The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Understanding the true forces behind Uganda’s Human Rights Movement
COMMENT | NNANDA KIZITO SSERUWAGI | The American philosopher Eric Hoffer studied mass movements and penetrated them with such deep insights that he exposed their true nature in his 1951 work, The True Believer. We can trace similar psychological influences among adherents of almost all of them, among which one of the newest lights in the bulb is the human rights movement. Hoffer’s insights clarify not just why mass movements arise to challenge the status quo but also give a glimpse into the sense of individual “celebritism” and ideals that make leaders of these movements assume high moral pedestals from which they judge everybody, often leading to extremism and fanaticism within their circles.
Many of us are ordinary people leading ordinary lives. As conscious beings, we can sometimes get frustrated with the drudgery of life and thirst for purpose and crave attention and hunger for meaning. But our individuality scarcely feeds these cracks of emptiness. We may not be as smart, talented, or lucky to rise above our circumstances.
That’s where collective causes come in. It is easy to become a hero, not by attending to your weaknesses but by projecting your frustration onto larger systems such as the state and championing every other ordinary person’s frustration with systemic challenges as your own. You become a martyr of the downtrodden because that self-sacrifice requires fewer talents and limited discipline than the ability to be a great scientist, a skilled engineer, or even an ordinary health worker carrying the burdens of public health day after day.
The path to radical transformation is attractive to human rights activists not because they sincerely believe they can change society by tweeting, marching, or insulting their enemies but because it brings them self-fulfilment and public congratulation in the face of shared frustration with life and all its challenges in a misgoverned third-world country. It is also attractive because it thrives not on your personal accountability as an individual in your family or personal or professional life but on eternally projecting your moralism against a static enemy, the failing government.
So, building a career in human rights activism, where your bread is buttered by criticising governance failures, is to be in booming business forever. Even a crackdown on your earnings, for instance, when the government blocks your bank accounts, only fuels your business with more capital because it legitimises you to the frustrated but gullible public as well as your funders.
It is true that Uganda suffers profound governance debts. Our people are poor. Our economy is weak. Our government (mis)functions through corruption. Our judiciary sometimes serves injustice. Some sectors in the state bureaucracy are highly incompetent. These are hackneyed truths taken advantage of sometimes by human rights activists.
However, what usually goes uncritiqued is the framework of incentives behind human rights activism. It is not just driven by the high calling to transform governance and change society, one cartoon or one digital graphics banner at a time. The complete story of our NGOs and celebrity activists can only be told when we study what sustains them. They are sustained by personal and structural phenomena. As stated already, on an individual level, activism is anchored in moral signalling and career-building anger directed against perennially failing systems like the government. Governmental failures are sometimes irrelevant because to satisfy the inherent emptiness of an activist, something external must be accused of failure; if there is no crisis, it must be created.
Then comes in donor funding. The incentive structure of an industry that donates to organisations and individuals fighting evil African governments is such that it functions not based on the genuine improvement in local conditions of our people, but on the narrative-shaping by activists that emphasises how wicked our governments are becoming every passing day. In that case, there is an inverted symbiotic relationship between governance failures and human rights activism, where activism is the ultimate, intimate beneficiary.
Externalising blame for one’s personal fate as well as the collective dilemma of our societies onto an eternal enemy like the government creates a sense that the transformation of society is the only path to personal redemption. Incremental reform in governance and economic livelihood pales into insignificance because the impassioned energy driven by activism highlights social ills as a singular responsibility of the government.
Perhaps the hallmark of Hoffer’s critique of mass movements, which I have domesticated to Uganda’s human rights movement, is the unifying power of hatred. If you want to unite people around something, give them a common enemy. The enemy doesn’t even have to be real – and I doubt the devil (mankind’s greatest enemy) is real. President Museveni’s government is the unifying enemy in Uganda. The solidarity among activists is forged around a common hatred for this Museveni monster. Whoever says anything good, or even neutral about this monster becomes an enemy of the holy choir of activists. To belong to their tribe, you must renounce their enemy, speak their conference gibberish, and reinforce all their biases.
Collective grievance, shared hatred, and cheap heroism are not tenets of a movement that is genuine about solving governance challenges. Instead, it undermines the quiet struggles of ordinary civil servants, public officials, striving entrepreneurs, parents, and many folks who show up every day to improve Uganda, not by making themselves the subject of everybody’s attention and admiration as moral and courageous activists, but by improving their personal lives and their communities at the grassroots.
I do not know if, a century from now, when our people look back at our time with the retrospective insight of hindsight, their heroes will be American and European Union-decorated activists. Unless it so happens that our history, like much of our past, remains written by our epistemic colonisers. The West’s decorated heroes of Africa today in the human rights space may, unfortunately, go down in history as the political martyrs of our time.
The human rights activists can hopefully reflect on these questions, just as they make a living by questioning the government. The reality of human rights abuses and governance failures in Uganda cannot be dismissed. It is also true that several activists are driven by a genuine conviction in the utility of their trade. However, the structure in which their work is entangled, with the biases in the foreign networks that fund, award, and promote them, and their individual hubris, raises the questions of this essay.
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The writer is a Ugandan thinking about Uganda.
