A key innovation that the National Resistance Movement brought with it to power in Uganda 32 years ago, was the idea of “local leadership.”

It isn’t that Ugandan had had no local leaders. Before Museveni, Uganda had a mayumba kumi (10 houses) system. Every 10 households had an elected leader, also known as mayumba kumi.

This system was imported from Tanzania after Idi Amin was thrown out by exiles who for years had been hiding in that country and plotting to overthrow the government.

The mayumba kumi laid greater emphasis on snooping on their neighbours than on improving their quality of life.

Indeed, by the time the system was disbanded, they had become notorious agents of the state, playing overt security-related roles, mainly because of the Museveni-led insurgency. This did not endear them to members of the public.

And before the mayumba kumi, there were appointed chiefs. They may have played security roles, but that was hardly obvious. For the most part, however, their mandate was mainly to enforce regulations pertaining to hygiene, local taxation, food security and the like.

Then Museveni and company came in with their “Resistance Councils” (RCs), first introduced as instruments for promoting the interests of the rebel movement, not least by organising and administering populations in areas they had captured and occupied.

The innovative aspect of the RCs, which after the war were renamed Local Councils (LCs), was that leadership shifted from one elected or appointed leader to 10 elected individuals, each with a specific function, covering among other things welfare, security, health, and education.

In their early days, they were widely hailed as real exemplars of “democracy in action,” not least because they operated on the basis of active and regular consultation with the people who had elected them.

LCs even had Local Defence Units (LDUs) whose role was to guard communities against insecurity and criminality, both of which had come to characterise the lives of ordinary citizens up and down the country.

Other early-day roles included distributing what at the time were scarce commodities, such as sugar and salt, but we shall not go into that on this occasion.

Along the way, “something happened” to LCs, village-level LCs in particular. They have remained important, of course. However, they have long ceased playing the roles that were once designated for them, or they have tried to carry on performing them, but with markedly diminished commitment.

Local Defence Units disappeared long ago, by which time they had degenerated into the very agents of insecurity and criminality, they had been conceived to combat.

The LCs’ role as promoters and enforcers of household-level hygiene and healthy living can now be seen in frightening statistics showing significant numbers of Ugandans lacking latrines and sources of clean water.

There is a view, admittedly not researched, that what has caused such atrophy in many of their functions has been lack of leadership renewal.

Until earlier last week, it had been 17 years since elections had been held. The reason the government always gave was that it lacked the necessary resources. With no threat of elections hanging over their heads, the incumbents had become comfortable and lazy.

Well, on Tuesday July 10, “democracy” eventually caught up with them. Given the relative lack of enthusiasm Ugandans show for elections other than at the presidential level, though, it was hardly expected that people would turn up in droves to vote for village leaders, sometimes spending hours queuing up. Nor was it expected that the competition would be as intense as it turned out to be.

Nor even was it expected that candidates would take the campaigns so seriously as to hire vehicles to be driven around in emulation of presidential and parliamentary candidates, and dress up in their Sunday best on the campaign trail. Why all this happened has become the subject of much public discussion.

The answers, it seems, lie in a number of developments over the past three decades. In the beginning, village leaders would campaign and be considered for election on their individual merit.

The government encouraged members of the public to vote for individuals they believed possessed the ability to lead and to do things they saw as important for the community as a whole.

Now even village leaders are elected on the basis of their membership of political parties, and have their party machineries behind them.

For party supporters, therefore, it is important to turn up and vote for your candidate. For the candidates, nothing is to be taken for granted, thus the spectacle of the hopefuls pulling out all the stops to impress and political parties providing funding to run campaigns in communities where everyone is supposed to know the candidates very well, in which case do-or-die campaigning should be unnecessary.

And then there is the question of what impact multiparty politics at the level of village leadership, with all the divisiveness it engenders, will have on the capacity of members to work together for the good of their communities.

It is too early to tell, but it is hardly farfetched to imagine it causing deep divisions in some communities and impairing necessary collective decision-making and action, the very things the NRM once sought to promote.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]