Having stayed in Uganda for years, Dr Paul Williams who recently led a debate on Uganda’s democracy in the UK should have seized the happenstance of his diplomatic trappings in the British parliament to portray the true picture of a country that hosted him for years.
Unless his stay was not meant to enrich his appreciation of the concept “development”, there was no way his address would be anchored on a contorted euphemism of President Yoweri Museveni being “a barrier” to Uganda’s development. Right from the start of his roiling the murky political waters, it was clear that it was going to be an uphill task to convince his compatriots in the British Parliament that Museveni who has superintended over an economy that has seen annual growth figures above 7% was a “barrier”.
It is not easy to cast the economic advancement of the Museveni government to the cruel barrel of history without appreciating the statistics of health, education, energy, infrastructure, security and the judicial system since 1986 to date. Of course, there are challenges faced, just like any other emerging economies to finance the budget, but that does not sully the shine on strides made. You see, the cancer of populism is metastasized in views like that of Dr Williams. The cardinal purpose of his address was to take the scion of the burning spear to the British parliament with the vain hope that the MPs are so gullible not to discern his inverted image of the economic state of Uganda he had wanted to portray. No wonder, it got the scorn it deserves. It never got the intended attention, the audience was just a handful and the crown was when the British government applauded Uganda’s economic strides and its role in both regional and international geopolitics.
To proclaim an upstart as the beacon of hope to the challenges of Uganda was not only naïve but a total insult to common sense. The House of commons is not a stage for theatrics — that’s why the Stafford MP Jeremy Lefroy dismissed his over-ornate version of Uganda and Dundee MP Chris Law, lauded Uganda for “its expansive policy on refugees, making it the third largest host of immigrants”.
His perspective rendered Dr Williams florid exposition as lacking in depth and ill-conceived. Democracy is an organic process, unique to specific settings. Each country has a unique superstructure that cannot be aped for purposes of amusing others, that is why when the British are comfortable to be led by a monarch, the Ugandans would question how a non-elected person would be a head of their country. That is the structural uniqueness of the two countries. So, for Dr Williams to evince that Museveni’s long stay in power is a barrier to development is a fussy attempt to rewrite our history. Before Museveni, there were seven governments that collectively shared twenty four years, therefore, if the issue was merely changing leaders, we would be rivaling the world economic powers, however with the current leadership the development trajectory took a positive turn due to leadership stability. So, to dismiss the role of length of tenure in power is negating the power of history.