The dearth of intellectuals in the Movement and the end of learning

By Odrek Rwabwogo

"I want the world to understand this', declared Yoweri Museveni to an anxiously waiting crowd of Ugandan exiles, well-wishers of the struggle of the Ugandan people and the international media.

This was a few minutes after signing the December 1985 Nairobi peace accord between his then rebel army, the National Resistance Army (NRA) and the short-lived military government of the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) led by Tito Okello Lutwa.

He added, ‘the people of Uganda; the population, didn't start violence. I was not a soldier; I was an intellectual. Why did I become a soldier? I became a soldier to defend myself and my people against state inspired violence".

In this, perhaps unintended statement, Museveni, gave a window into the thinking that birthed the Movement, beyond its military face of the time. In these series, we have kept close to the early writing and speeches of Museveni as leader of the resistance. This is because these speeches have such an authentic tone, quite an untainted appeal flowing through naturally.

These speeches are far removed from the political correctness that comes with the wielding of power we see today. To successfully prosecute a war, one needs a good theory that informs the broader fighting strategy and operational tactics.

Just like a building contractor needs an architectural plan on which to base a structure, so is the struggle especially if it has to have staying power and its good elements recreated for future generations. That theory can only be defined and articulated by the intellectual first, the man or woman whose ability to research, think, engage and expose the tenets on which to base the struggle, is so pivotal in building an organization.

Sadly today, this theorist, this intellectual has progressively been edged out; he/she who still remains is on the fringes of the modern battles of the resistance, battles now taken over by politicians with shifting loyalties, yet these battles will define whether the party will outlive its founders.

He/she is making very peripheral contribution to policy that the government runs on today, he/she isn't in charge of the adaptation effort of the founding theory to the changed times and he/she is largely an object of derision by the young generation.

If he/she still remains active and hasn't been ‘silenced' by a job in government where all the Movement theoreticians of the 1990s have trooped to, he/she is a probably a drunkard, a poor man in material wealth one whose voice and example, doesn't help the image of the Movement. His/her image simply reinforces a perception that the organization has outlived its best of times.

How did an organisation whose thinking is founded on deep intellectual thought as a basis for fighting, come to this?

Mao Zedong's writing helped define what it takes to start small and build a formidable resistance inclusive of peasants, students, workers and the intelligentsia. This influenced the founders of the Movement. Mao further helped distill the phases of a protracted peoples war from small guerrilla units laying ambushes against enemy forces, to a mobile force with capability to disrupt communication networks of the enemy, to a large force fighting a conventional war.

The founders also read the work of Karl Marx, which helped them broaden their understanding of western societies and a deeper appreciation of the role of capitalism.

They also read Frantz Fanon who gave them early insight into the tools colonialism used for cultural domination and the need to free the African from self-hate and identifying his fundamental interest in the struggle. On this canvass, was painted a new picture with local material conditions, a domestication of the thinking to suit our circumstances, by the leaders of the Movement.

What could have happened to a leadership that was so deeply enriched in this background that it has no intellectual activity anymore to back many of its theories and decisions today?

We wouldn't need to pose these questions if it were not for the level of trivialisation of the political process today, especially the narrowing of debate on key issues or the spectre of people campaigning under a party whose values and principles they hardly understand or running on a frivolous message such as "we are of the same tribe or religion" or offering money to voters, politicians selling homes and their businesses in order to win an election, as if this is an investment with a personal return.

We got to pose the question again and again: what happened to the pure rumbustious intellectual activity that informed the theory on which programmes of the Movement were debated in the early days, whether it was the planning and winning the battles of the bush, returning kingship, privatizing state enterprises or the scrapping of student payments at universities then called ‘boom'?

The relegation of the intellectual to the borderline of thought and practice in the Movement has bred three worrying trends:

First, there is the end of learning and growth of the party based not on conviction but largely on rewards. The only preventive strike against the enemy we call ‘recidivism' (the strange phenomenon of a people who had been highly conscientized' against religions and tribes, now retreating into these cocoons to build new bases against unity), is called the teaching of ideology.

The activity of teaching tends to be led by intellectuals in any organisation, supported by practitioners of all categories. When you demean their role and eliminate them by your behaviour in an organisation, you invite practitioners with no ideological hinge who simply do ‘try and error' in policy, in execution, and in their style of governance, the way we see the Movement work today.

As an example, the West still runs on the theories of an economist called John Maynard Keynes whose work fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics by governments. On whose theory does the Movement now run? It is so diluted that we make rules on the go and our values forgotten.

The pinnacle of this moment of recidivism became very clear to me in the run up to internal party elections in 2015. The media asked one of the contestants for the position of vice chairperson of the party for western Uganda about the teaching we were conducting across the country.

His answer, hollered from the pit of his stomach, was "He (Rwabwogo) has been arguing about ideology. We are the architects of the NRM Ideology. So what is he trying to teach us? What does he want to say that we don't [already] know… We have not discerned his ideological orientation…. I don't think he has got much he is teaching us."

Earlier we had also been chastised by another senior leader as to why we were running against a historical member in the party. He asked, "Who gave you permission to teach in those districts and towns?"

Never mind that none of these leaders had cared to ask for the literature we were using even though it was public or the style of teaching we adopted, the voluntary spirit with which we had done this for years or whether the participants in our classes had any doubts about the impact and positive impression we were making.

When leaders assume that all education and intellectual activity in the party must flow from them to the people, that organisation is in danger.

It soon ceases to make fresh recruitment. It is the end of learning when an organization cannot pick fresh people who understand its principles well enough to adapt them to the changing circumstances. It is a sad day when leaders question voluntarism in a party yet no party in the world is run outside this spirit of voluntarism.

Yes, one can pay a few people to administer processes such as internal elections but parties worldwide are volunteers who coalesce around an ideal and pursue objectives that keep the party alive and recruiting.

The death of this idealism, the takeover of policy making by civil servants many times with no debate offered, the lack of teaching for many of the new entrants while the senior leaders snort around telling off anyone who tries to teach yet new comers aren't taught what we stand for, are all sad telltale signs of the evening of the Movement. Unless of course we fight through the current midnight of malaise, we won't see the dawn.

The second effect of low intellectual activity in the Movement has been the ceding of good ground to shallow thinking that pervades our political space and the media. In a speech to congress of black African writes towards the end of the 1950s, the author and theorist, Frantz Fanon said, "Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to oversimplify, very soon manages to disrupt in a spectacular fashion, the cultural life of a conquered people.

This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation and by the systematic enslaving of men and women".

What Fanon didn't add was that this cultural enslavement has a long-term effect beyond colonialism and an uncanny ability to shape intellectual activity by the elite of a former colony and the lack of questioning of any received knowledge.

Take an example of the ‘puristic' battle of human rights driven by  the opposition and the so-called civil society groups. They close their eyes to the fundamentals of state building that Uganda and Africa requires so badly and focus on elite edicts and writs delivered by the West along with its funding without asking the question of "whose rights are these?

Is it for the majority who need stability, infrastructure, and jobs or for the few who want to replace status quo with a new form of status quo? Just like those in government, there is no tolerance of belligerent thought and intellectual activity in the opposition. You either support the opposition or you aren't a democrat.

This is because there is no more intellectual centre of gravity that holds to counter this thinking. That centre used to be in the Movement. Now, it is no more. Any trumped up thinking on governance simply passes without challenge. This is partly because, in the Movement, anybody with alternative thinking is quickly subsumed into the government structure and gets too busy making a living to think of tomorrow. 

The third effect of the banishment of the intellectual from the core of the Movement has been the devaluation of the principles we stand on. A number of young people we meet in our sessions or in the media think the Movement has no core belief (read ‘no ideology'), it makes rules that suits it on the go and is full of career politicians with no idea about right and wrong.

They see the cacophony of players that are subsumed into government and imagine the organization simply exists to serve narrow interests of politicians and has no moral ground anymore to refuse anyone who has a tainted record in its ranks.

They base this on the nominees of the party chairperson into various government positions; people who defy party rules, for example, and are rewarded with posts in the end, cement undisciplined behaviour in the organisation. As a result of this, the generation that has flourished under the Movement such as lawyers, engineers, doctors, teachers and a lot of the elite are the hardest to convince to join the organisation.

A number of them even question the intentions of the organisation and see it as one devoid of internal reform; a place one goes to for free money or contracts and no attractive thought that gets anyone to cleave. This is troubling for many of us because, the future of the party is going to be built on these kinds of young people today.

Perhaps President Yoweri Museveni speaking about retaining scientists by paying them well, an act he called "bribing them with huge salaries, vehicles and other incentives" at the Dag Hammarskjold foundation conference on May 13, 1990 at Mweya safari lodge was contrite. He said, "Ideological conviction is not a very common attribute, so we cannot rely on it. 

Let us instead rely on mercenary instinct and bribe our scientists to make them stay here". Probably this "bribing" now has to be extended to leaders of the party to stay with it as times now seem to prove to us. Intellectual conviction is on the wane in the Movement and we got to restore it to its place on the table to make this organization attractive again, outside political jobs.

Next week, we will look at the role of women and culture in the battles of the resistance.

The writer is a farmer and an entrepreneur