This is beautiful reading.


>From: uga749d <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
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>Subject: *** Marx is Dead, Long Live President Museveni's Daughter
>Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 23:18:00 +0200
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Chris Opoka-Okumu
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 11:19 PM
>Subject: Marx is Dead, Long Live President Museveni's Daughter
>
>
>
>Opinion - East African - Nairobi - Kenya
>Monday, October 6, 2003
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>PHILIP OCHIENG
>Marx is Dead, Long Live the President's Daughter
>President Yoweri Museveni's activities remind me of how, when I worked in
>Dar es Salaam, in the early 1970s, the story used to be repeated throughout
>Tanzania that Julius Nyerere's wife constantly nagged him to send his
>children to England for higher education.
>He always had the same powerful retort: "How can I possibly do such a thing
>when I am the very person pushing all other Tanzanian children to attend
>collectively-funded Ujamaa schools?" The story was no doubt apocryphal. But
>it illustrated the uniqueness of the person. No post-colonial African head
>of state has ever been so humble, so upright, so honest - the epitome of
>self-abnegation and abstemiousness.
>
>At one time, a Swiss bank wrote to advise him to open a personal bank
>account in Switzerland, explaining that, Africa being what it was, Mwalimu
>might soon be overthrown in a coup and would have nowhere to turn. The
>president was beside himself with fury. He passed the letter to us and we,
>in The Daily News, published it in full with a stinging editorial on the
>Swiss bankers' "lecherous" designs in Africa.
>
>To my knowledge, V.I. Lenin was probably recent history's only other head
>of state for whom it would been unthinkable to take advantage of his
>extraordinary power to enrich himself and his family at the public's
>expense. I bring Lenin into this story deliberately. Like Nyerere, he
>killed ruthlessly when necessary. After all, as Marx had admonished, "a
>revolution is not a tea party." But, in his personal life, Lenin was
>extraordinarily selfless.
>
>  In my Dar es Salaam days, Yoweri Museveni was among the most ardent
>admirers of both Nyerere and Lenin.
>
>When I first went to Dar in 1970, Museveni had just graduated from the
>University of Dar es Salaam, where he had been chairman of a student body
>that invoked Lenin's name every time (which was all the time) it spoke of
>"revolution."
>
>  To be a socialist was to serve the people. This required at least two
>gifts. One was knowledge of the science of revolution and the other was
>personal integrity of the highest order. Looking back on it with the wisdom
>of hindsight, we can now see where the difference lay. Lenin failed
>because, although he had both the science and the moral commitment, he had
>no help. Only a negligible number of his Bolshevik colleagues were fully
>committed.
>
>  Nyerere failed because, although he had the moral commitment, he didn't
>have the science and, therefore, objectively played into the hands of the
>very imperialist enemy he was trying to uproot.
>
>  Museveni failed because, although he knew the science, we now know that
>he didn't have the moral commitment and, therefore, never really tried when
>he at last had the power. His is the story of all my "Marxist" colleagues
>of the 1970s, many of them now in Kenya's parliament.
>
>  They were deeply learned in the letter of the classics, liberally quoting
>Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and Castro. Yet they were so completely lacking in
>its spirit that, when Marxism was forced into a full political retreat with
>the fall of a fake Marxist regime in the Soviet Union, they dropped it like
>a hot potato.
>
>  They were not alone. I remember a time when Tony Blair and Jack Straw
>were dragged into police stations almost every week because of violent
>activities in the name of the British proletariat. Both are now "poodles" -
>in Neil Kinnock's phrase - of the global hangman of the proletariat called
>George Bush.
>
>  At a Nairobi seminar one day in 1999, when I asked an activist who is
>today a prominent NARC minister what had happened to him, he dismissed me
>with a wave of the hand: "Oh, those were ideas of the 1970s. They are no
>longer relevant."
>
>Apparently, then, their "relevance" depended only on the existence of
>Soviet Stalinist power. An honest answer would have been: "Mine was just
>youthful exuberance. I never grasped the moral content of that teaching. To
>tell you the truth, I have never really been committed to social justice."
>
>Museveni admits as much in the field of real life. True, the Marxist idea
>of grabbing power through putchist or guerrilla methods mesmerised him,
>even though, divested - as the Movement was - of any proletarian content,
>it was thoroughly unMarxist.
>
>True, too, the NRM originally used its power positively, to rebuild
>Uganda's industrial, communication and transport infrastructures, and it
>had the sense to set the economy on a sound basis before launching its own
>attack on it.
>
>But Museveni did it at the immense expense of popular sovereignty by
>offering himself as the blue-eyed boy of imperialism's grand designs on the
>entire Great Lakes region. Under the George Bush (senior)-Bill
>Clinton-Thatcher-Blair continuum, he was seen as the leader in situ of an
>elaborate plan by Washington and London to bring not only the rule but also
>the exploitation of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Zaire and the
>Sudan under one political roof in Kampala.
>
>When they spoke of him as "Africa's only hope," those familiar with
>Anglo-Saxon double-talk understood perfectly. They meant that he was the
>only hope in Africa through whom such new-fangled transnational stratagems
>as Agoa could succeed.
>
>That was why Washington and London exempted Kampala from such demands as
>multipartyism, liberalisation and privatisation. Why insist on a structural
>adjustments programme if the goods can be delivered directly?
>
>Even as they launched a virulent attack on the Moi regime for corruption
>and highhandedness, the IMF and the World Bank maintained a profound
>silence as corruption - much more sophisticated, much more thoroughgoing
>and, therefore, much deadlier than under Idi Amin - began to be perpetrated
>by favoured individuals in Museveni's army, Cabinet and immediate family.
>
>The report last week that Museveni had commandeered a public jet and spent
>millions of the Ugandan taxpayer's shillings to rush a daughter to a German
>hospital to give birth was, therefore, probably only the tip of the
>iceberg.
>
>Grotesque family privileges of this kind are now being talked about openly
>throughout Uganda. Having watched Museveni's development since we were
>boys, a deeply disturbing question rises in my mind...
>
>How can such mundane cupidity and callousness be the outcome of so many
>years of idealistic teaching, personal risk and heroic deeds? I don't know.
>I do know that Nyerere and Lenin are turning in their graves.
>
>Comments\Views about this article
>
>
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