The Monitor (Kampala)
Morris Komakech
22 January 2007
opinion
Kampala — The few nasty experiences that Ugandans like to narrate are darkness, potholes and poverty. Darkness is caused by load shedding while potholes on our roads are caused by a mixture of reasons such as shoddy construction; poor drainage and maintenance, among many.
Poverty is the permanent tragedy to which Ugandans have been sentenced to by their tormentors - the National Resistance Movement-Organisation (NRM-O) regime. These three factors, namely; darkness, potholes and poverty share a common umbilicus; that they are all tools used by the current regime to maintain control over the population.
Lighting and smooth roads are symbolic of a nation's brighter future and yet when people are deprived of light and given a bumpy road to traverse, their fate becomes summative, that of misery, failure and frustration.
But the Movement regime knows that Ugandans move so fast and in an attempt to slow them down, their movements are regulated by judicious execution of darkness so that they don't see far. The roads are permitted to degenerate with potholes, so they don't move so fast. When tied down by these, cars break down, transportation becomes a nightmare.
Numbing the people
With darkness, the future becomes bleak; the industrialist won't start up his machines; our children cannot do their homework or night preps; our mothers and wives cannot cook dinner, they have to buy charcoal or use stoves to prepare meals for the day; and above all, we are barred from watching or listening to the evening news filled with stories of corruption, murders, mafioso etc.
Reliable transportation becomes the boda boda and wheel barrows. We wake up to rude shocks that our landlords have locked the only available water taps and we have to rush down the valley to fetch water with our jerry-cans. We drink dirty water and get cholera because we have no electricity to boil the water.
Our jerry-cans have moulded inside so badly that every gush of water that spurs out of it contains a dirt scab of some sort. But we know that people's experience of health is more about their experiences of capacity and connectedness than about expression of oppression.
It is the capacity that the NRM-O strives to remove from Ugandans.
There is yet another thing that they do to us deliberately. They deprive us of sugar so as to alter our tastes from sweetness to bitterness.
They sow the seed of discord in families so that we embark on self-hate and fights because daddy or mummy cannot afford sugar. Gone are the days when Dr Apollo Milton Obote (RIP) was lambasted for not having provided adequate amenities to Ugandans.
But at least, Obote's ministers never controlled sugar using ministerial chits and military orders as we see now.
Society divided
To the contrary, these so-called elected leaders, ministers, MPs and environmentalists live in houses with constant flow of electricity, water, steady income and four wheel drives that have the capacity to fly over the potholes.
Their days and lives are not filled with potholes and darkness. Their children do not understand the hassles that our ordinary children go through.
They study at home; have breakfast with sugar; use mineral water to brush their teeth; have access to all text books and computers, they attend the best schools in town and they take the few government sponsorships at public universities (look at the list of schools that dominate MUK intake yearly), on top of the supplement from the statehouse scholarship.
Failed revolution
The NRM story is typical of failed revolutions because visionary people cannot conceive any visions in darkness or when they are ill after being bumped on and off the roads. Revolutions around the world have failed largely due to the fact that they are merely sentimental and quick mobilisation ploy to get the masses to support all sorts of agendas.
Most nations in Africa and Latin America whose leaders claim to be revolutionary tend to suffer the same fate with the population divided under similar patterns; the super rich and very poor strata.
The peak of this failure climaxes when you begin to see more use of brutal force such as Black Mamba, Violent Crime Crack Units, militarised police and battalions of bodyguards for its leaders.
You realise that the leaders now ride in high tech motorcade, equipped with toilet facilities such that they completely alienate themselves from the masses who are purged of their dignity.
"To transform a human being into an efficient, uncostly, and completely subservient slave, you have, as a pre-condition, to completely purge him of his humanity, manhood, and will.
Otherwise, as long as he has some hope of a better, free future, he will never succumb to enslavement. To become an efficient instrument of oppression, you have to radically de-humanise yourself by forgoing many qualities that are normally found in balanced human beings.
You purge yourself of compassion, altruism, consideration of other people's suffering and the capacity to restrain your greed....- " Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, (writing in his dissertation, Dar-es-Salaam University).
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