{UAH} Here is how we should examine our future presidential candidates

As many a prospective mother in-law has no doubt advised her daughter: the clearest indicator of any man's future conduct is his past behaviour. The same warning can also be made of our politicians?

The country is rife with speculation about the meaning of the high-level fallings-out among our rulers. What they boil down to is this: We should expect quite a crowded field of presidential aspirants from among people who all once belonged to the same political party, and possibly even sat in the same Cabinet at one point.
We may end up with Kizza Besigye, Gilbert Bukenya and also ex-prime minister Amama Mbabazi all running in the next presidential election. Mbabazi, in particular, seems to hold some appeal for people who see in his cuff-linked image what they perhaps also aspire to be. I am not sure if I am the only one disturbed to hear seemingly sensible people speak in support of the idea of him becoming president, one way or another.
We have been here before; many times.

Milton Obote's predilection for rigging party –and even Trades Union- elections should have enabled those he worked with in government to see that they too would one day be his victims. Perhaps if closer attention had been paid to Amin's military record both before and after Independence, the UPC would have been less surprised by his coup against them, and the country at large by his subsequent brutality.
Many of Museveni's supporters-turned-critics, some of whose demonstrations he now crushes, must have initially overlooked his known hostility to public demonstrations while he served in the post-Amin consensus coalition, as well as his participation the military coup against it.

The fact that Ugandans are regularly reduced to debating only poor choices speaks volumes about the poverty and dysfunction of our political culture. This reminded me of an approving remark I overheard in a barbershop, by one young man to another, in relation to the then PM Mbabazi's triumphal appearance at the Uganda Cranes/Guinea match: "Okimanyi nti omusajja oyo ali elite mu buli kyakola? " (Do you know how that man is "elite" in everything he does?), much to the disgust of the man cutting my hair.

A quarter-century of one government has numbed many of us into wanting to take the abnormal as normal, and there has been nothing normal about the NRM governance right from 1986.
But stealing government land and money; giving public jobs and tenders to friends and relatives; swinging court processes in one's favour, etc, are not the causes of bad government; they are its products.
The real origin of this crisis goes all the way back to the 1985 machinations of the British Foreign Office, which sabotaged the possibility of a national conference following the collapse of the Obote II regime by organising significant support for one armed militia to seize power in 1986. This support was conditional on the NRA being willing to destroy virtually every institution –effective or not- designed since Independence to protect Africans from further exploitation. It is the story of how neo-liberal economics gained a foothold in Uganda.

This was a first for sub-Saharan Africa, and President Museveni has penned articles proudly declaring the wisdom of this strategic shift. This is the real "fundamental change": the dismantling of the architecture of Independence.
Since such unpopular measures are not easily implementable by a government accountable to the people, a certain type of dictatorship is the preferred policy tool, and in this mission, the NRM/A has been very loyal to its benefactor.
The almost blanket US-backed military governments of South and Latin America from the 1930s to the 1990s were a similar implementation system for the very same economic policies.

The economic wasteland and mounting social chaos that now confronts us is not accidental: it is a direct product of the economic policies that the West has finally been able to fully impose on us through the NRM being willing to do what no previous government (despite also being dictatorships) had been willing to do.
It is, therefore, a little futile to measure any aspiring president merely in terms of what they will do about "corruption", or "service delivery" or the current favourite: "youth unemployment", while leaving the current NRM/IMF economic framework intact.

The only serious measurement of any candidate is whether they have a viable plan to push this parasitical system back out of the door. Everything else is a detail, or pretence.
The aspirants should be examined on what role they have played in birthing this new "economy". Where were they when our lands, economy and agricultural wealth were being opened up for this foreign looting? How aware are they of the impact this has had on our people? Do they have any plan to help Ugandans recover their sovereignty and ownership of the economic future?

Writing elsewhere, Timothy Kalyegira has stated that some key Western countries are in favour of a Mbabazi presidency, and have insisted that the donor-dependent Opposition get behind him.
Kalyegira is often accused of conspiracy-hunting. However, it is notable that key Opposition voices, such as the current Leader of the Opposition, have gone on record to say kind things about him. Has a new 1985-type deal been made behind our backs again?

We don't need a new presidency; we need a new State. I hope we will rise above barbershop debate when thinking about how to do that.

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