Enlightenment Now? Is Uganda only pretending to get better?
The majority of the NRM leaning so-called Ugandan elite that I have had the change to converse with on my podcast, Big Conversations by Ordinary People, defend the inhumane actions of Uganda's government today as an unnecessary evil needed to keep the peace and stability that the Museveni promised after winning the bush war in 1986. They are also quick to point out how the Ugandan's standard of living has significantly improved since. Most of their arguments are very similar to the narrative pushed in Steven Pinker's books Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature: If you compare in absolute terms the standard of living today versus that of the past, today wins by a clear margin. The same sentiment also echos Barak Obama's famous quote:
If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be–what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into–you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now. If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, “young, gifted, and black” in America, you would choose right now.
True. The reality is that Uganda is not all bad. Compared to the 1986 version, Uganda today has surely gotten better by a significant number of measurable metrics.
But my worry is that if I took today as the start point, I cannot help but feel that the country is on a course to its worst version ever. Like other doomed countries including Libya and Iran, Uganda could be on a tread where we look back at today as the peak of our national progress.
If we don't intentionally start taking steps to improve it now, a time will inevitably come when even the better we will be ready to fight for is worse than what we are trying to improve today. Some of which are clear like; Replacing old guards with younger ones (that are more in tune with the population). And embracing innovative technologies (an open and accessible internet and related infrastructure) and social structures (democracy and decentralisation) that scale better with our growing country. The argument that not everything in Uganda is broken is not one against the current struggle for change. It's either a statement of cowardly resignation to the unavoidable rot of our country or a form of existential procrastination that can only yield nothing but the distraction of our home.
During my senior two in 2004, we passed our political science exams by defending Museveni's violent pursuit of power. Pointing out the intolerable inhumane character of the Idi Amin government and disrespectful denial of Ugandans their democratic right to choose their leaders by the Obote government. In the last five months we have seen the Museveni government unleash violence to Ugandans and rig elections at a scale unimaginable by both Idi Amin and Milton Obote.
- Shooting indiscriminately at Ugandans in the capital.
- Shutting off the internet.
- Kidnapping Ugandans at a frequency and shamelessness only imaginable during a time of war.
- Administering life threatening beatings to journalists while doing their job. To mention a but a few extremes. What we are seeing today is Uganda sinking into a dark and steep hole.
Unlike in Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now ideology, progress in the real world cannot be measure by the direction of the curve plotted on a linear graph. Ignoring the cherry-picked data, the kind of thinking expressed in that book asserts that those of us who are subjected to the most suffering by the injustices wielded by the powerful among us are condemned to that suffering until such a time as when the comforts of our well-off peers have increased enough that these peers are willing to let some of us, the more fortunate among the least fortunate, share some of the comforts they consider to be less indulgent today.
Uganda's progress may be easy to plot on a linear graph if you're crafting a hyper optimistic, pseudo-mathematica best seller to impress your top one-percenter buddies but progress is a very small part of the Ugandan story. And when told in isolation or out of context is even the wrong version of the Ugandan story.
The other version of Ugandan reality is that the government has a much high potential to easily obliterate Ugandans today. And from the its behavior in the last few months, we can be forgiven for worrying that it also has the will. The biggest disadvantage of living in a country where the government's ability and will to use violence hugely supersedes the citizen's ability to defend themselves against this violence is that the citizens end up conforming to the paranoid thought and belief that any threat to the power structures that be is not only an existential threat to that citizen but also to any if not to all Ugandans.
This kind of paranoia imprisons you. You become a hostage in your own home, living at the mercy and good will of the powerful. You become a tool. A tool, like an iPhone whose existence is accepted if only to serve the needs of its owners — as in the case of most hostages, in your case, to negotiate favourable comforts for your owners from the international society. A tool disposed off of inconsequentially at the discretion of the owners as we witnessed recently when unarmed Ugandans in the capital were randomly shot at by the Museveni government. Which is yet to be brought to book or condemned strongly by those capable of wielding more violence it.
Yesterday was the best time to take action for a better Uganda but today is all we have. If we still wish to indulge Pinker's optimistic dream any longer, we need to be willing to admit that progress is fragile, and that any kind of reluctance could be the slip that dooms our country into an irreparable shithole.