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.
