I was recently seated in Cafesserie restaurant with a friend. The friend I was with is the cat’s pajamas, as the expression goes, when it comes to geopolitics and geostrategy. As I listened to him, a comely woman, who must have been in her early 20s, was seated at a table near ours.
I was decked out in a suit, so I looked fairly urbane and somewhat distinguished. Indeed, I have been told that suits transform me. The young woman was seated with her back to us, but close enough to hear our conversation amid Cafesserie’s discreet hubbub. Turning around abruptly, she displayed the book she was reading: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a business and self-help book written by Stephen R Covey.
Explaining why she was reading the book, she asked me: ‘You look like a highly effective person. What would you say is required to be highly effective?’ Flummoxed, I told her that I was not ‘highly effective’. The friend seated with me, however, was highly effective. She just looked at me, waiting for my response. I thus told her consistency is key in whatever you do. It shapes the metaphorical road on which you travel. To the extent that even if you do not think you’re going in the right direction, you are. Our reality denies this. Wananchi are frozen in the headlights of an economy in reverse. That’s why our young people are fleeing to the Middle East for work. In the process, they are disconnected from themselves.
Karl Marx’s theory of alienation describes how capitalist systems estrange workers from their labour and their own human essence. Essentially, workers find themselves “outside of themselves”. This occurs partly because they are forced to sell their labour for wages, here and in the Middle East, by the depredations of a remorseless wage economy. Our workers’ alienation from their labour (combined with emigration from home and hearth) will create a generation that is desultory, being neither here nor there. In this scrambled existence, the State pulls up the drawbridge to keep the world out, hoping our battlements will preclude battle. Yet the government’s militocratic dispensation makes conflict probable by its very posture on the domestic and international stage.
Furthermore, public money is tragically not seen as taxpayers’ money. All the while, urban blight takes root as traffic in our cities is boda-bordering on the insane, and everyone is bedding in with the corrupt. It’s like gangsters’ paradise. Despite this, our current and future generations must pick up the tab for our current governance issues. That’s what Ugandans do. They pick up the pieces where our leaders come apart at the seams. This seems to be our particular burden of history. Sometimes, though, to forestall the negativities that arise from poor governance, we create public institutions. However, public institutions do not guarantee good governance.
They qualify it through departments, agencies, and local authorities in tandem with economic and socio-political realties. Instead, our governance has fallen short. None of our candidates is talking about how our institutions must be consonant with the precepts of economic as well as political democracy. To be so would require a socialist system. One in which producers (the workers) take control of production in a blaze of industrial democracy. It would return the means of production to workers, unshackling them from a creeping serfdom and freeing them towards creative expression. One far removed from a forced, necessary means of survival where workers become mere cogs in a machine. If we can consistently achieve this, all of us can become highly effective people.