Pay attention to what is happening in Uganda
Over his 25 years running Uganda, [Yoweri] Museveni has ushered in a stretch of unprecedented stability and economic growth amid liberalization. Poverty has dropped from 56% in 1992 to 25% last year. Donor dependency has dropped to around 25%. Uganda has become one of Africa’s shining successes in the fight against AIDS. And the government is set to start extracting a 2-billion-barrel oil find, which could double state revenues. But infrastructure is crumbling. Education and health services are failing the people. To buy off potential political adversaries, Museveni has added so many new districts that Uganda, a country of 32 million, now has the highest number of sub-national administrative units in Africa and the fourth highest in the world. And the standard of living is still painfully low, with GDP per capita at only $509, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Since April 11, Ugandans have been protesting this state of affairs—and the escalating price of vital commodities such as food and fuel—by walking to work. It’s a simple strategy, spearheaded by perennial opposition leader Kizza Besigye, and it’s making president Museveni look terrible. Here is Besigye being dragged from his car late last month.
This clash is both a shame, and revealing in the context of Ugandan civic motivation. The election was less than three months ago—at the height of the Egyptian protests—and drew less than 40 percent of the country out to the polls. Since then, of course, price shocks with respect to food and fuel have amplified the reasons to vocally object. But why not vote for Besigye rather than take his part in an unstructured protest?
Some analysis from Foreign Policy:
Though Besigye did indeed call for mass protests after the election results, they did not materialize, probably due to the military intimidation. Now, however, Uganda has had sharp increases in fuel and food prices due to drought and international oil fluctuations, and the opposition seized the opportunity to mobilize public dissatisfaction. The design of the Walk to Work protests also makes it harder for the government to vilify than protests rejecting election results.
The strategy is shrewd for this reason. And also amplifies a trend I am marking as I report this book: popular lack of engagement with centralized institutions—at least on their terms. Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani has put this event in the context of the 1976 Soweto uprising in South Africa, and the 2011 “Arab Spring” in northern Africa.
Soweto was a youthful uprising. In an era when adults had come to believe that meaningful change could only come through armed struggle, Soweto pioneered an alternative mode of struggle.This new mode of struggle substituted the notion of armed struggle with that of popular struggle. It stopped thinking of struggle as something waged by professional fighters, guerrillas, with the people cheering from the stands, but as a movement with ordinary people as its key participants. The potential of popular struggle lay in sheer numbers, guided by a new imagination and new methods of struggle.
The entire speech is worth reading. This moment is important because it speaks to a grassroots instinct for action that contrasts with the broken hierarchies that have administered African “democracy” for decades. As Mamdani points out, it also complements the ongoing protests unfolding in countries where, unlike Uganda, there is no vote to sit out. And, after the Museveni government sent out a ham-fisted note to block “Tweeter,” the role of social media again took center stage.
While the Ugandan opposition, like their Arab counterparts, appears to be fragmented, they likewise appear more interested in decent lives than civil war. I think it’s everyone’s duty to support that.
