{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Mbabazi must face issues and apologize

http://www.observer.ug/viewpoint/38442-mbabazi-must-face-issues-and-apologize

Mbabazi must face issues and apologize

Last Updated: 26 June 2015

He was at the centre of many wrong things: obnoxious laws, state repression, impunity in managing public affairs, bad economic policies, etc.

He actively built a system that he now says is tired and unable to carry the country forward. He deserves salutations for saying so, but he owes the public more.

Now he has offered himself for consideration as the next chief executive to reform and reinvigorate this tired system. Meanwhile, the hangers-on have come out forcefully to denigrate him – that he has no credibility to point out that things have gone wrong since he held many high-level government positions. Rather cheap and hollow!

John Patrick Amama Mbabazi, JAPM, is the man of the moment. His party, the National Resistance Movement (NRM), remains in a panicky state, not very sure how to deal with the man.

Ironically, it has been mainly a few Johnny-come-lately fellows who have been yelling loudest at JPAM. Not many senior and respected NRM luminaries have openly denounced him. It says a lot about how General Museveni's stay at the helm of the NRM and the country has run its course.

Yet, perhaps fired on by what JPAM aptly called 'fortune-hunters', General Museveni remains aloof to a very clear writing on the wall: the time is up. In his statement announcing that he will run for chairman of NRM and for president of Uganda, JPAM fell short on fully acknowledging that the government he served performed miserably.

To overemphasize the many undeniable achievements of the NRM is to lose sight of the innumerable failures and the gradual decay that has eaten into every nook of the public sector.

Here is where Ndugu Amama needs to show statesmanship and face the realities, fair and square. The Ugandan political system is not just tired; it is acutely sick, decadent and retrogressive.

Although the president likes quoting statistics of enrollment in primary and secondary education, we know that our education sector is a shambles, with children going to school without actually learning much. The health sector has a collection of structures – both newly-built and old, dilapidated ones – but a functional healthcare system is absent.

The supposed backbone of our economy, the agricultural sector, has been paid no more than lip service – without a serious attempt at structural transformation. Relatedly, the lands sector is perhaps the foremost epitome of decay, filth, and stagnation.

Rather than undertaking a comprehensive and sweeping reform of the land tenure system and enabling easy land registration, the NRM establishment arguably created more confusion and distortion than the colonialists left behind. In the national capital, the infrastructure, especially the road network, is a big joke.

From a perilously thin road network with no traffic signals at most major intersections to the absence of a mass public transport system, the poor regulatory framework governing economic activity and social life in Kampala is anything but of a 21st century city.

There is little that remains unsaid about the endemic corruption that has come to define the NRM misrule. The thieving that we hear and read about in the media is most likely a small fraction of the actual looting that government officials, in connivance with private sector players, have visited on our country.

A related key feature of the NRM's three decades in power is the near-total erosion of a system of merit and fair access to opportunity. In place of a meritocratic system, the NRM has given us a system based on nepotism, cronyism, and sycophancy.

Then there is the 'northern question', the scars from decades of armed conflict, the shameless marginalization of the north and northeast. Surely, Ndugu Amama, this is not just a tired system; it is worse.

These are fundamental failings that Ndugu Amama must confront and address directly for him to inspire confidence and respect from Ugandans. To guardedly and, rather, vaguely allude to weaknesses in a 'tired system' without explicitly conceding that things have gone awry, smacks of disingenuousness and insincerity.

By conceding to the dire state in which the country is right now, Ndugu Amama will also have to give a comprehensive and candid apology to Ugandans. Until he comes out to take responsibility for nurturing a monstrous and decadent system of rule, Amama will be doing nothing more than playing cheap politics.

The mark of a statesman is the humility to accept that things have gone wrong, especially when it is evident as the case is in Uganda today. Only then can you persuasively make a case for a new chapter.

Over to you, Ndugu Amama…
moses.khisa@gmail.com
The author is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the department of Political Science, Northwestern University, USA.

Mbabazi must face issues and apologize

http://www.observer.ug/viewpoint/38442-mbabazi-must-face-issues-and-apologize

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