{UAH} Federalism vs Unitary States

Federalism vs Unitary States - both systems are  good and bad in equal measures depending on what prism you want to use. They can both achieve good results but it depends on the leadership, the circumstances and many other factors

Federalism  - it definitely depend on many factors such as the geography, history, economics, religion, political culture, and regional impacts of global events.

Federal systems are adopted to address very different circumstances.....and, is often imposed by outsider (like in the case of Iraq,Bosnia-Herzegovina,Germany) in hope of ending conflict. 

Further, federalism does not guarantee decentralized and democratic government.  Modern Germany is federal, but so was Hitler's Germany, and so was the Soviet Union.

In Uganda, we made love with federalism from 1962-66. The relationship was crap, abusive and degenerated into serious physical assaults. We said, enough of this! 

From 1967-1971 we shifted our love and allegiance to unitarism and things started to get sweet and we saw what being a Ugandan meant. 

Then kijambia Amin came along and raped us all. We all got into a "forced marriage" - in a military dictatorship. There was nothing like "please" or "thank you". We all had to follow orders. Time reaches we said, "We had enough!". We threw that abusive rapist out on 11/4/1979 with the help of the TPDF. 

What followed were a series of failed unitary relations with the UNLF until we had the December 1980 General elections that brought the UPC led government of Obote and that too, insisted of formalising the relationship under a Unitary government. 

Some army officers from the North were not happy with the kind of relationship Uganda was having. They preferred a military dictatorship and this led them to overthrow Obote. 

Soon, that experiment of a military dictatorship was overthrown by Museveni and his friends from within a section of Ugandans who were led by Rwandan refugees in Uganda. 

What these NRA rebels brough us was/is a toxic mixture of military dictatorship, false democracy and fake traditional kingdoms. 

From the above analogy, it's clear; Uganda needs a true democratic unitary system of government but that system should be underpinned by full devolution that is uniform to all the regions. That is what we are yet to test as a nation. We have seen it working well in other African countries like Kenya, Botswana, Namibia, etc. We have also seen it working so well in the UK, through with some grampy regions complaining because uniformity is lacking overboard in the UK. 

Further reading about this topic:

One of my favorite summaries on this topic is the IRIS report - titled:

DECENTRALIZATION, GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC SERVICES

THE IMPACT OF INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS

A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

By Omar Azfar, Satu Kähkönen, Anthony Lanyi, Patrick Meagher, and Diana Rutherford

IRIS Center, University of Maryland, College Park

September 1999

Also the work by Susan Rose-Ackerman gives some insights of the pro and cons of federalism and unitary systems

Thank you

By

Sunday Geoffrey

23/9/2018

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1837357.pdf?_=1459152804331

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