Museveni has Killed hopes for liberal democracy

AFRICAN DICTATORSHIP

I read with much consternation that Museveni’s regime suspended the operation of some civil society organizations in Uganda claiming that they have failed to oblige by the CSO standards and laws set by the dictatorship. Among the suspended CSOs is Chapter 4, a legal hub that offers pro-bono legal services to the most wretched of the earth.

Closing CSO is only one act of killing democracy. Not long ago, the last Parliament passed yet another draconian law that illegalizes same-sex relationships.  To mask all these retrogressive laws, Parliament also passed other bogus laws such as jailing, mostly, male sexual offenders for an incredibly harsh term only equivocated by a Taliban lawmaker. In this article, I wish to illuminate how Museveni’s regime has killed democracy and opened a door to a full military dictatorship – or perhaps, post-democracy parlance.

Civil society Organizations are very important in a developing liberal democracy. Civil Society Organizations are understood roughly as that space between the market and the state. It is not part of largely misunderstood political opposition. However, it can be mistaken as one depending on the level of democracy or tolerance of dissent in society.

The proliferation of Civil Society Organizations may demonstrate things – one, that the state is reneging on its duties such that a gap in service exists. Take for instance, CSOs that deal with human rights, or maternal-child mortality prevention shows that these gaps exist. Second, where the market becomes too dominant such that profit-making (high levels of commodification and stratification) trumps over social equity, CSOs may emerge to illuminate such social inequities. There emerges Anti-poverty coalitions, anti-corruption groups, pro-accountability groups etc. Third, in doing the latter two actions, CSO also helps provide employment in a society where a majority of the educated are unemployed or miseducated enough to spend time searching for white-collar jobs.

There are several instances where CSOs have been used and abused. Take, for instance, the fact that foreign interests may wish to inject an alien culture in society to create a consumer market. They make funding available to CSOs to promote that consumer culture. Scholars in this field view CSO as shock absorbers of corporate exploitation when they become recipients of corporate social responsibility activities.  I have previously made attempts to alert the nation that whatever cultural practices that Africans had, the anti-African cultural terrorists pay out people through NGOs to abandon it, only for them to reproduce and commercialize it. Take, for instance, vaginal and body adulterations or decorations. But this discussion is for another article.

The emphasis here is that Mr. Museveni and his minders have lost the cause of liberal democracy by tightening the noose on civil society organizations. Proponents of neoliberalism in Uganda should pay heed because a revolution is inevitable under these circumstances.

At the swearing-in ceremony in 2016, Museveni promised that by 2021, there would be no opposition. When Robert Kyagulanyi’s red-army movement sprung, it took Museveni by surprise because he thought he had succeeded in destroying the opposition. FDC, the strongest and most sober opposition political organization had splintered. Dr. Besigye, its main brand had been isolated using both soft and hard violence. The traditional parties, UPC, CP, and DP had become NRM allies or indulged in internal kitty-cat fights that crippled their effectiveness.

Democracy without an alternative school of thought is called a dictatorship. In the US, we can also say there is a dictatorship in their democracy that is dominated by the Republicans and Democrats. At least, it is a two-party dictatorship. In Uganda, it is a one-party military tyranny characterized by violence, voter bribery, and suppression of human rights as well as the civic space. Seen in another way, both Uganda and the USA are dictatorships. The difference being judicial independence and public participation in the US, while in Uganda, violence, suppression of human rights and liberties predominate.

The implication of closing the CSO space is that alternative spaces for social and political renewal have been quashed. Not long ago, we saw Museveni celebrating how Kyagulanyi and colleagues were brutalized in Arua. In another public appearance, he faked concern over the brutality visited on suspects under UPDF and Police custody. Above all, the bigger statements are seen in the policies of the regime and not the few verbal niceties that numb the mind of its tyranny. The US has demonstrated once again that it is no longer a champion of democracy if it can exploit Africa. No one cares about democracy anymore as everyone is economically strapped in the post-COVID-19 era. Harshly, we must think of a post-democracy world and contend with it!

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How the Museveni's Regime is Committing Social Murder under COVID-19

  

SOCIAL MURDER

When COVID 19 first hit the world, it revealed that many societies had successfully obscured widespread social inequities. Towards the end of 2020 data confronted us from the US and UK that unveiled these outrageous inequities as COVID 19 struck had. COVID 19 made visible a form of embarrassing social inequities. But these were known as deliberate outcomes of public policies that had developed over centuries in capitalist countries.

The morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 among the disadvantaged population demonstrated a need to review the dominant policies that seek the production of health. The poor and less powerless section of the population, mostly people of color, immigrants, the elderly single mothers, and the elderly were the most exposed, contracted, and died from Covid-19.

Such morally objectionable differences between people that we can correct through a democratic and equity-oriented public policy became the defining moment for the developed industrial countries. Even superpowers were helpless in halting and reversing the onslaught of coronavirus.

Social inequities anywhere call for immediate action to address the structural and systemic facets that make them thrive. Specifically, the situation with COVID 19 called attention to the redistribution of social, cultural, economic, and political resources - all of which are determinants of health. It called for less commodification and stratification of society but more of decommodification and destratification. The pandemic response should have been driven by a unified global sense of urgency to save humanity from its indignation, suffering, encountering unnatural deaths, and not to entirely commercialize or profit from it!

The causes of social inequities in every society have their historical, structural, material, and power relations. Power and governance are key determinants of social inequities, especially under the neoliberalism capture.  How power is distributed determines which group gains or loses societal privileges to better services and/or social and economic resources to live a healthier life.

Those without power are deprived of the material conditions to live a fulfilling life in the same society, thereby creating a two-tiered nation – of the poor majority and a rich few. In Uganda, we saw how some people reaped big from the streams of COVID-19 prevention monies lavished to Uganda.

When Rudolf Virchow introduced the concept of social medicine in 1848 in his report entitled: "The report on the typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia", he had studied the developments in Upper Silesia that led to a frequent typhus epidemic and concluded that the people there were suffering because they lacked education, liberty, and democracy. Those people lacked civic engagement and decision-making power and were quite impoverished. Virchow recommended that the treatment of the typhus epidemic was not pharmaco-medicine, rather a "full and unlimited democracy".

It follows since then that there is a causal link between oppression on people with the overall standards of health of the oppressed. People who lack political or civil rights tend to be at a high risk of getting sick and dying young. This observation, which is beyond the scope of this article, has been an obsession of many social epidemiologists for decades.

In Uganda, the history and patterns of oppression are easily traced to how power is appropriated and maintained violently within a tribal cabal. Every post-colonial regime that ascended to power - except for Idi Amin - enacted its constitution as a procedural tool or standards by which to cling to power. Where the constitution is tested and fails, these regimes reverted to the strong arms of colonial laws to perpetuate oppression. The constitution has not served Ugandans beyond a regime. As such, there is no guarantee that subsequent grabbers of power will not oppress and exploit Ugandans.

The current regime's oppression is characteristically corrupted and violent. It is driving the young Ugandan population into various vulnerabilities leading to an early and unnatural death. Most are resigning too soon to fate while the desire to flee Uganda has peaked. Sizeable others are disinterested in matters of governance or accountability owing to the politicization of everyday social spaces complemented by crude violence – torture, deforming, humiliation, and death.

The monopoly of power has transformed this Museveni regime into the most reliable source of morbidity and mortality outside tropical diseases, epidemics, and pandemics. The regime kills Ugandans even more than the natural calamities such as landslides and El Nino rains.  

Someone may ask, how so?

I believe Friederich Engel referred to such unconscionable conduct of the regime in which the masses are led to die maliciously through deliberate policy decisions, as social murder.

Covid-19 has demonstrated that Uganda's health care system is far from its potential to contain a pandemic. Understandably, the colonialist and subsequent post-colonial governments did not design the healthcare system to handle pandemics. Rather, healthcare was part of the colonial social policy package designed to incentivize participants in the colonial rule and economy.

Subsequent post-colonial regimes maintained a healthcare system that would respond to the health needs of all Ugandans in line with the WHO 1946 constitution. The current regime has for decades, embarked on undermining and dismantling it. It prefers the proliferation of a predatory private health sector most accessible by regime loyalists in the same fashion as the colonialists’.

The violent repression, occasioned by a state-inspired corruption deprives Ugandans of the opportunity to seek accountability just as the people of Upper Silesia. Inevitably, the state’s neglect of the public healthcare system in Uganda is nothing short of social murder.

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CUT - Unedited

Access to a good healthcare system is not only a common good but a basic human right. This is proscribed in the WHO’s 1946 constitution of which Uganda is a signatory, demands "…the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being." According to the WHO, health as a human right creates a legal obligation on states to ensure access to timely, acceptable, and affordable health care of appropriate quality and allows addressing underlying determinants of health. At the moment majority of Ugandans cannot afford good quality healthcare.

The out-of-pocket costs in the private hospitals have come to bear on household expenditures and it has reached beyond what experts consider calamitous spending levels. Hospital bills averaging Shs 60m from a short stay in a private clinic or hospital, especially when the patient dies, leaves families highly indebted and immediately slides them into abject poverty, misery and early death.

Recently, I read Hon. Betty Nambooze's (Mukono Municipality MP) plea in a situation where a doctor who treated COVID 19 patients himself contracted the virus. Unfortunately, the doctor was rushed to a private hospital where he died after a short stay. The hospital held the corpse hostage pending payments of exorbitant hospital costs that the family, friends, and the clan combined, could not raise among them. The private hospital administrators suggested that the family sell off the deceased man's family house to recover the service costs from which he died. The doctor is only one such example as many people prefer to die from home for a decent burial than indebt their families.

Engel wrote in 1845 that

“…when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by sword or bullet…or forces them, through the strong arms of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues…it is murder!

Covid-19 has demonstrated a need for the government to rethink its policies on strengthening the public healthcare sector. A two-tier well-balanced healthcare system would still work to complement each other. The economic sense of this argument is that a healthy population is a prerequisite for a robust economy.

End.