What is The Real Structure of Uganda’s State Apparatus? • First of all, there can never be a state apparatus in any country without socio-economic classes in that country. • It is on the basis of the emergence of economic classes that state machineries, apparatuses, and law also emerge. • Classes are groups of people which differ one from another according to how each one of them is related to the economic means of production of their country and how much of labour each class deposits in economic units of production. • Relations to the means of production mean who owns them and who does not while labour contribution means who actually works and who does not. • Examples can be taken in history like relations between masters and slaves, landlords and tenants, capitalists and wage earners. • The master, the landlord, the capitalist, who own wealth and do not work become rulers above all others in society. • Economic domination is simultaneously and concomitantly based on and accompanied by military superiority. • With both economic and military powers, domineering classes are in a position to establish and enforce law, by applying and exercising a social practice, namely, politics. • Politics expresses concentrated economic aims, and emotions between those classes in their struggle for power and social survival. • The economically and militarily better equipped class establishes regulations that must reflect and implement the social and economic intentions of its own but makes sure it must suppress what it considers incorrect and hostile social and economic intentions of the opposite class. • These social regulations become law which becomes the sum-total of obligatory and compulsory standards of behavior and conduct acceptable only to the economically and militarily better equipped class above all others. • In order for this domineering class to implement its economic aims based on its acceptable moral standards it must have social organs of force and coercion. • Among the armed group, there emerges one who is intellectually more equipped and better informed about what should be done and how such should be done in order to organise and guide the socio-economic order already in their hands. This becomes the personification of the national territory they occupy. He is finally concluded as King. • This King builds up a specially armed group which becomes a force to uphold, protect, safeguard and defend, at all costs the economic and political interests of the entire predominantly economic class above all others in the territory. This comes to be referred to as Army. • But the social situation begins to demand that there must be day-to-day administering and conducting of what the King wants to implement and realise from land and the economy as a whole. • It was found that the King could not do all this alone. He therefore appoints administrators, from his own class, referred to as Chiefs to perform such duties. • It is gradually discovered that the administration of territory and the economy put together again demands people sitting together, put their heads together, illustrate and expose common social experience and challenges in order to pave day-to-day ways forward necessary for organizing society. This finally demanded the formation of a Council system. • Councils would be composed of people with strong mutual economic roots, ties and, status according to the class in power. Slaves, slave-maids, tenants and women, for example, are not allowed to take part in councils. Their economic ideas and demands would be contrary to those of their masters. • Hence and, thus, King, Army, Chiefs and Councils constitute a machinery or an apparatus for reflecting their social and economic will above that of all others. What therefore is the current Real Structure of Uganda’s state apparatus and machinery? • President – Head of state and personification of a politically demarcated territory – Uganda. • Vice President • Prime Minister • Cabinet of Ministers • Civil Servants – Administrators • Parliament – This passes political laws. • Police - • Prisons - • Army –To defend the integrity of the entire political territory, in and out – and is the chief component of the entire state apparatus. • All councils of Districts. • All chairmen/women of all District councils. • All District civil services. • All these put together constitute the entire state apparatus in its proper pyramidal form and stature right from its national apex down to its territorial base and bottom. Notable accruing anomalies: • There had never been a country known as Uganda before or earlier the year 1890. • Uganda as a country was a creation of and by the capitalist class of Britain at its higher socio- economic political development stage, namely colonialism. • Colonialism is a system whereby either a country or a group of countries is bound together by political and military ties by a capitalist class of a foreign country for socio-economic purposes of that very conquering class. • The colonizers amalgamated a number of nationalities some of which under customary habits of conducting society while some had developed a system of embryonic state apparatuses, with Kings, standby armed forces, councils and chiefs. • Colonialism conquered all these, but colonialists decided to divide local populations between higher and lower groups for purposes of luring better obedience from the more favoured ones who would subjugate the lower ones to serve the economic purposes and interests of the master colonizer. • Thus conquered kings and chiefs were given special chunks of land called Mile land, to make them economically more superior to their former subjects and in complete obedience to the colonising master. • They did not just stop at the land issue alone, they also allowed them pseudo chiefs and councils to cooperate with colonial political and economic organs in order to make natives coercively produce the necessary and required raw materials for the colonizers at the cheapest cost possible. • The colonial state apparatus was such that (i) it had a Governor (representing the conquering monarch of the colonising country.) (ii) Commissioners administering Provinces and Districts. (iii) A small standby armed force. (iv) Small civil service. (v) Small Police. • Alongside all these organs, central and local, there existed the native puppet organs created out of conquered kings, chiefs and councilors. • At the time of de-colonisation the local organs connected with the conquered kingships remained intact. • This is where the descendants of the colonially conquered kings (1890) come in to claim royal status within a postcolonial independent state. • That of Buganda region during the first phase of independence (1966) collided with the central government and was violently overthrown. • This was followed by others being just ordered by the central government to abdicate. • This put in place a national state apparatus with a central government this time with its own branches down to local levels. It was properly streamlined with no redundancy of clamoring remnants of royal appendages. • This type of streamlining went on until the putting in place of a new constitution, 1995, by Uganda’s government in the hands of a fresh political party known as National Resistance Movement. • This new party came up with a proposal that these descendants of the colonially conquered former kings be given a special social status referred to as Cultural Leaders but outside any type of political context. • Here arises a question: “What sort of” culture “should they or, can they, lead?” • They are under Uganda’s central government and therefore none of them is a king since none of them can head a sovereign state within a sovereign Republic. • They are even under a much more different social status than that of their fathers who were at least part of local authorities under the colonial regime. • Today within the local administrative machinery, Uganda has Resident District Commissioners who are like the District Commissioners during colonial times. • Instead of former so-called kings under colonialism, now Uganda has elected District Chairmen with elected District Councils. • This is a well streamlined state machinery which is economically, politically, ideologically very much relevant to the ordinary masses of the entire national territory. • There is no need at all for a third vertically parallel line of so-called “tiers” along the Resident District Commissioners and Local Council District Chairmen to administer local populations in the so-called former kingdoms. • The culture these descendants of former kings can put in place beneficially is to establish museums or, Royal Cultural Centres, exhibiting origins of ancient history of African state formation for academic work and research, teaching people their historical background and the necessary way-forward. • It is absolutely contradictory to call them “Kings” and then stop them from entering politics. • They can establish Non-Governmental Organisations through which they can contribute towards national development in general, but Uganda’s national state apparatus must remain properly streamlined without any ambiguity or beating about the bush. • All in all, from an academic point of view, such institutions are absolutely anachronistic in a modern world.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:47:04 +0000
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