ROLE OF CHURCH IN POLITICS

A misconception is being deliberately peddled by NRM party pundits and some conservative church leaders to the effect that the opposition in Uganda lost the February 2011 elections because they did not conduct an issue-based campaign. I was equally surprised to read in the media that Archbishop Luke Orombi said that the people of Uganda rejected violence and chose peace. By this, the Archbishop insinuates that on the one hand, Museveni represents the peace that Uganda opted for as per Kiggundu’s Electoral Commission declaration; and on the other, the opposition represents violence! This was an insensitive remark made at the time a large section of Ugandans rejected the electoral victory of Museveni describing it as an orchestrated fraud.

By advancing this line of argument, one faults Ugandans as having been unanimous in weighing the option of peace in order to make an informed choice.  An unanswered question is: by what means does the opposition monopolise the instrument of violence? The answer to this uncovers a craftily laced propaganda built over time to paint a white-black morality in the body politic of the country.  In a banana republic like Uganda, majority of people do not vote on issues. In fact, even Museveni was sure that an issue-based campaign would yield nothing in a society of a largely ignorant and poor population. Where poverty rampages the countryside, one cannot expect a voter to make an informed choice other than selling his conscience in exchange for handouts from politicians to satisfy his immediate needs.  NRM reportedly spent as per Washington Post 23 February 2011 billions of shillings of taxpayers’ money to bribe voters with cash, sugar, soap, and salt. So, would we say such purchased votes were shaped by issues or a rejection of violence?

No. In fact, even the media elite reportedly benefited from campaign cash bonanza. That is why Andrew Mwenda, the Managing Editor of The Independent with unprecedented gusto, has been vociferous in justifying Kiggundu’s election results. He also easily falls into the same ‘fallacy effect’ by arguing that Museveni unlike Besigye, ran an issue-based campaign. Wrong! Uganda’s society is still anchored to high ethnicity affinity evident in several areas that voted for their homeboy whether or not he was advancing issues or not. This coupled with the institutional lapses shrewdly designed and exploited to yield the expected election results. In the heat of the elections, Museveni declared that NRM party would not and will never lose an election. As if to add currency to the president’s line of thought, opinion polls giving NRM 68% began to roll out of the media houses with propagandists arguing that NRM party would even score 80% as a mark of its ‘popularity.’ It was no wonder that Museveni’s appointed Electoral Commission simply endorsed the stage-managed result of the opinion polls.

 I was saddened to hear His Grace the Archbishop imbibe the always touted NRM party line and getting entangled in this sordid secular debate. The church should not take sides in this period when people are living beneath socio-economic viability and suffering perhaps the highest level ever of assault by state security and NRM party apparatchiks on individual liberty and rights. One might mistake the church to be in bed with an establishment considered to be unaccountably profligate in executing its mandate and has lost moral bearing. The Machiavellian leadership evidently will do anything at its disposal to compromise the church in an essentially materialist society. For the church to justify the use of brute force to suppress alternative voices not only mocks the innocent bloodshed in the mundane struggle for power but it also betrays the voiceless genuinely craving for economic space and justice.