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Uganda: NRM Party Ideology is a Mixed Grill
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The Monitor (Kampala)
COLUMN
17 May 2008
Posted to the web 16 May 2008
Margaret Wokuri
By describing NRM as a mass and cadre party in his article "So Which Political Party Would You Join" (Daily Monitor, May 9), Mr Kalinge Nnyago was only being polite. I would neither describe NRM as a mass nor a cadre party.
While it has been argued that strict ideological principles have of late been abandoned due to diversity in liberal views, there are benchmarks we can still base on to classify a party's inclination.
So by categorising NRM as a mass party Nnyago assumes it has some bit of principle where there is a deliberate effort in inspiring the masses through policy processes such as public ownership of property, full employment and social welfare which describe mass parties.
However, what we see in NRM is pure liberalism that was even abandoned by those who started the liberal policy for it was realised that even with liberalisation there is need for state control of certain things to safeguard people from excessive exploitation.
The NRM government recently went out public to say it will not fix prices in the wake of escalating costs of food. It has deliberately left its citizens at the exploitative hand of the sham investors, the market fights and UTODA ransom strikes are an indication of the lack of policy on markets and transport in the country.
The best description for the NRM party therefore is that it is a representative party that only reacts to public opinion rather than setting the agenda.
The reason for this choice is because the party's first priority is to win votes and retain power. For this reason, the president has gone on turning sub-counties into districts, giving cash handouts to private individuals and making unrealistic and unmanageable pledges.
Things are always addressed as they come; it is no wonder that for a government that has been in power for the last 22 years, it had to wait until the people of eastern Uganda were swept away by floods in order to write a disaster preparedness policy!
The other categorisation we can make of the NRM party is that it is still very revolutionary in nature. While Ugandan citizens wasted time writing the 1995 Constitution, the NRM has refused to transform itself into a constitutional party.
A constitutional party is one that respects the rights of other parties, makes a distinction between itself and the state, respects state institutions like the judiciary and legislature.
We don't have to look very far to see that many times the NRM government has gone overboard-- the raid on courts by the Black Mambas. It has often bullied the legislature into taking its positions.
Finally while cadre parties are said to be dictatorial, the beauty is that they rely on a politically active elite who give direction to the masses as was the case of the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution.
But NRM cannot be a cadre party either. If it were, we would expect better explanations of the current rising food prices from the party's intellectual class.
We would have no policy contradictions on poverty eradication where you have the government encouraging people to form SACCOS but at the same time proposing poverty eradication through discriminative 'cash bonanzas' to selected people as has been suggested. So where is the elite that is in charge of NRM's policy direction to warrant its description as a cadre party?
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All that we hear are orchestrated manoeuvres as everyone seems to be competing for attention of the "only visionary person" in the party. The incessant cries of Prof. Bukenya and now Dr Otaala about the mafia in the government are just a few examples.
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