{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Merit is a sure way to regional balancing

http://www.observer.ug/viewpoint/127-columnists/36664-merit-is-a-sure-way-to-regional-balancing

Merit is a sure way to regional balancing

Written by Moses Khisa

Last Updated: 06 March 2015

After months of speculation, and anxiety within political circles, General Museveni finally shuffled his cabinet last Sunday.

Whenever a cabinet is named, many people quickly check to see which part or region of Uganda has 'eaten biggest' and which one has lost out. In recent years, the trend has been quite predictable: the west/southwest 'eats big' while the north 'eats less.'

This applies both to the total cabinet appointments but also the curious distinction between 'wet' and 'dry' ministries. The former are the big-budget ministries such as Health, Finance, Education, Defense, Works, and Energy. The latter are believed to include Gender, Disaster Preparedness, Tourism, Agriculture, and perhaps Lands.

In Sunday's reshuffle, the west/southwest took more than half of the 31 cabinet ministerial appointments. It also took majority of the 'wet' ministries. 
Asked to explain this skewed regional distribution, government spokesman Ofwono Opondo responded in his usual bluntness and assuredness: the west votes Museveni as a block and is rewarded accordingly.

What Opondo is suggesting, which is seldom surprising, is that his boss's ministerial appointments are rewards for political loyalty, not performance. Of course Opondo was a trifle disingenuous.

He knows that if we consider the official election results, Karamoja votes as much for General Museveni as Ankole yet the former doesn't get as many ministerial appointments as the latter. But the balancing act in Museveni's ministerial appointments is not meant to yield regional/ethnic equity; it aims at giving superficial gratification to the less suspecting public.

For those interested in understanding the intractable problem of building efficient states and managing effective governments in Africa, you can't look beyond Opondo's comment.

His boss runs government in the typical fashion of an insecure authoritarian ruler and patron who has to constantly monitor who supports him and who doesn't and accordingly rewards or punishes not on the basis of performance but on calculations of perceived threats to his power.

Would there be regional/ethnic imbalance in cabinet if there was no deliberate yet futile attempt at regional balancing? Most unlikely. Although the north, especially Acholi and Lango, and northeast (Teso and Karamoja), suffered two decades of violent conflict and insecurity, these regions are not by any means short of Ugandans competent enough to earn a merit-appointment to cabinet.

In fact the only non-political (merit) appointment (assuming that applies to Museveni's political chessboard) in the latest reshuffle is from West Nile. Sticking to meritocracy and performance is the sure way to equalizing appointment without having to first consider people's religion, region, and so on.

For long, academic departments at Makerere University had a policy whereby each year, one or two best graduating students would be retained in their respective departments as teaching assistants and as future lecturers.

Consider the department of political science. Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, every two top graduates automatically qualified for recruitment as teaching assistants. For personal reasons such as professional ambitions, some wouldn't take the offer or stay long.

Those who took it and stayed are now professors or senior lecturers, drawn from across the country without any major region/ethnic skewedness. It didn't matter who was department chair.

Or consider the national football team, the Cranes. The lingua franc of football at the national level tends to be Luganda. But without a deliberate policy of regional or religious balancing, we get football stars from every corner of the country: the supposedly socioeconomically marginalized north and east have produced as many prolific players as the central and the west.

At any rate, does appointment to cabinet necessarily translate into much substantive change for the district or region of the appointee? Hardly. For four years when he was works minister, did Abraham Byandala cause the construction of more and better roads in Luweero than Kiruhura?

Or has Irene Muloni's helm at the energy ministry meant more electricity in Bugisu than Busoga? And are there more courts and better justice in Bushenyi because Kahinda Otafiire is Justice minister?

The portrayal that balancing appointments to cabinet enhances equitable access to the national cake is just a mirage. The individuals appointed to cabinet, especially to the 'wet' ministries, will amass personal fortunes, send their children to schools abroad, and help close relatives and campaign agents get jobs and government contracts. That is it.

Why, then, does the Ssabagabe insist on regional balancing? Partly because he has made people believe that cabinet appointments are a way of sharing power yet in fact they are not. But he also does it for tactical reasons. It is more cost-effective.

The politics of patronage that inform Museveni's rule can be very expensive to sustain. To pay for support from each and every voter is impossible. Instead, making a cabinet appointment or granting a district is handy in mollifying whole constituencies.

Thus to appease voters in Kigezi who may feel aggrieved that one of their own was sacked as prime minister, you appoint another of them as replacement.

In reality, the life of a peasant in Kanungu hardly changed for the better just because Amama Mbabazi was premier and it's unlikely to change because Mbabazi's successor, too, is a Mukiga. 
moses.khisa@gmail.com

The author is a PhD  candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University, Evanston/Chicago-USA.

Add comment

Instant publication:
Register and login to have your comments published instantly.
Rules:
- No abusive language
- No unsubstantiated allegations
- No incitement to ethnic, religious or sectarian hatred
- No incitement to violence
- No spam
- No impersonating other people 
Offending comments will be deleted without notice.

Merit is a sure way to regional balancing

http://www.observer.ug/viewpoint/127-columnists/36664-merit-is-a-sure-way-to-regional-balancing

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.