Ugandans need deliberate reflections and reflexivity

THOUGHTFULNESS

A friend and I indulged in a reflective practice recently and concurred that, occasional self-reflection and reflexivity have the power to replenish our “reality” and relations as we glow in our primes. By reflection and reflexivity, we mean giving a serious thought to one’s values, beliefs, acquaintances, and interests; and how these shape their reality as well as defines their relations. 

We recognized that our lives seem to happen on the fast lane, forcing us to park certain critical aspects of it into our past. Life drives us from one phase to the next as active passengers but never fully in control of its steering. Reflection and reflexivity allows us to at least, be aware of the direction life is swinging us to.

In the pursuit of life, we suppress experiences, missed potentials, or near-misses. At some phases, historical contentions remain unresolved and thus, we get fixated. We may pretend that we are over the unresolved past, in reality we expend energy in suppressing them. Then we speculate and rationalize our fate as luck – bad or good, depending on success or failures.

Yet, for every human failures or success, one can trace the genesis to their individual history. Only your history reveals the point at which you deviated from, or converged with your current predicament.  As such, some of these contentions could somehow get resolved through reflection and reflexivity.

We also grapple with the mystery of life and death. As we live, we become accustomed with news of demise of your contemporaries.  Upon hearing such, you shudder with shock for a bit and then you let go. Such news inevitably evokes past memories – history. Nonetheless, it affirms that you have aged and alive.

Our truths lay claim that life and death are a continuum - an endless rope tied on your waist at birth connects you to death. That obscure rope is history - your history. No matter where you go, you could never disconnect with that life-rope.

After all, one begins to die upon conception. Time covers the distance between one’s birth and death. The rest of our earthly activities are only necessary conditions for that transition.

A reflection when combined with reflexivity helps us a lot, in conjuring up our subjectivity, allowing us to remain conscious of how much time we have at hand, and how to expend it. This conscious work of reflection and reflexivity make our sojourn and transcendence through life, memorable and meaningful. For, we cannot separate our past from our present.

At a Kampala restaurant, I met up with old school friends. An awkward encounter ensues as we all became depersonalized. To me, the more we self-actualize, the more we unveil our specificity. The purification process involves the pruning of one’s rough edges to discern them from the common societal values.

Everyone develops specific traits essential to sustenance of their new becoming. In the process, we endure subtle conflicts with societal values and traditions, given our own emergent values. Many end up living half-lives, trying to find a balance between the two.

At the behest, the common societal values vanishes, and are re-enacted within the new trades identities upon which our self-actualization materializes, and with the actualized self. The lesser values one shared with society, the more one appears triumphant in this aegis of neoliberalism beast.

So, in a typical reunion with childhood friends, you are confronted by displaced persons. Immediately after exchanging pleasantries, you are introduced to a lawyer, journalist, doctor, accountant, director, manager, and so forth. Big titles. Fond names and memories of the past are now distanced from the person you eagerly awaited to re-unite with. People have become work places and work places have become people.  Elsewhere, materials define people, and people are defined by materials. Why do we interface with someone’s workplace and their material possessions simultaneously during a simple private social gathering?

The End.

Uganda: A state of Censor

 State Censorship

There is an old adage that when you offer a handshake to a leper, expect a hug in subsequent encounters. This adage seems to prevail in Uganda with state censorship in our ordinary lives. The state has appropriated our inherent rights as enshrined in chapter 4 of the 1995 Uganda constitution (as amended). Our freedoms of free speech, association and, liberty are probably the most censored in the entire continent.

It is becoming harder not to infatuate with the idea that Uganda is not a full dictatorship or a neo-fascist state. Personally, I see a bleak future where Ugandans wear shackles at every aspect of their limbs and duck tapes over their mouths as this regime reinvents itself for the worse.

The plight of maverick Dr. Nyanzi of thirty-three days in a maximum prison on accusation of her social media communication is a signal. The crime (sub judice), is related to her exercise of creative speech.

The numerous attempts to obliterate the mysterious social media figure - Tom Voltaire Okwalinga accentuates Police budget. Suspected Okwalinga’s have been arbitrarily arrested and jailed. The story of Shaka, aka Maverick Blutaski conjures a memory of the intents of the state to shut us up. Incidentally, as they close one communication channel, modern communications technology keeps creating others.

Certainly, the Police spend much of its time and resources in containing public free space. That is the irony. When you have an educated population, you should expect value clash and critics when performances are below par.

Unfortunately, the state censorship and surveillance has peaked levels that prevail under totalitarian regimes. Soon, they will fly their supersonic jets and helicopters over your villages to distribute pamphlets with scripts of what to say in your daily conversations.  Their morbid desire is to police Ugandans until they develop a common language of the subdued.

Some Ugandans condemn Dr. Nyanzi, TVO, or Shaka, subjects of witch-hunt by state functionaries. However, it is our free speech and intellectual freedom that this state is after.

Even if these critics’ writings or public utterances irritate the regime, or were somehow wrong, morally objectionable, and are indifferent to the emperors, should we just destroy them or shut them up? These people convey relevant issues that concern our expectations from our government, and we should listen, attentively.

Few days ago, a letter threatening to suspend the trade license of NBS TV, dated May 11, 2017 and referenced LA/181/39 was issued by Uganda Communications Corporation, the state agency that censures our public and private dialogues, and regulates the media. Apparently, the UCC was “appalled, concerned…and took exceptions to strong language and conduct of a guest” on NBS televised show. This action demonstrates the boundless state ascendancy over our free speech.

You can imagine how much caution any Ugandan or business must exercise to survive a harsh confrontation with state apparatus. This hypersensitivity and high-handed censorship are detrimental to intellectual development and a threat to foreign investments.

Moreover, such excessive state intrusions into private spaces drive Ugandans away from active public life into self-exile within the diminishing personal spaces. Excessive censorship drives progressive views underground and engenders resistance. For instance, there is a phone tapping law whose victims are random, and then the Public Order Management law where the Inspector General of Police is the absolute authority over our rights to associate, assemble and free speech.

This state affair needs a rebuttal. We must resist excessive state censorship and halt the usurpation of our inherent freedoms. The mechanism of control begins with destruction of our social bonds, creating isolated individuals. Once isolated, no matter how legitimate your causes are, the state’s strong arms crashes your will and duck-tapes you infinitum.

The right of free speech, the freedom to assemble and associate are the fundamentals of intellectual development. When you shut those avenues down, you brood a nation of near imbeciles who are too easy to dominate.

When we concede to tyranny by passively relinquishing one or two inalienable rights, we slowly and surely forfeit all.

End.

Labour Day should make sense to workers and living conditions

LABOUR

Ugandans spend Labour Day unconsciously as simply another public holiday. Labour Day has a long treacherous history whose commemoration requires deeper and purposive reflections on labour. The debate on labour has spanned generations, and yet no one ever explains the relations of labour to capital like Marx and Engels ever did. These analyses allow us time to place appropriate value on our everyday struggle for work, income, and a better living, as humans. Irrespective of your qualification, political connections, or ethnicity, we should use Labour Day to evaluate the changing meaning of labour in this era.

To Marx, Labour, is a commodity in the market. He averred that capitalism separates the person from his labour, and allows the person to sell his or her labor in the open market to a bidder. In the capitalist organization of labour, man is alienated from the product of his own labour – that is, through differentiation and specialization, either one is hired to make parts of a whole with no idea of the whole, or are paid very little that they hardly afford the product of their labour (simplified).

With the hegemony of neoliberalism, many anti-statist policies such as restructuring and deregulation have created havens for exploitative corporatists in the private sector that bring impress upon us a lifestyle transitions and diseases. The state has retracted from its public obligations - in funding social services provision, while maintaining some juridical powers. Unlike in the past where government was the main employer, in the aegis of neoliberalism, it has relegated these roles to corporations/private sector.

Uganda is a captive of neoliberal policies allowing for limited jobs in government, which are tightly controlled and distributed on sectarian basis. The bureaucracy, political patronage, and corruption conspire to sabotage rapid growth in the private sector to absorb the abundant labour.

The Museveni regime adopted structural adjustment program in the early 1990s and have since created an economy in which the state, and not government, maintains partial control over certain sectors – such as banking, education, health, while allowing greater role for private investors in every aspects of life. Unfortunately, the over dependence on foreign investors have not yielded much to the needs of the ever growing pool of labour. This has led to a huge gap in services (decline in quality of education, and near collapse of healthcare system), and a huge labour pool. 

Recent employment statistics demonstrates over 80% youth unemployment, and over 90% unemployment rates among university and college graduates. Moreover, those employed are likely to be under employment, in precarious employment - part time, occasional employment with no job security, benefits, and/or unsafe and stressful working conditions. Our working conditions have a direct bearing on our living conditions, which inadvertently affects our overall health. Capitalism produces mental health crises in its zeal for expropriating profits wherever it is entrenched.

In its response to the sluggish private sector growth, the Ugandan state has shifted its employment policy from contracting social service providers to lavishing politics. The wage bill for elected and appointed politicians surpasses the state investment in career public servants. This should worry the left leaning labour unionists.

The relation of labour to freedom is in the control over land. Ugandans are losing their land and control over productivity, even for subsistence. When the regime expropriates all the land from the people, then everybody will start to rent land they once owned for a fixed period as proposed in Buganda recently. If you have no income to service your tenancy, you are rendered homeless – dehumanized. Without ownership of land, everyone becomes a tenant. That is the essence of powerlessness and loss of freedom. The way this economy is organized and operationalized will appropriate your land and place it in the hands of a few landowners.

A Labour Day reflection like this allows for a conscious reflection on the meaning of labour, and a better understanding of the economy and emerging changes in societal structures of power and class. Independent workers Unions should emerge from every profession and field of service besides professional associations. Evidences show that in capitalist societies, a high union density remediates unfair labour expropriation.

The END