PEOPLE POWER
In every African family setting, fathers long for the birth
of their able sons - hair apparent. Mothers, on the other hand, seek restlessly
to bear a daughter. Irrespective of the western concepts such as Oedipal and
Electra conflicts studied in human psychology, boy-children will cling onto
their mothers and the girls to their fathers until some point. As they grow and
become socialized to their respective gender roles and responsibilities, the
boy takes after the father and the girl follows the paths of womanhood.
In such settings, every father is proud and protective of his son. A
well-groomed son is a successful son who grows and emerges from the
patronage of the father. A good son is seen with a readiness
to extend the visions of the father while projecting his own. If the father was
a failure, like Onuka, Okonkwo’s father, the boychild would be justified to
deconstruct from such a trait and reconstruct in his own identity to do better
in life than his father; if the girl were the oldest, the mother would pride in
her daughter's protective nature expressed over the care of her siblings.
Life is such a progression. And, in any society, which does
to support progression, perpetuity stalls.
This is the situation unraveling in the Ugandan political
scene. Older and established politicians have done everything within their
might to stall progression. They are holding on to power tightly to dominate
the political scene. Many would rather bequeath power and prestige to their
great-grandchildren and not to their immediate progenies.
The rise of the People Power outfit has challenged this
notion of stalled progression in this patriarchal society. It is making elders
shiver with rage and driven their grand-children in panic. People Power is
threatening the plots of their Fathers from becoming indomitable Chiefs. The
heir- apparent are threatened that their ambitions would end with sniffing the
coffee beans from the spoils of their father's imaginary empire. It is clear
from such mental disturbances that we have an occupation force in Uganda.
The youthful following of People Power is not by coincidence,
rather, it is by the creation of history. They are the products of a regime
that rules society through protracted violence. Such regimes produce sons
without fathers and daughters without mothers. These children become desolate,
unwashed and confined to societal margins, and mostly to the outer periphery.
The problem is that as violence continues and so is the production of such an
excess population.
When you see learned fellows who in their rights are at
liberty to aspire to be leaders stand to dismiss People Power adherents as
lumpens and those who support their causes as insane, you begin to understand
how repression gets internalized by its victims. It is as if being elite cures one the sense
of foreboding.
How does a section of Ugandans, born and raised in Uganda
become dismissed as mere lumpens unworthy of executing even their civic
responsibilities? To answer that question, we need to study the history of
Uganda. Probably, the legacies of wars and incivility in Uganda offers us some
insights.
Without sounding rather a tribalist or sectarian - concepts
used these days to technically suppress the enumeration of unequal ethnic
relations in Uganda, here is my take.
In 1986 when many of us became refugees within our own
countries, ensconced in Kampala, there were Baganda in Kampala, in villages
behind Bukoto flats, in Kanyanya, in Gayaza, Kyambogo, Banda, Bweyogere, etc.
Those were Baganda villages. When refugees and orphans from the countryside
started pouring in the country, the population pressure mounted. As Uganda
became peaceful, many more people fled wars from the countryside and filled
slums of Kampala. The internally displaced persons piled pressure on slum
facilities. But internally displaced were not alone. There were former
government employees, civil servants, with their families who were retrenched
from public service fighting for the same destination. Some of the instant
destitute had worked in various state parastatals whose jobs were liquidated by
foreign investors. They were mostly
forced out of their jobs with little resettlement but without the onset of
their social security payouts. The common destiny for all these people,
including those migrating from rural to urban and from employment to
unemployment merged in Kampala’s slums - Naguru, Nakawa, Kataza, Namwongo,
Luzira, Kitintale, Kamwokya, etc.
Today, those indigenous Baganda we found in Kampala in 1986
are no longer in Kampala, many were pushed out and long retreated to their
burial grounds in Masaka, Wakiso, Mukono, Luwero, Kayunga, Mubende and so
forth. But even there, they found regime minders already have appropriated
their ancestral lands – in large chunks. The little they were left with, some
had to sell to buy second-hand boda boda to sustain their lives. The little
plots of land left were no longer of much value. These people are now squatters
in Buganda, homeless, under-housed and most sleep on their bikes for only a few
hours in the night.
Today, there are more homeless Baganda and severely
under-housed Ugandans in Kampala and nearly in every countryside where land
conflict is raging as the order of the day. Incidentally, there has been a
major shift in the geographies of desperation. As the Baganda and former civils
servants left Kampala, the Batoro and Bakiga replaced those degraded dwellings.
Then recently, with the destabilization of Karamoja, the Karimojongs have
filtered into the City without much skills to survive in the city, except
pitiful begging on the street with their children. They have added to the dirty
profile of Kamapal's streets! We now have the people with money, mostly from
western Uganda, causing inflation in Kampala by buying plots and houses at
exorbitant prices to spend the loot from state coffers.
The country is therefore in its current predicament because
of its ability to produce low class citizens. The government has failed its
citizens and must take responsibility for that. Universal education is
untenable because a robust education system is sustained by a stable community.
If families suffer from any form of insecurity – food, housing, safety,
violence, etc, they are likely to become mobile and the school becomes a
structure without students. This is partly how we have so many unwashed youths
whose futures have been squandered. Families of every configuration in Uganda
is insecure today than never before. The public healthcare has also collapsed
under the weight of corruption, while safe house for torturing those who
complain of the inadequacy of the regime have mushroomed.
I think it was Gen Sejusa who once observed that the social
inequities caused by the private-public sector divide are so profound that the
majority of those who study in public universal schools, would never become
managers even of a small village bank brank. In the last 30 years, youths from
northern Uganda have performed worst in all levels of national exams. This also
reflects on the prospects of jobs that they get and the kind of life that they
live. True to that, most youths from Northern
Uganda have filled the ranks of lowly paid security jobs in urban centers.
Nowhere in the world have we seen such an enthusiastic but fully disempowered youthful population as we see in Uganda.
The rise of People Power is the one thing these
youths are all proud of because that is the congregation of their collective
sentiments – their resentment of patriarchal systems of governance that
undermines their youthfulness, perpetuate social inequalities and above all,
blames the young people for their predicament as if they inflicted it upon
themselves.
There is a large majority of the youthful population all
over the country who feels disenfranchised exactly in the same way. Many have
become conscious of the fact that their future has been squandered, and that
they have no way out except to stake their lives, blood and might to see this
change come to pass. Many, probably do not even understand the difference
between the government and the state. What they know is that they have none of
those entities standing up for them and that they are on their own in a jungle
of the corrupt. To them, the state manifests in a punitive form, arresting them
for being idle and disorderly, stigmatizing and dismissing their existence
through labels such as lumpens, bayaye, rascals and the unwashed of the slum.
Their lives of the youth of Uganda highlight the multiple
layers of injustices in life for which they find themselves juxtaposed,
deprived of their parents and relations upon which to realize their true
potentials through state violence. It is with such gusto that the young people
that you abuse, stigmatize, undermine and dismiss with contempt, shall rise to
become everything you had never expected of them. Whatever the flaws of People
Power there is, it truly is a reflection of the state violence, failures and
the excesses of the power green in all those who chide them.
For me, at least, I believe in their aspirations. People
Power is Our collective Power. #Mission2021
End.
