CELEBRATING THE NRM

On Sunday Uganda will be commemorating 34 years since the National Resistance Movement (NRM) came to power.

In the recent trek through the Luwero triangle we were reminded, informed, if we did not know, of the great sacrifice it took for the National Resistance Army (NRA) to march on and eventually capture Kampala on January 26^th 1986.

Love them or hate them the enormity of the task, the extent of the sacrifice, the NRA made cannot be discounted. It helps of course, that they were the victors, because victors are the ones who write history.

"The young, hardy and idealistic soldiers that emerged from the bush three decades ago are now older, rounder around the middle and more realistic, some would say jaded...

They found out very quickly that running a state, especially in the context of poverty, disease and war, is not as easy as it seems.  They have found that there is no place for fixed positions in the exercise of power, that while principle is important, the context in which you operate has a lot to say about how you go about your work. And now they are shocked to find that, not only is their bush war forgotten, but the achievements of the last three decades are being trivialised.

Those are the hazards of the passing of time.

In Europe to the horror of the World War II generation there is a resurgence of Nazism. In America a more isolationist policy, a throwback to the country’s pre-world war II, is gaining popularity. And in South Africa, believe it or not, there are people who hanker for the “good old days” of apartheid, and they are not all white.

President Yoweri Museveni often recounts the parable from Nkole folklore about the woman with two daughters. One was her step daughter, the more beautiful of the two. The woman trying to marry off her daughter covered the step daughter in mud, but beautified her daughter and dressed her in the finest gowns.

To the woman’s shock suitors saw beyond the grime and dirt covering the step daughter and picked her all the time.

So the NRM has laboured under the myth that they will be known by their good deeds and there is no need to communicate them. What they have done is there for all to see, self-explanatory.

However, nature abhors a vacuum and in communication, this vacuum is often filled to your detriment.

"When eight in ten Ugandans were not around in 1986, stories of sugar, paraffin and cooking oil shortages are just old women’s tales; stories of gun shots going off like popcorn every night in Kampala are seen as an attempt to make little children behave after dark; stories of how it took six 

hours to drive from Kampala to Masaka are dismissed as propaganda....

No lesser a person than Lee Kuan Yew, the legendary Singaporean president, did not give Uganda a chance. Speaking in the 1980s he thought it would take Uganda a hundred years to dig itself out of the hole it had sunk itself in with the mismanagement of the 1970s and 1980s.

There is still a lot of work to do. We need better, health care, education, security and less corruption. We need more jobs, roads and power.

But now our demands are from a higher base than the population was used to in 1986. The NRM is now a victim of its own success. 

Where we were glad to have power in our homes – even in Kampala, now we are ready to burn Umeme over a 30-minute outage; Where we were glad to be first in line at the LC’s house to get our weekly quota of sugar, now we walk to work when the price of sugar doubles; Where we were glad to be home before dark now there is traffic after dark.

Longevity is good for achieving long term programs. But

longevity comes with the danger that the fickleness of the human mind will not give credit for the foundations of the success.

Happy NRM day!