For sometime now, my articles comparing Uganda and Rwanda
have generated the most intense debate on our website, my private emails and my
phone’s SMSs. President Yoweri Museveni’s supporters accuse me of doing PR for
President Paul Kagame. Many people ask why I compare the two countries and
their leaders and not other African countries. My friends have been asking me
to explain. I have yielded grudgingly.
I compare the two countries almost subconsciously. Even in
private conversations with friends, I find myself bringing out Rwanda as an
example of effective state building in Africa. I am suspicious that I am
particularly intrigued by Rwanda because although RPF was born from the NRM,
its post genocide reconstruction is setting it apart from Uganda particularly
and Africa’s general malaise of chronic corruption and incompetence.
For example, on May 14th 2009, a young man came to see me in
office. His father was awaiting discharge from Nsambya Hospital. But the
authorities were refusing to discharge the old man until the family paid
Shs750,000 in hospital fees. For every extra night the father spent there, the
hospital charged them Shs 75,000 ‘ thus making a bad situation worse. ‘I have
only Shs 300,000,’ he told me, ‘Can you assist me with the balance?’
I receive such requests almost daily from strangers, fans,
friends and relatives ‘ often extremely distant relatives. I always politely
(and sometimes even rudely) tell them I am unable to assist. But this guy’s
request was unique. For the short time I have known him, I found him a very
proud person. He would rather walk 10 kilometres than ask a person for
transport. As he sat across the table from me, his face betraying both anger
and extreme discomfort at having to literally beg to get his father out of
hospital, his vulnerability struck me like a sword. I gave him the money!
This is also the experience of everyone in Uganda with a
good job, a name and money. Our people line up at the homes and offices of MPs,
ministers, well-off relatives or strangers begging for assistance to treat
their loved ones. Every time they do that, they lose their self esteem, their
dignity, their sense of self worth ‘ everything! The humiliation they have to
endure has taught me that poverty makes a mockery of basic human dignity and
drives politics (authoritarian or democratic) towards corruption.
The failure of the public healthcare and education systems
in Africa has made better off citizens seek private sector alternatives here
and abroad. Yet given our paternalism and extended family traditions, they have
not escaped its costs. All too often, relatives, friends and constituents turn
up for assistance. The best way to avoid such obligations is to socialise their
costs through the state. Why then don’t elites in Africa wean themselves from
such onerous obligations by building functional public institutions?
A significant slice of the answer lies in the nature of our
politics. Although these social burdens are financially and personally
inconvenient, they are politically and socially profitable. People with money
and power exploit the vulnerability of the poor; by helping them with token
gifts of fees or medical bills, they create a social debt. The resultant
gratitude is expressed through political support and/or social deference.
From this perspective, institutional failure seems to me a
political and social strategy. It furnishes political rulers, for example, the
opportunities to selectively extend personal favours to individuals and groups
to reward loyalty and/or rent political support. Dysfunction is the way the
system works, not the way it fails. It offers both those wielding power and
those subject to it joint gains through corruption.
The bureaucrat or the politician will steal the very money
that is meant to build the healthcare system. However, a portion of the monies
so stolen may also be spent on a few individuals and/or groups as assistance in
times of need. For many individuals and households, rather than forge political
organisations to demand improved service delivery, they do better by seeking to
become individual exceptions to the general problem.
By supplicating before the president, they can secure the
money to evacuate a critically ill relative to a hospital in Spain. A meeting
with the First Lady can secure cash for their children to study abroad on
‘State House Scholarships’. By begging the MP, they can secure transport for
the dead body of a loved one from the city to the village for burial. It is
through such acts that governments in Africa secure individual compliance with
practices that inflict collective harm on the general population. It is also
through these measures that governments fragment resistance to their misrule.
This provides us an important insight into the political
utility of corruption in Africa. Those who steal public funds are not merely
seeking to build private fortunes ‘ although it manifests itself that way.
Corruption furnishes resources to build political coalitions. So it is not
merely a criminal act aimed at enriching the individuals involved. Corruption
is a social system through which power is organised, exercised and reproduced.
The institutional and policy failures so outlined are not a
product of dictatorial rule. Both democratic and authoritarian governments in
Africa have been unable to insulate themselves from particularistic pressures.
Africa’s major challenge therefore is how to reform its administrative systems
to ensure an impersonal application of policy.
It is here that I find Rwanda setting itself apart from the
rest of Africa. A month after the aforementioned young man visited my office
for help, I went to Kigali. A friend, who is a lieutenant in the Rwandan army,
picked me from the airport. He told me that a month earlier he had felt a
headache while playing tennis in the morning. When he went to the military
hospital at Kanombe, they referred him to King Faisal hospital. A scan there
revealed he had a brain haemorrhage. By 3pm, he and his wife were airborne in a
fully equipped air ambulance to South Africa for medical attention.
To save his life, my friend did not have to supplicate at
State House Kigali or call the army commander. He did not leverage his
connections with powerful people in the system. He had Military Medical
Insurance (MMI) like every member of that nation’s security services does ‘ and
today, like almost every citizen of that poor country. What he got were not
favours from friends and political connections but rights from his insurance.
As we drove along the neatly lined palm trees, properly constructed pedestrian
walkways, my friend spoke with an air of confidence and national pride.
I can cite many examples like this in Rwanda but none in
Uganda and most of the nations of Africa. Yet most African countries have
better institutional foundations, greater democratic traditions and richer
economies than Rwanda. But they do not (and cannot) deliver such good quality
public services to anonymous citizens impersonally as we see in Rwanda. Of
course this is not to say there is no political or personal favouritism in
Rwanda. Rather it is to demonstrate that there is an active attempt to build
systems that can deliver public services without recourse to personal
discretion.
This strategy of rule in Rwanda baffles me. It dis-empowers
Kagame. He does not get elites supplicating at his feet for help to save a life
of a loved one as we saw with Brig. Noble Mayombo in Uganda. His investment in
effective and efficient delivery of healthcare does not make political sense
because it makes him lose control over people’s lives. If you build a good public
healthcare system, you cannot block your enemies from using it. That is not
politically attractive because you lose ability to exercise discretion
selectively to reward your supporters and penalise your enemies.
In societies where elites lack autonomous sources of income
outside of state patronage, the best way to build political loyalty is to make
them dependant on the ‘big man.’ Under such circumstances, it pays to have
dysfunctional public goods and services. Because then, you can selectively
decide who to give an air ticket for his wife’s treatment in Germany, who to
lend a presidential jet for evacuation in case of a medical emergency, whose
children get State House scholarships to study abroad and who gets a Land
Cruiser to navigate through the myriad potholes.
Rwanda’s reforms turn this logic of African politics on its
head. The state seeks to build effective public institutions. In doing this,
incumbents rob themselves of the power to selectively give privileged access to
better health and education services in return for political loyalty. From a
rational view, it seems Rwanda’s rulers work against their own political
interest. Why? I believe this is largely because Kagame is a true statesman.
Statesmen try to build institutions that can develop perspectives
independent of how an individual leader personally exercises power. The
critical factor in state evolution is the impersonal application of public
policy. When you fall ill, you do not need personal relations with any office
holder. You get a service on the basis of your claim to citizenship.
Why does Kagame resist pressures to dish out personalised
favours whereas Museveni gets pulled and tossed by them? We can speculate that
given Uganda’s social diversity, Museveni has to negotiate with many powerful
ethnic and religious interests. This possibly compromises his objectives. In
Rwanda, the genocide may have destroyed all other centres of power. This left
Kagame a free hand to implement his vision without significant challenge from
other societal forces.
Yet circumstances can only offer an opportunity. Which
leader will utilise it well depends on their managerial competences and the
moral imperatives that drive them. The military victories in Uganda (1986) and Rwanda
(1994) offered both Museveni and Kagame opportunities for reform. It seems to
me that Museveni was unable to take full advantage of the potential contained
in the opportunity in 1986; Kagame has taken full advantage of his.
What could be the cause of this variation? As noted above,
Uganda’s diversity limited Museveni’s legroom for reform while Rwanda’s
homogeneity may have furnished Kagame the right leverage. But it also seems to
me that personal characteristics are at play.
I think Kagame has greater personal discipline than
Museveni. He can pursue a national project he believes in with unwavering
resolve, a factor that explains his authoritarian and somewhat intolerant
streak. He is intolerant of corruption and incompetence but equally as a negative
side-effect of this, he is intolerant of free speech.
Museveni, on the other hand, behaves like a chameleon;
always adapting his position to suit his most immediate political advantage. So
he tolerates corruption and incompetence because they serve his political aims.
This makes government incapable of institutional coherence to systematically
clump down on free media; the positive side-effect of which is free speech.
Yet it seems to me that Museveni’s calculations are personal
(to stay in power) and not national (to develop Uganda). Thus, instead of
serving his articulated national project, he is constantly responding to
pressures from mobilised demand groups ‘ ‘ring fencing’ elective positions in
Bunyoro, granting every clan that demands a new district etc.
Some people think this is a sign of Museveni’s democratic
credentials. Yet the cynical manipulation of popular demands to win short term
electoral advantage is largely a sign of political opportunism that is
injurious to the long term interests of Uganda.
Some of my friends argue that Kagame’s unwavering pursuit of
set objectives is a evidence of his authoritarian tendency. Yet, though
somewhat suggestive of an intolerance streak, Kagame acts in a principled way
because he has a strong moral purpose behind his power ‘ to serve a cause that
is bigger than him i.e. to build his country.
Therefore, whichever way you look at it, the debate above
offers considerable grist for the comparative mill of these two nations, two
revolutions and two presidents.
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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