MUSEVENI HAS THE LAST LAUGH ON CORRUPTION?

Marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout spelled it out a long time ago. That when you are the market leader one of the key ways of bolstering your position is always be aware of what the contenders are up to, and then hijack their effort.

The Anti-corruption walk this week that was led by President Yoweri Museveni may one day serve as a test case for that very theory.

Coming up to the 2021 election the strategists must have worked out that the biggest Achilles heel of this government is the growing corruption, or at least the perception that corruption is growing. So how to prevent the opposition from taking it on as their rallying cry? Own the fight against corruption.

"As was pointed out somewhere Museveni was actually demonstrating against his own government....

So where does that leave the opposition? They have to hope that after the fanfare of the walk, government falls back to business as usual. Despite the President’s best intentions, the money is on that being the outcome.

Corruption is not unique to Uganda.

Across the border in Kenya the government is working hard to fill a hole in the budget that was created by officials who cooked the books, projecting higher revenues and underreporting expenditure. In South Africa once proud enterprises like South African Airlines, power company, Eskom and media house, SABC are all but dead, buried under the weight of corruption and mismanagement in the last two decades.

Dealing with corruption there will require unique approaches specific to them as it will here.

But let us walk through this process. So countries that are not corrupt how did they get there?  

In medieval Europe there were kings who had supreme power. They descended from the strongest cavemen, who through physical might imposed their will on their hunter-gatherer communities.

As these communities grew in size they settled down in one place. Power shifted from the muscle bound caveman to the man who by working his fields could command the most surpluses. He became the leader of the now larger tribe.

But he had his cronies who were shoring him up. The resources of the tribe – paid to the crown as tribute, were not enough to go around, so they started wars of conquest and expansion, and shared in the spoils of war and the enlarged resource pool.

But meanwhile the collective surpluses were also used to pay the artists, the thinkers and innovators. Out of innovation came the industrial revolution, which created a new industrial class who became a counter to the absolute power of the realm.

Through protracted negotiations, that were often bloody, the realm ceded some of its power in exchange for retaining its lands and exalted position in society. In some places France and Russia this progression of events went spectacularly wrong for the ruling class.

What the industrialists sued for were more objective rules for the management of society, that did not depend on the whims of one mad ruler or another, which effectively rolled back corruption. 

"Corruption thrives in situations where there are huge discretionary powers allowed the leadership, which can easily degenerate into impunity....

Long story short, if there is no credible counter to governments, corruption will flourish. You cannot shame corrupt governments into good behavior, they have to be compelled. To expect them, out of the goodness of their hearts, if there is any goodness left, to mend their ways, is an exercise in futility.

Meanwhile the corrupt are not asleep and are actively sabotaging the aforementioned evolution. They coopt, wear down or get rid of all together the anti-corruption activists as long as they don’t coalesce into a real threat to the corrupts’ power.

Maybe we can short circuit this process. We can’t wait the hundreds of years it too Europe to organize itself. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Some people point to other countries where leaders have put the fear of god in their citizens and no one dare steal a shilling. They want that absolute power here but only to fight corruption. But still that is arbitrary power that doesn’t build institutions, shocking as it seems, it’s a regression rather than progression from where Uganda is today.

So we are back to where we started.