Kampala — Thanks to my recent tour of duty with the entourage of the President in Bugisu, it became impossible to deliver a well thought out column in time!

I am however able to bear personal testimony to the strong resurgence and renewal of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) as the President toured the land of Masaba, and to serve notice to the pretenders to the leadership of the people from the Opposition that the NRM is set to sweep the 2011 polls - and with an increased majority.

Why? The answer is simple: service delivery. As the political class - including the hard-line Mengo cabal, the Democratic Party (DP) and the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) variants - continue confusing themselves in Kampala, President Yoweri Museveni and the NRM continue scoring in the countryside!

The people see hard work, focus and consistency from the leadership of the NRM and the country, and only unmitigated confusion and disaster from the political class.

Which is why for now, we shall not comment on the very predictable goings-on in the DP and in the FDC with my good friend Hon. Beti Kamya, and on the as yet unfolding three part article in the Weekly Observer titled, "Mushega: Why I am not NRM".

All the foregoing said, there is perhaps no better way to get back into these pages than by commenting on the article by another Kamya - Arthur George - carried in the Sunday Monitor of the August 3 titled "Economic rights belong in politics".

Now, one of these days somebody is going to ask whether this column is simply about polemics with Mr Kamya.

The answer would obviously be "no", and we shall work to avert such a conclusion from crystallizing.

Except, credit must be given where it is due. Mr Kamya writes very well and very thoughtfully - on very serious subjects. So much so that I have started thinking that he is one of the people (as he himself intimated in the article in question), we could have principled and respectful disagreement with.

Even more important, in engaging with him, we are able to interact with the entire readership on those very matters.

In the article in question, Mr Kamya talks about my "proposals" betraying "the essential features of the adulterated.

Marxist-Leninism that was Stalinism and Maoism". He talks about "assimilation of these 'isms' by independent African states to the exclusion of other ideological moorings".

Mr Kamya finally asserts "... old fashioned ideas, time tasted ideas are better than new fangled ones. Consonant with classical political theory ..." Through all this, he asserts that the Movement has "pathological mistrust of democracy and the democratic process"! One would retort regarding the last assertion, that the record of Mengo would obviously be far worse!

Mr Kamya's comments remind me of a favourite quotation of the late Dr John Garang in response to charges of being socialist or communist in late 1980s and mid 1990s: "We are neither pro-East nor pro-West. We are pro-Africa".

Mr Museveni, in response to similar questions would put it even more simply: "We are pro-ourselves"!

Clearly, Mr Kamya's observations are at variance with life itself. He seems to be upholding the basic thesis of Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man", that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies is largely at an end and that the world has settled for "liberal democracy".

In Mr Kamya's deeper thoughts further, I discern clear echoes of journalist Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century". The good news is that Mr Kamya's article enables us to pose a number of questions yet again.

Is democratic government a product of an act of creation? Is it the result of an event or of a process? Is its consolidation made possible by merely individual leaders or by the interplay of an extremely complex set of factors?

How does contemporary globalisation impact the consolidation of democratic government in Africa? Where, in response to Friedman's "Flat World", my friend Prof. Mwesigwa Baregu sees a "global jungle"? We stay with this subject next week.

Mr Mafabi is the private secretary to the President for political affairs