Humanist

“Hope is a good thing, Mr. President, for without it we might as well die. So, I choose to hope. During your final term in office, Mr. President, I look forward to your renewed leadership that will return us back on course to constitutional governance. You know the fundamental change that you promised Uganda.

I look forward, Mr. President, to your final-term presidential leadership, which you will execute through a genuine decentralised system of governance, where the Uganda constitutional requirement for regular holding of lower local council elections is upheld in the same way as the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections are upheld.

Mr. President, I look forward in hope that the lower councils, particularly the village councils, will once again, during your final term and beyond, flourish as the foundation of a genuine participatory and bottom-up governance system for Uganda.

I pray that the lower councils will be respected and listened to by the sitting president of Uganda, you and your successors to come; and once again fully functioning lower councils will be the yardstick that legitimates presidential leadership.

With you back on course, exercising your leadership of Uganda within the ethos of constitutional governance, broad based participatory governance, and with you clearly sending out signals for your retirement the media will inevitably change their reporting of you, I promise Mr. President.”

This text above is extracted from what I wrote in 2016 in “Letter to President Museveni.”  And sadly, it remains valid today.

Until we return back to the ethos of genuine bottom-up participatory governance systems via our local council elected leaders (LCs) from village to the top, all resources currently being ploughed into the fight against corruption are a waste.

The current status quo in which the decentralisation process was halted and foiled, as demonstrated by non-holding of LCs elections for decades, is among the biggest failures of President Museveni and his National Resistance Movement administration of Uganda.

Non-holding of LCs elections for decades is among the root causes and the foundation on which wide spread corruption is nurtured in Uganda. The LCs elected decades ago are no longer the people’s choice, but are imposed upon the people by central government.

In my ancestral village, Kadoki in Akadot Parish in Pallisa Sub-County in Pallisa District, the one who was elected Village Chairperson is reportedly no longer resident in the village; and the one whom he made his Vice Chairperson, is automatically governing in his stead. And what a horrible job the latter is doing.

Many in our village, including me, are the more capable to govern our village in a manner that brings prosperity, improved quality of life and dignity to our home area, but we are frustrated by the continuous postponement of LCs elections.

Non-holding of lower LCs elections is a a major contributor to the findings of the AFROBAROMETER study, “Citizen’s commitment to democracy and its perceived full supply in Uganda 2012-2024,” that:

“Ugandans are far less satisfied with how democracy works in their country.”

Indeed, if democracy were working well in our country, with a functional decentralised system of governance, the huge sums of money being utilised this week on the “Public Service Leaders’ Introspection Retreat of Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, and Members of the National Resistance Movement’s top leadership at the National Leadership Institute in Kyankwanzi,” would not be utilised as such.

It is totally unnecessary and wasteful to spend such huge sums of money for, to borrow Advocate Isaac Ssemakadde’s characterisation of our out-of-touch top leaders, “fat cats”, to talk about what they are paid to do, should be doing and are not doing.

 As reported by Egale Online, the theme for the retreat is: “Answering the Citizens’ Call: Improved Service Delivery for Social and Economic Transformation.” What is this, if not a mockery of us the citizens denied our official channels, the LCs, to hold our elected national leaders and appointed technocrats to account.

The huge sums of resources being spent on the seven-day retreat should have been better utilised to conduct lower LCs elections and to fund the functioning of bottom-up governance structures – the local governments, through which, ideally, “service delivery and social economic transformation” should be guaranteed.

Instead, the Parliament of Uganda, the people’s representatives, but who have shunned their roles and are out of touch, “fat cats”, are complicit with the Electoral Commission in legitimizing flimsy excuses of “there is no money to hold lower local council elections,” as reported by the media, including the Nile Post.