Seems you can’t achieve “balance” by giving a job to a king
Wednesday February 22 2017
One of the things Ugandans have come to expect over the period President Yoweri Museveni has been in power is that appointments to public office, especially to positions that are deemed to be politically important, should be “balanced.” It means they should reflect the ethnic, religious and regional diversity of the country’s population.
It all started with efforts to create harmony and a sense of inclusiveness after the NRM came to power, following years of political violence and the divisions it had created.
Much has changed since then, including the destruction of the national consensus many believed or hoped would become a permanent feature of politics.
However, the deliberate balancing of appointments has carried on and even found its way into opposition groups. Even they balance appointments to shadow Cabinets.
There is therefore a sense in which balancing has become part of the political culture in Uganda. Truth be told, much of it is merely for show. Granted, appointees go on to enjoy the trappings of office, including, for some, riding in big cars that are preceded and followed by police or military vehicles with wailing sirens.
Fundamentally, though, only a few, a very few, really matter.
Others are mere window dressing. But that hardly matters to ordinary folk. What matters is that someone from their part of the country, their religion or their language group is included.
They see the appointees as representing them and as proof that they, too, have “a share of the national cake.”
It is nonsense, but also important. Nothing shows its importance better than the wild partying that, in many part of the country, greets the appointment of this or that person to this or that position.
Hardly anyone ever asks whether the person in question is fit for the position they will occupy.
And so it must have come as a great surprise to many that when President Museveni did what he must have believed was good and bound to be popular and appointed one William Gabula Nadiope as ambassador in charge of special duties in the Office of the President, the appointment triggered much anger in the appointee’s home region and among many of his people wherever they are found.
The thing is, Gabula is no ordinary mortal. He is a king.
Clearly, to President Museveni this carries far less meaning than it does to Gabula’s people, the Basoga, to whom it goes without saying that Gabula should not work for, answer to, or take orders or instructions from anybody. Period.
To put him in a position where he has to, or which implies that he has to is, to the Basoga or to large numbers of them at any rate, to diminish him and undermine the dignity of their kingdom.
As with every controversial issue, there is dissent. Some Basoga see the appointment as offering the king a range of opportunities, not least for earning a living, given that his subjects are unable or not sufficiently organised to look after him and enable him to live as befits a monarch.
A broke king, they argue, is both a burden on and useless to his people and their region. Perhaps most powerful of all the arguments in favour of his taking up the appointment is that the 28-year old monarch, with a Masters degree in economics, ought not to idle away his time, but to put whatever skills he has acquired to use in the service of the country and, by extension, his kingdom.
Powerful as this is as a justification for his taking up formal employment by the state of Uganda, the argument also points to a certain incoherence in government policy in general and, specifically, in Museveni’s own thinking and aspirations.
Museveni has long been a strong advocate of Uganda’s education system being reoriented from producing job seekers to churning out job creators. He has not stopped at merely talking.
He has gone on and demonstrated his commitment to enabling young people to create their own jobs and employment for others by handing out billions of shillings of taxpayer’s money to individual youths and youth groups to establish income-generating ventures across the country.
As I write, the government is busy implementing a youth livelihoods project that seeks to turn idle young people into rural entrepreneurs and producers of things.
The last time I looked, its shortcomings aside, many young people had taken advantage of it and set themselves up as farmers, carpenters, welders, traders, and jua kali fabricators of this and that.
These are the young people Museveni has long been looking for, real champions of his aspirations to turn the country’s youth into producers, not simply consumers.
Now that poses the question: Why is he the same person insisting on turning the young, energetic and presumably creative King Nadiope into a job-seeker?
Why not make him the symbol or at least one of the symbols of his campaign to make young people embrace a culture of working for themselves and demonstrating that, for people who have been to school, life is not simply about seeking employment but also creating jobs? If such thinking is good for commoners, why not for kings?
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]