The exercise of power when disempowered

EXERCISING PEOPLES' POWER

The Chameleon are a distinctive and highly specialized clade of old lizards. All the species of this animal survive the harshness of wilderness by camouflage. Naturally, the newer species are even better at surviving than older species. In real social life, the chameleon lifestyle of changing colours is associated with being volatile, deceitful, exploitative, and untrustworthy.

Unfortunately, these are also the traits that characterise the operators of our contemporary society.

The contest for NRM chairmanship and subsequent President of this country has revealed to us many interesting facts. If Ugandans have never learned from the perils of leadership that is built on personality cult, then this is the time to examine this phenomenon. Personality cults absorbs power from the people and concentrates it in the hands of the tyranny and its agencies.

NRM is in many aspects like UPC. Both Parties have led and dominated the politics and leadership of this country with glaring tragedies. It is even accurate to state that the leadership and tricks of the current regime were hatched and bred in the old UPC. Perhaps, this explains why the current leaders have perfected the art of survival, important facets of politics that UPC took for granted.

The truth is, just as UPC under President Milton Obote was cold to internal democracy; NRMO, under President Museveni, is simply averse to the idea. It is certain that no one would have guessed when Dr Obote would have voluntarily vacated the Presidency had he not gotten torpedoed by coups. Evidently, Obote died as Party President, like Kamuzu Banda and Mobutu Sese Seko. Likewise, no one can predict when Museveni will leave power voluntarily.

It is the stasis, rather than the lack of democracy, that irritates the people. NRM cannot claim to champion democracy to the public when they are starved of it internally. In life, you only give what you have, not what you don't have. Not that President Museveni has not performed. He has. However, he has become the problem for which he was a solution about 30 years ago.

President Museveni is a victim of his heroism and cult power.

Having dominated the minds and controlled spaces of his contemporaries, President Museveni sees himself as a person of high superiority, while everyone else around him is inferior. And it is apparent that Museveni's loyalists do suffer from inferiority complex which has led to pervasive learned helplessness.

The existence of such a society signifies the devastating impact of patronage and repression. It inspires learned self-helplessness where everyone becomes unsure of themselves, or their abilities to make decision and to act, without depending on the goodwill of their cult leader. The longer the situation persists, the more we start to see the effect of individual learned helplessness taking a toll on public institutions; Corruption, paranoia, incompetence, low self-esteem and lacklustre mannerism that are compensated by aggression, arrogance, violence, and fatalities.

Ugandans are not thieves, or that they appear bogus when compared with their neighbors by chance. It is because their daily narratives of subjugation have seeped across and dominated their psyche to render them feeble. And yet, when extracted from that environment, Ugandans become the opposite of what they are under the tyranny. They become able leaders, competent, assertive, articulate, zealous and above all, enthusiastic about everything in life, including personal, interpersonal and professional life.

The future of Ugandans is in moving them forward. The establishment drags them through the horrors of the past to subvert a change process. This allows an interpretation of change in governance as something possible only by brute force or coups.

Further, the collective ability to initiate change while rejecting coercion are a concrete evidence to demonstrate the true exercise of power as proscribed in the 1995 Constitution. Without the orgasmic experience of change, the extent of the exercise of people's power, its benefits to society, and to human liberties, will remain unknown.

END