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Youth is wasted on the young, at least in Ugandan politics today

Saturday June 14 2014

A bunch of talented young musicians that you can’t ignore have hit the Ugandan scene over the past one or two years. They are bold yet polished and make our famous Jose Chameleone and Juliana Kanyomozi seem old and yesterday-ish.

These daring new kids like Iryn Ntale and Rena Nalumansi make you happy to have lived long enough to see Uganda’s art of tomorrow today.

But besides the performing arts, you see promise in other fields that restores your faith in youth. In sport, young Ugandans are taking on the world and excelling.

In scientific research, several young men and women are being wooed from Kampala by institutions abroad that get to learn about their exploits at our under-resourced universities. And thousands of less gifted youth are venturing out into the outside world at great personal risk to seek honest work and invest for the future.

The one field that has however failed to attract quality youth is politics. Somehow, as decent youth of talent and industry join other sectors, in politics it seems mostly the dregs are invited or accommodated.

Unlike in the years before and soon after Independence when the youth were making big contributions to national emancipation, today the youth seem only keen on bringing their most obnoxious traits to politics.

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In meeting an important person, their main agenda is “facilitation” money. These days these repugnant youths can even talk threateningly to a most high ranking personality, vowing to work against him if he does not refund money they allege to have spent in unsubstantiated “mobilisation.”

I think the last time a focused youth nearly shook the political establishment was over two decades ago when one Charles Rwomushana created a “needy” students movement that quickly propelled him to student presidency at Makerere University. Since needy people are the majority, Rwomushana started wielding unfathomable power.

He stood for the Constituent Assembly and easily won a seat.

Anecdotal stories about his campaign have it that while his opponents carried bags of money to bribe voters, Rwomushana hit the trail armed with a hoe and would offer to dig in voters’ gardens. The disarmed voters showered him with votes after “eating” his opponents’ money.

At that rate, Rwomushana would probably be president by now, but he was given a security job in the president’s office and his political star started nose-diving. He got power alright, which made the senior military officers of yesterday hate him with a passion, but his popularity was gone, possibly for good.

No young politician has ever repeated the Rwomushana feat. And the now older Rwomushana shows no sign of electrifying national politics again.

Today we have political youths who make you want to go to exile. They have mastered intrigue and extortion. They intimidate older politicians. They talk of mobilising votes. They are proud to declare how they belong to this or that senior politician.

But look for constructive efforts from them and you may as well search for a needle in the proverbial haystack. If you compare Ugandan adolescent training over the past decade to the digestive system, it seems to have sent the proteins to science, the vitamins to performing arts, the sugars to sports and the solid waste to politics.

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