President Museveni has often warned Ugandans about the risk of African recolonisation. With rather extravagant language, he has remarked that we are too busy enjoying ourselves with the pettiness of our existence as the pieties of ideological clarity are overlooked.
In fact, it is possible that if the colonisers were to make a second coming, they’d find us dancing paka chini; enraptured by capitalism’s dance of the seven veils, as it were.
To sit out such a dance, the President has offered the three-legged stool of political and economic integration (pan-Africanism), robust defence mechanisms, and rapid advancement in science and technology.
Throughout his presidency, Mr Museveni has rightly argued that Africa’s historical vulnerability to colonisation stemmed from internal division and technological stagnation, and that modern global dynamics present a similar threat if the continent remains fragmented.
However, while Africa is balkanised by its numerous countries not becoming one, Uganda is atomised by its many districts, threatening our potential oneness. Thus, Ugandan unity should be wholesome as an example of how Africa can become whole.
This implies a more socialist approach to economic management, one that the President probably secretly favours. We are all aware of his Marxist roots, given colour of fact by how the National Resistance Movement/Army (NRA/M) used Maoist rhetoric and tactics to prosecute and win a Bush War.
This was partly pragmatic as Milton Obote’s 1980s economic policies were inherently capitalist, representing a complete U-turn from his own previous socialist ideology.
During his first presidency in the late 1960s, Obote championed the ‘Move to the Left’ and the Common Man’s Charter (1969), which aimed to nationalise private companies and shift Uganda toward a socialist, State-controlled economy.
However, his second administration (Obote II, 1980-1985) let the market decide, floating the Ugandan Shilling and removing price controls on consumer goods. Obote also actively partnered with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. To secure their loans, he had to accept their ‘Washington Consensus’ model, which relies entirely on deregulation, fiscal austerity, and private-sector-led growth.
The NRA/M took a different and more populist tack by championing a social revolutionary ideology that required a fundamental social revolution towards unity. This entailed the seizure of political power by a ‘protracted peoples’ struggle’ or mass movement to control the State-as a structural precondition for moving from capitalism to socialism.
This would minimise income inequality and do away with Obote’s nascent plutocracy or rule of the rich in favour of the public ownership of the means of production. An upshot of this would be the dismantling of the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) state machinery and replacing it with worker- or peasant-led decentralised assemblies known as Resistance Committees.
It was a radical ideology, one that the government would have to actually implement if it were to seriously make an attempt at unity based on politico-economic inclusivity. Anything less would really open the government up to the charge of being mouthing Marxists.
This would ironically draw further similarities to China under Mao Zedong, according to Russian leader Joseph Stalin. He famously dismissed Mao Zedong as a ‘margarine Marxist’.
Stalin used the term ‘margarine’-which is a cheap substitute for real butter-to imply that Mao was an imitation or ‘ersatz’ communist rather than a true orthodox Marxist.
By spouting pan-Africanist ideology and not walking its original talk, the NRM government might conceivably be margarine pan-Africanist and thereby failing to butter the bread of unity.