Uganda Elites are Sympathetic NRM Cadres

POWERLESSNESS

The impact of sustaining the NRM regime on tax payer’s money has come to bear down on national morale across the civil service. In every work place, there is bickering about low pay, poor working condition, inadequate income, and arrogant political appointees who disrupting professionalism and so forth. The state, by appointing political stooges into civil service, has also diminished the level of professionalism and morale.

The root of this problem can be traced back to the 1990s and earlier times when the NRM ferried students and public servants to Kyankwanzi for politicization and indoctrination. Here, prospective government employees were groomed through the rigors of revolutionary intellectualism and a cocktail of Marxism. Participants were given vague pictures of a rather complex, colorful, hopeful, peaceful, prosperous and equal society which would be cured of sectarianism, obscurantism and chauvinism.

Ultimately, words have meanings, and words usually leave lasting impression on the minds of those with faith. As such, Uganda was a country of devoted religious people who had faith in various systems. Ugandans in the 90s were a vulnerable people who had just emerged from turmoil and ready to embrace a new beginning. For once, the ideology of the NRM was assuring and appealing to a common conscience. The 1990s was also a decade in which Ugandans were able to reinvent their efforts meaningfully towards discovering the essence of being in Uganda – as Ugandans as such.

Today, the experiences of the 1990s are inverted after every promise was reneged on; every progress reversed and every collective gain, usurped by the despots. The common dreams that were nurtured for posterity have been squandered. The regime that everyone proudly identified with has retracted, transforming itself into predatory a system that is exploitative and prejudiced. This has rendered members of the civil service helpless and ideologically disoriented

The opposition groups view the elites and those in the civil service with much scorn. This may account for their conscious redundancy in pushing for political change in Uganda. A general consensus is that a change of regime is inevitable as precursor to improving the social conditions of the working poor. On the one hand, the opposition frustration is genuine because every sane person now feels the utmost urgency and necessity for regime change. However, a thorough analysis of this behavior of the elite ought to be unpacked systematically if the opposition groups wishes to espouse them.

Dr Kiiza Besigye, a leading opposition activist once described the elites of Uganda as selfish, opportunistic and self-serving groups that collude with the military to perpetuate President Museveni’s grip on power. Some quarters have dismissed the elite as never becoming a critical mass because of the persistent duality of elite-cum-peasantry that pervades them. A critical mass is adopters of innovation in a social system - a necessary requisite threshold for change to occur. There are those who recognize that the elites have conspicuously absconded from shaping socio-political landscape, thereby relinquishing politics and intellectual discourses to vandals.

This article argues that the remarkable absence of the elites and members of the public service from public discourses is rooted in the traditions of cadreship of the 90s. These groups have been bred to identify with the regime; to provide the ground substance on which the regime is firmly supplanted in Uganda. This attitude manifests in the rather timid approaches taken by the various Unions that represent professionals in civil service. There is this aura of guilt and betrayal between each of them whenever the need to demand for improved working conditions arises. They show the kind of guilt a prodigal son endures when demanding for his fair share from family fortunes. The teachers Union or market vendors will not join the picket line when the Health Workers’ Union is agitated and vice versa - It is this rather false sense of matrimonial loyalty to NRM as cadres which also compels these groups to subvert the forces of change for themselves.

However, a fault line is beginning to emerge, which confirms that a scintilla of change in attitude is beginning to take shape with the elites. This is largely because the civil servants and some elites are becoming conscious of the distinction in their adverse social conditions under the NRM regime. They are now and then confronted with breakages in the distribution of public goods which would otherwise benefit the public. 

It is also important to note that because of the numerous political posturings, the regime has made it obvious that the civil workforce is disposable. President Museveni threatened to fire all the striking teachers so that young, inexperienced, untrained jobless youths could take over the teaching jobs. It is this same attitude which ensures that inept, inexperienced political cadres are appointed ahead of career professionals to mess up with professional traditions.

However, the fact that teachers and health professionals can take industrial action illustrates a stride toward gaining higher self-consciousness. The just concluded teachers’ strike is a confirmation of how the regime continues to undermine formal institutions which employ the bulk of its cadres. 

The government is now conspiring with informal groups which also operate the informal economy, such as the boda bodas, illegal traders and the crooked middle class that evade taxes. These are the groups that have curved a symbiotic relationship with the state at the expense of those operating the formal institutions. This also explains why public utilities have endured depravity, while private investments in the same industries are thriving.

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