Evaluate the role of Political Parties in Uganda's democracy

PARTY POLITICS

I read Norbert Mao’s piece titled “Political Parties are key in democracy” in the Daily Monitor of Aug 2, 2020, that reminds us of the relevance of political parties in a pluralist democracy. Mao observes that political parties galvanizing the socio-political spheres in a polity through enforcing a set of core beliefs.

In adjoining this discussion, I emphatically assess that political parties in Uganda have been in abeyance for too long and have collectively lost their shine. Mao presides over the oldest political party in the country – the Democratic Party. His sobering recollection could, therefore, affirm that his own party’s values have faded and hard to recognise. As a seasoned lawyer and politician, Mao has a commanding knowledge and experience in party politics where he is held hostage to a turbulent party environment.  One challenge is that reinventing parties that are subsumed in a chronically repressive environment and yet strives to partake in a sham democracy willingly becomes a major contradiction.

Youths reading Mao’s article becomes doubtful if political parties in Uganda actually adhere to any core values or perform those roles, functions or responsibilities as Mao articulated. When I read the article, I struggled to delineate between Mao’s ideals and parties’ realities in the Ugandan political context.

The youthful Ugandans are acquainted with the abnormalities of parties and not their core values. Uganda has 29 registered political parties. Some are sold like pancakes to the highest bidders. Most are briefcase elements for pomp and defections. Those established and barely functioning parties are themselves war zones - places for quarrels, fights, and protracted tribal wars; or even where to rebrand for meal cards politics. Parties in opposition are known as the nexus of both physical and mental poverty.  There are parties in Uganda that have built reputations as the political uterus in which potential NRM cadres are conceived.

Ugandan Political Parties are treacherous and have become a reservoir of the politics of violent confrontations. The NRM regime has pulled out the gut material from all political parties and organizations rendering them clientele agencies. When Hon. Robert Kyagulanyi bought NUP, some people lamented that the People Power sophistication had ended. This is how people have strayed away from Parties.

Under Museveni, Parties are like bars - enclaves for political hotheads to cool off. Talk about flattening the political pressure curve! Party leaders are mostly listening post for the ruling regime, making it hard to trust any of them.

Mao needed to move beyond validating political parties and reinventing their relevance for future generations. Parties in Uganda have outgrown their usefulness. It is time for movements that are not legally bound to the repressive laws of the regime to take center stage. Parties have left spaces for robust social movements and various non-traditional formations to emerge. Ugandans should take those spaces to liberate the nation from impunity. Parties no longer command such ideological thrust and have alienated the majority of Ugandans from the democratic process. Parties are no longer repositories of trust and preferred engines for social transformation because they have not shown maturity or brought the desired change when all they do is fight for flagbearer position.

In the Ugandan context, no Political Party can survive in a political environment when it has no independent source of well managed and steady revenue. Paid party membership must have significantly declined over the decades.  Parties cannot contribute meaningfully to democracy when they are resource-constrained and operated on a non-democratic non-value basis. Thus, the sad realization about Uganda’s political parties is that they are prone to imperialism and elite class collaborations with foreign donors and exploiters.

End.