Walk-to-Work protest has been justified by Occupy Wall Street

PEOPLE'S POWER

The current Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations in US cities and the demonstrations in Greece are two incidences that have justified and legitimized the Walk-to-Wok protest by members in the opposition to Uganda’s tyranny.

The W2W demonstrators have long pointed out the disparities in wealth distribution in Uganda between the regime’s cronies and the many wretched Ugandans who are living marginal and precarious lives.

Ugandans are enduring sky high food prices, a degraded environment characterized by catastrophe, a diminishing forest cover, lowered water levels, poor health care system, chronic power outages, high tariffs, chronically corrupt government and failed institution, sporadic incidences of insecurity to the person and to property, rampant land grabs by the powerful, nepotism and sectarianism in all branches of government. Further, the unease is made worse by increasing brutality exacted on the population by the largely sectarian and high handed military police.

All these trappings have pointed to the state’s abuse of its power, a sign that the current democracy in Uganda is a fragile arrangement that can no longer predicate equity in the utilization of public space for just distribution of public goods. In Uganda, the so-called rich are intricately connected to the power base that forms the Center/Core upon which they choreograph and execute the plundering of our country.

The emerging pattern is that the incumbent regime has found difficulties establishing its authority without brutality. Through repression, it has managed to establish legitimacy as the formal authority over the largely impoverished Ugandans. The fact of the matter is that those who are at the center have diminished in influence due to many years of abuse of power. They have cultivated a state that is opportunistic and agents who are rogued. In that essence, the power brokers are viewed as predators that form the bulk of the “Greedy” that OWS/W2W now targets.

To the contrary, because of the greed exhibited by the corrupted regime’s elite and the pseudo middle class borne out of political patronage, those at the periphery have increased in volume. There are more disparate and helpless Ugandans today than a decade ago. The number of people that have suffered from reversal of faith in the future under the NRM that the prospects of the 90s had ushered has almost tripled in the last decade alone. There are more poor Ugandans on the streets, some made homeless through the systematic policies of land grab. Many, so ill and burned out from treacheries of life that they prefer to perish in agony instead of confronting the dilapidated health care system. Noam Chomsky, a renowned American scholar described many of these hapless souls as precariats - those persisting precariously at the peripheries of society.

This is where W2W became a legitimate voice for, and a political response to the plight of those living precariously at the periphery of our society today. I hypothesize that the richest 2% adults owns and controls more than half the wealth in this country, and that, the so-called wealthy people are linked directly to the center through militaristic modes of patronage. This factor alone deprives the so-called middle class that feeds off the corrupt center, of any legitimacy.

Strange things happen in Uganda which reaffirms the pitiful level of our consciousness. The understanding of demonstration has been spewed out of tangent. When Taxi/Bus drivers; teachers or doctors and merchants/entrepreneurs demonstrate, they are treated with the same measure of awe that is exacted on the political agencies. Surprisingly, when the politicians demonstrate, the other groups abscond and vice versa and yet they are all seeking for same objective – fair conditions upon which national resources, including wealth and burdens of the state should be distributed.

The dilemma is, unlike in America, Uganda’s precariats are uninformed elites who are subdued by post-colonial forms of loyalties to the state.  This is the mindset that buttress patronage, rights violations and corruption. Corruption then becomes the means paired alongside brutality for ascertaining legitimacy of authority over those at the periphery.

I contend that all Ugandans should join W2W protest through which the greed of the center can be challenged peacefully by the precariats. These actions are legitimate and constitutional rights enumerated in Ch. 3(29)(1)(a)-(e) and others, in the Uganda 1998 amended Constitution.

END.