Temper learning ideology with a genuine change of heart

By Fr. Fred Jenga

I followed the recent orientation programme of newly elected NRM Members of Parliament at the National Leadership Institute at Kyankwanzi.  At the time, one key point that kept running through news reports was the emphasis on learning the NRM ideology.

Of course, there was nothing wrong with learning ideology, but my concern is that learning ideology without tempering it with a humane concern for the people leaves ideologues more concerned about a system than the people it is supposed to serve.

Needs of people have to be put first and systems second - except in rare cases where a political system morphs into a religion.

I would like to amplify a topic that Honourable Janet Museveni addressed at the Leadership Institute - the subject of servant leadership.

What a breath of fresh air that was from the normative Marxist-Leninist political thought about state formation, economic systems, political history, or construction of political parties' characteristic of such schools! Given where we are as country, the formation of Uganda's political leadership needs to go beyond the formation of their minds to include a formation of their hearts.

Training politicians in political ideology without teaching them what it means to be good human beings with obligations to other people creates a calibre of leaders who are callous or insensitive. Built within the concept of servant leadership is a change of gaze from ourselves to the people entrusted to us.

We urgently need a conversion of hearts by the political class in the country. We need to have people who are compassionate and can be moved by the suffering of poor, regular Ugandans. The current indifference or inability to feel for the other, dramatised through flagrant and grotesque corruption in sectors such as healthcare will destroy us as a community.  

What I perceive as the betrayal of the current crop of Ugandan political leaders is that they have failed to look at the world from the perspective of regular Ugandans in the villages or slums. The majority look at the world from the perspective of their wealthy political pedestals - one that skewed and gives them a distorted understanding of what everyday people have to grapple with.

Authentic servant leaders are first and foremost occupied with understanding where their people are in the operative socio-economic matrices of life, and then apply their political efforts beginning from the identified tangent. That is what distinguishes genuine leaders from veiled economic opportunists merely scheming to exploit an already overburdened populace.

Acknowledgement has to be made that we are making good progress in different sectors of the country, but if we are to stay the course, then those behind the political wheels will need to be even more invested in the improvement of the lives of the people beyond what is happening now.

I have lately been thinking about the late Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. He needs to be rediscovered and held up again as a shining example of the kind of servant political leadership that the African continent urgently needs.

Nyerere was an incorruptible and almost ascetic political figure to whom masses in Tanzania and beyond opened up because they thought he genuinely cared about them, cared about their families, and cared about whole of Tanzania. His Ujamaa political experiment might have failed, but people could tell that he cared about them.

The writer is a Catholic priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross