I believe that as a manager and administrator, Obote was more effective compared to Museveni – witness the hospitals and schools, banks and industries that he built and his government ran with excellence and which Museveni’s government has mismanaged or sold. But Obote made a fundamental error that Museveni has avoided: he failed to domesticate power; that is why he kept losing it. Obote did not practice what Museveni accused him of: corruption, tribalism, militarism and personal control of the core institutions of the state – at least not to the scale Museveni has. Instead Obote sought to run Uganda as if it was Britain. But you cannot use the institutions and practices of an industrial society to run a peasant society. If African intellectuals are to contribute towards the improvement of governance on our continent, they need to question existing theories and assumptions.Why have the longest serving presidents in Africa been those we have despised as venal – Mobutu, Blaise Compaoré, Omar Bongo, Robert Mugabe, Obiang Nguema, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Paul Biya, Eduardo Dos Santos, Idriss Déby, etc? What do/did they understand about our societies and have manipulated so skilfully to stay in power? What did our most enlightened and progressive leaders – Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Milton Obote, Kwame Nkrumah, Murtala Mohammed etc. – fail to see that made them last only a few years in power?Why have many of our leaders come with great promise but ended in disappointment? Sadly, Kalinaki makes no effort to address these issues. As a moral statement about Museveni’s failures – and they are many – Kalinaki’s book does a great job. But as an insight into the problems and potential remedies of Uganda’s ills, Kalinaki’s book lacks analytical bite. Instead, it inadvertently shows that Besigye suffers the same disease as Museveni – a messianic self-image, an overestimation of himself and an under-estimation of the complexity of managing a peasant society. See more: independent.co.ug/the-last-word/the-last-word/9628-inside-kalinakis-book-on-besigye
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 08:24:46 +0000
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