When they sleep - our Presidents don’t dream

Arguably – it will take the mental-health disciplines of neuroscience and psychology years of sardonically repudiated research proposals, to establish the chronic inability of our nations’ commanders-in-chief to replay the film-rolls in their brains during their hours of sleep.

This intriguing phenomenon could be justified on the basis of behavioral psychology, and the social-science underlying its motivation.

What happens to people who feel they have achieved all there is to achieve in this world?

They very easily stop attempting, and begin a steep descent into regression.

This could explain why Presidents, especially those in poor societies like Africa, become less enterprising and industrious, once they have been in office long enough.

They begin to grow complacent.

Because until only recently, most Africans were born into fairly obscure communities in small villages, where one could live life to the ripe old age of ninety without travelling as much as fifty kilometers out of their homeland – the idea of national Presidency, where one is constantly trailed by foreign media and required to make television speeches for a global audience, is inordinately appealing, and can easily become the acme of aspiration for many.

These sorts of incentives perhaps partly explain why political contestation in African countries is an unusually desperate, do or die affair.

Because alternative avenues of self-advancement and societal recognition like academia, sports and the arts are grossly underfunded and depend for their success upon the charity of politicians, for many, politics offers the only way out of the shadowed recesses of obscurity into the luminescence of fame’s broad-lit halls.

This is why otherwise accomplished academics like Uganda’s Professor Baryamureeba or Liberia’s Johnson Sirleaf, music celebrities like Senegal’s Youssou N'Dour or our own Ragga Dee, sports stars like Liberia’s George Weah or The Philippines’ Manny Pacquiao; have used the respective non-political pedestals of their fame to eke their way into mainstream politics – in a bid to guarantee their economic security and attain ‘‘self-actualization’’.

Even Senegal’s Poet-President, the very famous Leopold Sedar Senghor – is said to have written his best poetry in the years preceding his presidency; long before writing was relegated in importance by the ‘‘more urgent’’ business of state management and chairing cabinet meetings.

On a lighter note, the fact that the Chair of Uganda’s Electoral Commission is a professional Mechanical Engineer, who would be more productively employed in the Ministry of Works or its equivalents, says a lot about the state of our nation's politics.

Why should election management, an otherwise straightforward process, require someone to ‘‘engineer’’ it?

The transition in vocations never seems to occur in the reverse, though.

To have a once famous politician abandoning politics to join the music industry, or engage in ground-breaking doctoral research is simply unheard of.

And while most of us have scoffed at and dismissed as comical, Mr. Museveni’s attempts to become a recording artist with his two ‘‘hit’’ songs thus, it would be wise for Ugandans to unanimously and enthusiastically support our President's budding music career.

Perhaps if we could somehow convince the good old General that a career as a professional musician is as financially viable as that of Head-of-State, he would be willing to reconsider his present intentions of life-presidency.

The culture that all other occupations in society are a means to an end – politics being that end – has to be surmounted.

And Mr. Museveni himself should lead the way by joining alternative careers like music where he has already tried his hand (or at least been seen to do so).

Competitive politics, unlike heritable leadership like Kingship, is also unique in the sense that it fills its participants, and the victors therein, with an irrational sense of accomplishment, and appeals to the exciting, innate human trait of ‘‘vanquishing the odds’’.

For while most Kings can rest easy, enjoying the fruits of their bloodlines without being questioned, and killing off any rival claimants to the throne without penalty - the average African President has constantly to pay ground-rent for his position; by explaining his decisions to contemptible peasants, having his commonsense constantly questioned, making peace with enemies, entering into uncomfortable alliances with people he would rather shoot, and subjecting his credentials to illiterate and ignorant voters every five or so years.

Matters are made worse, if like in Uganda’s case, the President manages to convince people that he liberated and brought them security – notwithstanding that in truth, all he liberated was his own stomach, and the only security he brought was the one he had taken away in the first place, by rebelling against an elected government.

This is why Kings, without the slightest threat to their Lordship and often on trivial grounds like involvement in illicit love affairs, find it easy to abdicate their thrones and leave all the easy glory behind – while Presidents on whom assassination attempts have been made, riots instigated and street demonstrations held, and even against whom elections have been out rightly won – will cling onto power with their very life’s breath.

It seems holding onto hard-won and ill-gotten gains, even at the cost of rigging elections or launching civil wars in which millions of countrymen are killed, is a much more fulfilling thing than simply basking in the splendor of inherited luxury attained by some lottery of birth.

That being said - the Ugandan Presidential campaign during this year’s general elections, now in its final leg, has for me, interestingly brought to the fore a major attribute which the incumbent, Yoweri Museveni, has lavishly endowed his support base with – namely, an intractable inability to dream.

This ‘political pathology’ – a very saddening and stunting lack of futuristic perspective, is something as highly contagious as it is acutely insidious.

A few moments spent in the company of the average NRM loyalist, are enough to quash any foolish social optimism, and siphon-off any fanciful spirit of national aspiration a hopeful citizen may possess.

While it is true that Mr. Museveni’s greatest followership is peopled by government functionaries and their kin, beneficiaries of state patronage, and the illiterate and ignorant masses who are easily coaxed into political-fidelity or beguiled into partisan-affection – there is another critical mass of supporters the incumbent has been brutally successful in winning over to his stagnant cause, who are what may be rightly called dreamless Ugandans.

This curious tribe of pessimists, political cowards and spineless voters are people essentially resigned to what they see as fateful predestination – citizenship to a nation trapped in an endless cycle of mediocrity and midget-sized aspirations.

With limited and notable exception, Mr. Museveni’s voters have become incorrigible converts to the gospel of political determinism, acquiescing to the bleak reality of their lives without as much as a stir in their soul, or a fight in their gut.

The hackneyed English adage, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’, seems to amply apply to this lot.

They have lowered their expectations of government-performance so low that despite the blatant failure of their leaders to address the most basic of our people’s needs – the fact that ‘at least we are alive’ or ‘at least I have UGX 1000 in my pocket for lunch’ seems to be sufficient recompense for the taxes they pay, and to encompass the full worth of their very lives.

It is a shame that Ugandans have learnt to compare themselves with the worst, and explain away their misery in other people’s misfortune; rather than compare themselves with the best and set bigger goals for their tomorrow.

Instead of asking –

‘Why does Rwanda, which has a smaller resource base than Uganda, manage to insure the health of all her citizens, yet our people keep dying like orphaned geckos?’

OR

‘Why does the average school teacher in Botswana, a country almost entirely desertified, earn almost ten times as much as the Ugandan teacher?’

These dreamless Ugandans, a growing segment of Mr. Museveni’s electorate, prefer instead to cynically remark;

‘Look at Nigeria – a big country with a lot of oil and money – involved in endless internal strife. We are better off, and should be grateful …’

As if it is Nigeria’s oil and money causing that strife, and not actually the misappropriation of it!

Or when an opposition politician, like Kiiza Besigye, makes a decent promise; their entrenched pessimism automatically kicks in;

 ‘How can someone promise to pay teachers a million shillings? This country doesn’t have that much money … it is too good to be true …’

Not even the now (in)famous Elton Mabirizi’s promise to salvage Ugandan women with a focus on the nether regions, has proven potent enough to cure this group of their deep-seated doomsday mentality.

This lot of Ugandans has lost all sense of self-worth, and essentially feels that they do not deserve any better, or to be treated with dignity. 

They are convinced that all the country has achieved is reducible to the aptitude of a single man, namely – Mr. Museveni.

So indeed – whether Museveni wins this year’s election or not, his staying-power and fortitude lies less in what his good-friend Andrew Mwenda has termed the myth of invincibility, but much more in his most enduring legacy to our nation – a generation of Ugandans with dreams so small and aspirations so ‘humble’.

Under Museveni, Uganda has become a body of confessed underachievers, with celebrated mediocrity for a national spirit.

His government’s under-performance (or nonperformance), has set an artificial ceiling over our heads – beyond which our dreams and aspirations have been unable to grow, since his long unwelcome stay has robbed us of the benefit of any alternative perspective.

‘‘For if we wake in the morning with our throats un-slit, why not be grateful for the opportunity to suffer a day longer?’’  - we ask.

And while governments elsewhere (a few on the continent but most off it) are challenging their citizens, and especially their younger people, to aim high and be truly ambitious - Uganda's youth are being encouraged to shelve their University degrees, since formal career paths are dead ends, and go into rearing rabbits, growing mushrooms or burning charcoal.

Some call this an entrepreneurial revival - but when a country begins to celebrate the fact that its graduate population are full-time, small-scale farmers, then there must be an essential kink in the amour.

But perhaps I unfairly blame our Old Man, for I’m told he doesn’t get much sleep anyway   ̶  perpetually worried as he is, of being caught off-guard by shifty-eyed coup-plotters, or receiving nocturnal visits from the apparitions of ‘silenced’ political opponents from his haunted past.

For how can a chronic insomniac be expected to dream, anyway?

And when a people’s leader dreams no more, sadly, neither can they.