FAMILY RULE
The Independent news magazine of March 11, 2009 revealed how President Museveni has conspicuous involved his family, relatives and acquaintances in exploiting Uganda. Ever since this article, “Family Rule in Uganda” was published, there has been limited audit of the progress, expansion and legitimization of this family rule in Uganda. In essence, the 2009 list may require revision since individuals like the President’s brother; Gen Saleh has long relinquished his portfolio in cabinet. Other activists have since attempted to expand this list of the Museveni family influences into the army, police and other facets of civil service.
Recently, the London (UK) based veteran Journalist, Dr. Vincent Magombe reignited this debate of family rule in Uganda in an article which featured in both The London Evening Post and Black Star News of New York, titled: “How Museveni is Turning Uganda into Personal Business” and “How the Country Named Uganda became Museveni Family Incorporated” respectively.
The merit of this debate is not merely to haunt the First family or their established influences in politics, economy and in social life. Since some of them have become Ugandan citizens by marriage or birth, their constitutional rights to freely and fairly explore these realms of society are entrenched in the 1995 NRM constitution as amended. However, the centre of contention arises when conflict of interest, political patronage and sectarianism underlie these influences.
Family rule in Africa and elsewhere is nothing new. In Uganda, it only confirms an increasing bureaucratic form of capitalism which is being used to buttress false nobility. This trend is worrying because of the exploitative nature of this influence and the creation of unequal society insulated underneath a wealthy aristocracy. Pundits have argued that, like all other African leaders, past and current, the entrenchment of family rule in a country enables the ruling president personalize the state; monopolize the economy and its politics, thereby securing a lease for life presidency.
Evidently, Uganda is a classical case of a bureaucratic capitalist state, where state operators – most of whom are related to the president; openly use their political power to also dominate all the facets of the economy. For instance, members of the President’s family are entrenched in many private businesses, such as managing Uganda air services and major airport like Entebbe; some own security agencies, transportation franchises, beverages manufacturing, oil, mining and mineral exports, telecommunication, banking, military hardware, agriculture and so forth.
Maurice Jerome Meisner (RIP), a Sinologist, studied this concept of bureaucratic capitalism in China and wrote a book: “The Deng Xiaoping Era – An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism 1978-1994”. According to Meisner, Bureaucratic Capitalism is used to refer to the use of political power for private pecuniary gain through capitalistic or quasi-capitalist methods of economic activity.
In his study of Chinese quasi-capitalist success story, Meisner discovered prevalence of a traumatic underside to the quasi-capitalistic model of the Chinese economy as characterized by considerable economic inequality, wide gap in wealth distribution between rural and urban workers, a rise in crime and unemployment, rampant job insecurity and poor social benefits. Meisner concluded that such incongruous economic progress and social deterioration are not only common in capitalist societies, but is also very specific to the traits of bureaucratic capitalist practices in Communist China from the Deng Xiaoping era to 1994.
Reasoning from a Marxist lens, Meisner argued that people cannot avoid the painful vicissitudes of Capitalism because of its exploitative nature. Here and there, the regime’s centric bureaucrats will, at liberty, misrepresent the strength of the economy so that the exploited people begin to feel a pervasive sense of improved economic conditions. At the bottom of it all, the exploiters are intent at extracting from the repressed masses to keep them impoverished, needy and dependent on that very class that control both the economy and the polity.
Au Loong Yu, the author of “China’s Rise: Strength and Stability” who claimed that China has become the industrial complex of the world, observed that Chinese bureaucratic capitalism enables bureaucrats at all levels of government to run companies, profit from them and are rarely prosecuted. This is because the bureaucracy has completely monopolised state power, thereby enabling the bureaucrats to rise above all classes. In such a case, one could even say that the bureaucracy has privatized the state.
For Uganda, the analysts cited above aver that the bureaucrats and key players in private sector are intricately linked to the ruling family, either directly or otherwise, through political patronage. Given their principal location at major joints of the economy and political structure, they determine which private sector player stays afloat or is suffocated, purely using political yardstick. This is how they monopolize the economy, the military and subsequently hold on to political power that they will bequeath to their offspring as if it were a birth right.
In other-words, with the politics and economy safely secured and guaranteed, the militarized regime can now amend the constitution of Uganda to provide for an article which reads: There shall be a President of Uganda and that President shall be Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and bloodline.
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