The end of one year and the beginning of another always induce mixed feelings. On the one hand, one is glad to have crossed into the new year. On the other, even for the most irrepressible of optimists, as the new year begins, questions arise as to what the next 12 months will bring. Within my local community, the passing of the previous year is celebrated as though it was a virulent disease, as implied in the greeting “Gukulike, omwaka!” (Congratulations; you survived it!) For me, as 2016 kicked in, existential pre-occupations were far from what was on my mind. It was firmly fixed on matters political, and kept shifting from national to regional to continental issues. What did they mean?

In what has for long qualified as one of Africa’s violence “hotspots,” the Great Lakes region of East Africa, Tanzania and Kenya, traditionally its “islands of stability,” remained pretty much off the headlines. Beneath the surface, however, in Tanzania questions continued to loom large over the “Magufuli effect,” one of them being whether the path the country’s new president had chosen, of literally turning things upside-down in pursuit of a clean government, represented a permanent turning point or a mere blip before sleaze returns in full force. For Kenya, only a few years ago, many East Africans were worried sick about the country imploding and pulling the rest of us down with it. You need to live in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan to appreciate the importance of stability in Kenya to the wider region.
Happily, the threat of implosion was averted, leading to growing optimism — despite the International Criminal Court saga — about the immense possibilities the region’s largest economy presented. Soon enough, Kenyans had regained that peculiarly Kenyan spring in their step. As 2015 ended, one of the most popular topics in public discourse was graft. And not just any graft. These days, Kenyans can hardly talk about anything at length before they go on to decry corruption in their government which, they claim, is now out of control, and so grand as to dwarf that which they hated the Moi government and its NARC successor for, and which turned British writer, Michela Wrong into a household name in the country, courtesy of her book It’s Our Turn to Eat.
Are we at risk yet again of graft threatening political stability in Kenya at some point with all it would imply for the rest of us, or are Kenyans over-sounding the alarm bells? As alarm bells go, in Uganda they are beginning to sound even louder within the opposition political camp, as President Yoweri Museveni, never one to leave anything to chance when it comes to fighting to keep his seat, intensifies his efforts against opponents who seem unusually capable of charming large numbers of people to turn up at their campaign rallies. Once rather easy to dismiss as overly exaggerated, reports of panic and desperation in the president’s camp are gaining credence as incidents involving violent clashes and unexplained arrests multiply.
As with many previous ones, the current election campaign hardly tallies with the lofty promises of “fundamental change” that President Museveni made 30 years ago when he was first sworn in as president. Uganda may have regular elections within the framework of competitive multi-partyism, but the mutual antagonism that characterises intra-elite contests and the blasé attitude the rest of society exhibit in the face of acts of political cruelty suggest Ugandans are in sore need of re-examining their collective aspirations as a country. Burundi, East Africa’s poorest country, has already shown what it means when rival political elites fail to agree about what is important and what is not, for their country and for society at large, and what happens when, rather than conceive and pursue a national project, they push the divergent agendas of their narrow groups, be they political, ethnic, or whatever.
Many of these things happen in the name of competitive politics that, at the end of the competition, produce vindictive winners and bitter losers. And as vindictiveness and bitterness go, Burundi could do with less. However, as 2016 began, it was clear that the country’s political elite were not about to re-think their approach. Talking of rethinking approaches, Rwandans have become something of master practitioners of the art. After the genocide, they re-thought the whole idea of multi-party politics and associated competition.
Some experts may fall over each other to denounce the consensus politics they came up with, but the role it has played in Rwanda’s rebirth is undeniable. And as 2015 ended, they re-thought the whole issue of presidential longevity, asking their president of the past 12 years not to leave at the end of his current and would-be last mandate. Some external observers and actors have been quick to denounce their choice. Among them are those who often emphasise how local actors must drive change, and how the role of outsiders should be to understand why things work as they do locally, and what incentivises local actors to do what they do.

Source: The East African

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