have Been

*It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long it catches mice.
--Deng Xiaoping

*The rabbi of Lublin said: “I love a wicked man who knows he is wicked more than a righteous man who knows he is righteous. But concerning the wicked who consider themselves righteous, it said: ‘They do not turn even on the threshold of hell.’”
--From Tales of Hasidim: Early Masters

*If we had ministers sporting French suits and gold watches, and squalid slums up against garish mansions, we would have another revolution in twenty-four hours.
--Chinese official (on Africa) to Robert Calderisi, a former World Bank official
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TimothyKalyegira was an earnest Sunday Monitor columnist who was quite controversial as he delved in an amalgam of sorcery, witchcraft and magic for his sources. At one time he ruffled my feathers when he made a reckless statement that some young Acoli men were filtering into Kenya to fight alongside their Luo brethrens in the 2008 Kenya post-election debacle. This kind of irresponsible reporting could have jeopardized the lives of many I know who were resident in Kenya or who might have been visiting.

When Mr. Kalyegira, who was sponsored by a local mysterious millionaire, returned from the Beijing Olympics, it was as if he was possessed by the glitter he witnessed in China. Impressionable as he was, we were to suffer weekly barrage of China having already effectively surpassed the US and its western cousins. Many probably did not take him seriously because of his historical hyperbolic embellishments. Soon after, his column disappeared—probably courtesy of directives “from high above.”

The fact of the matter is China has made a quantum leap in the last twenty plus years under the aegis of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a Marxist outfit gone capitalist without the yoke of so-called freedom the west preens itself about. In about the same period Uganda’s National Resistance Number (NRM), a similarly Marxist gangster by virtue of its impatience with opposition and criticism, assumed and consolidated power. The question then is: why has the CCP achieved much and continues to evolve, while the NRM is on a downward slide and on the verge of imploding with nothing to show for it but corruptions and haphazard development?

Let us give it to the Chinese for having been prepared with a history that spans four thousand years, and influenced by such masters as Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius) and Lao Tzu, let alone the elegant Zen Buddhism. It is a relatively homogenous and well-disciplined society. Culture matters in development. If you don’t viscerally know who you are, how can you know where you are going clearly? Granted, however, the NRM simply did not practice what it preached. Since Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of the new China the CCP has had three presidents. The NRM has had one—one Museveni who increasingly has become the definition of the NRM. The CCP is evolving, even as we speak, what it calls vertical democracy, which is a top-down-bottom-up communication channels. Increasingly policies are tested regionally before floating it nationally as the kinks are ironed out.

The NRM is practically a top-down gang outfit. The mushrooming number of districts and the LC system is sham decentralization for a top-down control at the grassroots. Widows may wail and are handed cash-stashed brown envelops in the perpetual campaign tours. A region may threaten votes to blackmail for paved roads. But that is as far as the down-up functions in Museveni’s fiefdom.

The essence of vertical democracy would have been a natural for many Uganda societies. While many of the major players have histories of feudal top-down kingdom model, there is no reason why, equipped with the goodwill, the gun and the smarts it had, the NRM could not have persuaded these remnants of ancient legacies. But, it was not to be: the desire to be a feudal King was part of Museveni’s DNA, hence the oft-quoted self-declaration of King of Kings.

The umbrella government and the individual merit regime seemed quite elegant and appealing, but it fell short of its logical conclusions. It was a half-hearted tact to buy time and consolidate personal power. Soon people who were lulled into sleep woke up hog-tied with little political space. Hence, the chorus for multiparty democracy, which the west meekly encouraged with the slick cunning caveat that it is for Ugandans to decide, when they could as easily have pulled the plug of aid that props the regime.

No one in Africa wants multi-party democracy for its own sake or for just aping the west the way we do in many ways. China, despite some shortcomings, is showing that there is an alternative functional model which could have been the NRM legacy but for greed and egos of the architects.