The ability to compromise makes politics a vocation

By Samuel Baligidde

Can anybody succeed in asserting the irrelevance of moral principle in the conduct of public affairs even though according to any State, national interest is the sole valid criteria for decision making in Public Policy? National interest is sometimes incapable of objective determination except with regard to explicitly declaring a set of partisan value preferences.

Never mind that, the idea that national interest carries its own morality and makes sense only where, as in some western democracies, political order is guaranteed but the main task of the policy-makers on these shores shouldn't only be pre-occupation with reconciling the desirable with the possible.

The Public has come to learn that there is really no such thing as national interest but stated in present-day Ugandan terms only compatible national interests ought to be recognized and promoted. Moral principle is not irrelevant and should be one of the criteria guiding all government policies.

True, all policies have a political dimension but Morgenthau's theory of power and national interest which allows academicians and other people to eliminate those policies that foolishly overlook the prerequisite of power might be appealing only to the apolitical.

The tendency and decision to equate politics and the national interest with the effects of lust for power in Africa; and with the evil of violence mutilates the political reality which the ‘Realists' advocate.

Realism puts its faith in voluntary restraints, moderation and the underlying assumption of possible harmony among the State's many interests; premises that are scarcely admitted by the original postulates.

Too many factors are left out for realism to hold. Neither does the light that illuminated the landscape of Machiavelli's world.

A power monism does not explain politics when power is defined as Niccolo Machiavelli sadistically did and his disciples surprisingly still maintain during this millennium. The extent to which power politics as a hatchery of evil and violence expresses a basic human instinct is no longer questionable.

The evil of power is now rooted not in the presumed or real sinfulness of individuals alone but in situations in which even renowned do-gooders act selfishly and immorally! Discrimination between the inherent or instinctive aspects of the ‘power drive' and situational ones is not flagged.

It is by determining the risks against visible political gains that judgement about the desirable and the possible emerges. During the political computing process conception of the national interest is made. Has compromise, according to William Fox's 1949 classic essay titled "The reconciliation of the desirable and the possible" become inescapable? Most right-thinking citizens of this country seem to concur.

The ability to compromise makes politics a vocation, so to speak, only for the mature; the responsible and those who like some Ugandan politicians and statesmen of all political shades do not give up easily when they discover incongruent values juxtaposed in such a way that one or the other has to be sacrificed; not the greedy and self-centred political artificers who in this country seem to have, as philosopher Edmund Burke would have maintained, ‘forgotten their trade'!

They deserve to be the objects of public scorn when things go amiss. What is judged impossible is the pursuit of policy or deviant behaviour which endangers the very existence of the life of citizens.

Policies [or lack of them] that give rise to sadistic behaviour like what happened when a mother bled to death after giving birth to a baby or when a few get handshakes while in the wake of the present dry spell people die of hunger must be rejected.

If one arranges political objectives in order of priority, survival of the State usually takes precedence; not the individuals comprising its chief agent [the Government]. 

Surely, by the time a responsible public servant opts for action or nonaction they should consult theirs and the National Conscience [that is, if they still have any!].

The writer is a former diplomat