{UAH} Allan/Pojim/WBK: How NRA-NRM duped the West - Commentary

http://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/Commentary/How-NRA-NRM-duped-the-West/-/689364/3055234/-/ewgre1z/-/index.html

How NRA-NRM duped the West

The National Resistance Movement (NRM) government commemorated the 30th anniversary of its takeover of state power on Tuesday.

The anniversary was marked with much less pomp and ceremony than would have been expected, given that a general election is less than three weeks away and the NRM would have taken advantage of this anniversary to further make its point about having rescued Uganda from the brink of collapse.

So much has happened over the last 30 years, it is difficult to know where to begin in assessing the three decades.

One of the effects has been a self-fulfilling prophesy: the longer the NRM has lasted in power, the more the population has begun to feel it is an invincible government, impossible to dislodge by electoral or military means, which feeling has weakened any resolve there might have been to organise against the NRM ahead of various elections.

As the Kampala Express newspaper on Facebook noted in a photo caption on January 26, 2016, "The last 30 years of the NRM government have seen, on a positive note, continuous rule by one government which has enabled the country to heal somewhat from its start-stop instability since 1966.

On a negative note, the same 30 years have seen the erosion of the last vestiges of the well-organised post-World War II colonial state and with that most of the suburban European infrastructure established in the late 1940s.

Out of the ashes of this has emerged a Uganda that has reverted to a fully traditional, pre-colonial African state in mind, body and soul -- erratic, native, impulsive, clueless, low-brow, lethargic."

Much of the infrastructure Uganda inherited from the British at independence has gone to waste. That erosion can best be seen in the old civil service residential and "Boma" areas of the main towns in Uganda.

Roads, avenues, streets, tennis courts, public libraries, parks, golf courses once built for a European lifestyle have fallen apart for the most part.

After the government decided to sell off rather than renovate these pool houses in 1991, it started the final collapse of the pre-colonial infrastructure.

Civil servants who had bought these houses but retired with little pension to speak of, turned these houses into restaurants, computer training schools, hotels and kindergartens.

Most of the brutality that was employed by the NRA to counter the earlier insurgencies by remnants of the UNLA, as well as new groups like Peter Otai's Uganda People's Army (UPA) and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), have faded into now-obscure media and human rights reports from the late 1980s.

The greatest achievement by the NRM government, like its cousin the RPF government of Rwanda, was for many years in being able to master public relations and make that a central government policy.

The NRM and its offshoot the RPF understood the way Western governments, the media, academia and civil society think and built their foreign policy around that.

Europeans and other Whites, shielded by four decades from the horrors and trauma of war and conflict, were unable to deal with images of skulls, mutilated bodies and emaciated civilians – until the outbreak of the civil war in Yugoslavia in 1991.

‎Europeans and other Whites, although very well-read people, can also be as naïve as nine-year-old children.

They understand the most advanced theories in astrophysics, medicine, computing, technology and law but often cannot fathom parts of the world that would be termed "primitive" such as Black Africa.

The NRM and its leader President Museveni skilfully manipulated this naivety and exploited the gullible Western press and diplomatic corps to the maximum.

Skulls of the dead, supposedly of innocent civilians killed by the Milton Obote and Tito Okello armies were piled up and shown to horrified Western diplomats and journalists.

Imagine the typical Scandinavian or North American diplomat or reporter, completely traumatised by the sight of skulls and bones, speechless, unable to know how to begin to make sense of this. That diplomat or journalist is told that these people were killed by "Obote's soldiers".

What does he do, especially when he is told that as all this was going on, the West turned a blind eye and continued to fund Obote's government and the British train the UNLA, "Obote's army"?

Paralysed by guilt, traumatised by the harrowing experience, Western diplomats started to make amends by writing reports to their home countries on how the "disciplined" NRA had stopped this barbarity and started Uganda on a new path.

The second part of this well-conceived deception followed with economic figures. The NRM government could do no wrong. Every year was one of growth, impressive growth after impressive growth.

Never once was there talk of a single financial quarter of recession. No, these were economies whose graph always curved upward. More sophisticated and much more productive major economies in Asia, North and America and Europe from time to time slip into recession.

Not these economies of Uganda and Rwanda. Theirs was always one way: up and up, year on year.
This formula – stimulate Western guilt and take advantage of their naïve minds – was brilliantly replicated in Rwanda after 1994 with the exact same results.

Only much, much later, after TV and newspaper images of police and army brutality carried out in broad daylight on the streets of Kampala or Opposition activists and journalists in Rwanda fleeing into exile, did a new generation of more sceptical and less guilt-ridden European and American journalists and diplomats really start to question these two regimes of "liberators".

Western diplomats who visit upcountry Uganda are exposed to the grim levels of poverty and underdevelopment after a supposed three decades of steady progress.

Without the continual aid programmes from the West to support Uganda's education, health and from the Chinese to overhaul the roads and other public works, the true incompetence of the NRM would be laid bare.

But none of this mattered to the NRM government. It had achieved what it set out to achieve: fight to get state power, it got state power, and decided to use any and all means to hold on to it.

www.twitter.com/timkalyegira
Facebook: Kampala Express

How NRA-NRM duped the West - Commentary

http://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/Commentary/How-NRA-NRM-duped-the-West/-/689364/3055234/-/ewgre1z/-/index.html

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