{UAH} Cabinet reshuffle in a weak nation-state

On Sunday, March 1, President Museveni announced his long-awaited and much speculated upon Cabinet reshuffle. Various versions of what a reshuffled Cabinet might look like had appeared on the Internet, probably leaked or faked to influence the final listing.

After the reshuffle was announced, there followed the expected analysis and grumbling at the face of the new Cabinet. Too many ministers from western Uganda, particularly from Kigezi. Baganda feeling they had been "marginalised" in the reshuffle.

On the Kampala Express Facebook page, I wrote an article wondering what all the public interest in the shape of the Cabinet was about.

"Much has changed over the last 20 years. Most Ugandans get their news from private radio stations. Others in the urban centres have the Internet to turn to.

Shopping is now done entirely on the open market, in supermarkets and malls for some, in smaller vegetable markets and roadside kiosks for others. Public transportation is in private hands.

Most people's "letters" and other mail are received or sent electronically via email and for many social media is the first point of call at the start of the day.

The only time most Ugandans directly deal with the government is with traffic police, the renewal of passports, paying their taxes, immigration officers at border points, Uneb results to a degree and some in government hospitals and schools.

What the country has witnessed since about 2010 has been President Museveni becoming a Super Minister, the man who commissions every road, market, power project or water plant in the country.

In that sense, it does not matter to the public who is minister for what.

The Cabinet are not executive officers with final decision-making power but ceremonial figures drawn from across the political, ethnic and religious structure of Uganda, whom the President uses to give the public a semblance of representation.

In that article I tried to reflect on how unchanging is the Ugandan mind set. On one hand, the bulk of society has been freed from the control and dependency on government in most basic public services and facilities; but on the other hand, the typical Ugandan still thinks in terms of the government as the entity to turn to and look upon for answers and direction on their lives.

Chief Justice
Later in the week, after more than a year without one, Uganda's third branch of government, the judiciary, finally got a Chief Justice. He is Bart Katureebe.

Justice Katureebe's appointment by President Museveni was widely welcomed by the political class, media and legal fraternity and was one of those very rare occasions in which the usual bickering and bitterness was not felt.

Many in the judiciary have mentioned the urgent task that is the disposal of cases involving land disputes in the rural areas involving peasants and other upcountry folk as being one the new Chief Justice should look into.

However, there should be no illusions about what a Chief Justice can achieve, as it is with the Cabinet. The Cabinet ministers were appointed by the president, at his pleasure and for his purposes.

There was no parliamentary scrutiny preceding that reshuffle or consulting even the senior policy organs of the ruling NRM party. The Chief Justice is in theory an equal or almost one with the head of state in the structure of government. But in this case, he is appointed, once again at the President's pleasure.

The compliments being heaped on Bart Katureebe are about his competence and personal integrity. It is always encouraging to see a person of respectable standing appointed to senior public office, but it leaves unanswered a critical question – does he have real powers?

In other words, the hope being placed in Katureebe is in his personal integrity, not in the water-tight independence and strength of the judiciary. There is nothing institutional that shields Katureebe from political pressure "from above".

We can only hope he will not come under pressure from State House and can only hope that he remains the man of integrity he was before his appointment. The fact that we can only hope rather than be certain, demonstrates the shaky ground the state called Uganda stands on.

This is what it was right from 1986 and even before. We put our faith in the NRA rebel leader Yoweri Museveni because of the statements we heard him utter in interviews with the BBC in 1985 or the speech he delivered during his swearing-in in January 1986.

We put our faith in President Milton Obote because of his warm personality, humour and the fine English in his speeches. But we had no answer to the question of what the country would do if this leader on whom we placed our hopes in his personal capacity were to fail.

It is the same question I have put to my colleague Andrew Mwenda in his profuse praise of the personal integrity and discipline of Rwanda's President Paul Kagame.

To Mwenda and other Ugandans who praise and admire Kagame, he is a no nonsense leader who tolerates no corruption and strictly adheres to the rule of law.

I have asked Mwenda to explain who would arrest or prosecute President Kagame if he, being human like us all, were to commit a crime or get involved in an embarrassing personal scandal, say like the former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. I patiently await the answer to that question.

So, altogether, we are still in that zone of state-building that is far from certain. We do not yet have the impersonal institutional culture to shield us from the whims of human nature or the abuse of power by those who wield it.

To build that institutional platform requires that we think less of government and more about ourselves, the middle section of society --- the legal fraternity, the old school associations, the social media groups, the church groups, the Rotary and Lions Clubs, the Uganda Medical Association, the Uganda Journalists Union and bodies like that.

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"When a man is stung by a bee, he doesn't set off to destroy all beehives"

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