Religious leaders and Uganda's politics – more reflections

Kenyan

JF-Expert Member
Jun 7, 2012
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By Alan Tacca


Between 1981 and 1986, Gen Museveni and his NRA may have fought several bush wars.

There was of course the war that ousted Dr Milton Obote and Gen Tito Okello’s short-lived military junta. But you remember there were several guerrilla outfits and rebel leaders fighting Obote and, later, the Okellos.

An irate and scornful Obote used to refer to them collectively as bandits. But there were also wars between the diverse rebel groups; wars for supremacy, for something like the Lord of the Bandits.

Without necessarily involving direct lethal confrontation, guile, misinformation and friendly sabotage could be deployed to undermine the competition.
Mr Museveni fought and triumphed, not only as the lord of the bush lords, but over the whole of Uganda.

He talked. He wrote pamphlets, newspaper articles, and a book titled Sowing the Mustard Seed; not to mention the 10 Point Programme. Plus interviews. The job: articulating what he believed had gone wrong with Uganda, and giving his account of how his NRA restored the country.

His recent preoccupation with what has gone wrong under his rule suggests that evil has made a full circle.
Anyhow, I have referred to this background to remind ourselves that Mr Museveni has never seriously attributed Uganda’s troubled history to a deficit in religious faith and worship.

In other words, Uganda’s past rulers were not sectarian, murderous, dictatorial or corrupt and incompetent because our religious leaders had not preached enough morality; or because the citizens had not prayed enough.

No. Even just three weeks ago, with some of his peers staring at him, when the President listed 10 bottlenecks holding Africa back, he did not include weak religious engagement. Instead, he listed ‘ideological disorientation’; which – as I noted last Sunday – is packed with enough dynamite to make you explode into laughter; because it is so clearly absurd.

If I can read it, President Museveni’s body language says he finds religion a rather amusing but mostly harmless feature of society. But when he contemplates religion that is fanatical, as among the Muslim Jihadists and Christian Pentecostals, he almost certainly reflects more deeply on Karl Marx’s famous line about religion as the opiate of the people.

He perfectly understands that the religious fanatic operates at the extreme negative end on the scale of rational thought and hates the application of logic.

Museveni also probably sees that we have too much fanatical Christianity already. And he knows that religious fanaticism cannot cure social ills any more than morphine can cure cancer. If anything, fanatical Christianity may provoke Muslim and other extremisms. But precisely because religion is addictive, it will not die easily. So the politician’s most expedient – if cynical – course is to exploit it.

Besieged from several directions on issues that are intimately linked to public (office) morality, Mr Museveni happily dodges some of the pressure by laying part of his burden on the shoulders of religious leaders. Why?

Because they claim – and many of their followers believe – that morality is exclusively the responsibility of the religious sphere.

If you are not religious, you must be immoral: It is a stupid proposition, but to the religious fanatic it makes complete sense.

But if you lock morality in the religious sphere, then Museveni can escape, saying that you, the pulpit people, are the policemen of souls. Preach to our politicians and civil servants, our businessmen and the general population to stop stealing, to stop demanding or paying bribes, to work hard and compassionately in schools and hospitals; to be good citizens. If they don’t take heed, you have failed; not Museveni.

It is a ‘joke’; like the one about ‘ideological disorientation’. Otherwise religion becomes a shield protecting bad governance from attack.

Last Sunday, my article suggested – and I am ready to be challenged – that our religious leaders cannot claim greater moral authority than the rest of us to inspire our politics. And Mr Museveni will remind them of many things, but he will never remind them to ask why the countries of Northern Europe, perhaps the least religious in the Western democratic fold, are also among the best governed nations on earth.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator | altaccaone@gmail.com
 
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