Understanding the Ugandan ‘Gen Z’ protests

 https://observer.ug/index.php/viewpoint/81957-understanding-the-ugandan-gen-z-protests 

July 24, 2024

Written by DR BUSINGYE KABUMBA

 

I write this column on a wet Tuesday morning, the 23rd of July 2024, at a time when the national mood is similarly damp and dreary.

The young people of Uganda, like their neighbours in Kenya and elsewhere, are tired – and they are tired of being tired. They are also frustrated, anxious, demoralized and increasingly hopeless. They were sold a dream in which education was supposed to be the key to success in life.

They were told to study hard, finish secondary school and make it to university or other institutions of higher learning. Having done their part, they were made to believe that the system would then do its own part. There would be jobs which would allow hardworking and honest individuals the opportunity to make a decent living for themselves and their families.

The young people of Uganda did their part. They read hard, excelled in their studies and emerged from the Ugandan education system to find a country with no room for them. The public sector jobs that had been available to their parents were mostly phased out in the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the 1990s.

Those that now remain – in the Ministries, District Service Commissions and other government agencies are invariably going to a few well connected persons. In the Uganda of 2024, academic papers do not matter. One’s name, and connections, do.

The private sector is similarly difficult – with a shrinking economy, crippling taxes and overregulation (ask anyone about the requirements to register and run a business).

 

And so, young Ugandans realize that all they obtained from those many years of education was a fairly good command of English (alongside a strangely intimate knowledge of the Canadian prairies and such other random things). Invariably, many Ugandans in their late 20s and early 30s find themselves still living at home with their parents.

They simply cannot afford to move out – especially in the context of an inordinately high cost of living. The young people of Uganda – and their parents – were sold great expectations. Instead, they found great disappointment. At the same time, they cannot help but notice that there is another class of young Ugandans who seem to have ‘made it’.

Certainly, some of these are the lucky few who through either above average intelligence or uncommon industry – or both – managed to beat the odds and can now maintain a tolerably good standard of living. I went to school with some of these, and their success is legitimate and unassailable.

On the other hand, the vast majority of these nouveau riche are the children of those whose who have literally stolen the building blocks (and iron sheets!) of what was meant to be the Ugandan dream. Those whose parents have converted funds meant for public roads, public housing, public health, public education and other public goods into grotesque private mansions, gaudy private cars, outlandish private holidays and even private treasuries composed of rooms stacked high with bundles of cash.

 

These particular ones are very difficult to miss. They do not hide their illegitimate wealth – they flaunt it. Incidentally, those who have painstakingly worked for, and achieved, success in this jungle of a country are often still traumatized by the memories of their poor or lower to upper middle class backgrounds.

While we might now have some money in the bank, and afford a bit of the good life, we are still haunted by, and conscious of, the vagaries and vulnerabilities of life. The children of the corrupt have none of these memories, and exhibit none of the restraint that comes with such consciousness.

It is these young people – the offspring of the plundering class – who regularly run up night club tabs ranging from Ugx 15 to 60m in one night, and flippantly share these exploits on social media. There are, indeed, two (perhaps even more) Ugandas. One in which Ugx 60m (my annual salary as a lecturer at Makerere University) can be casually spent in one night over wines and spirits whose names I would struggle to pronounce; and another where life itself has little or no value.

 

In this other Uganda, young people and their parents struggle to afford the bare necessities of life – shelter, medicine and even food. While in one Uganda the children of the corrupt do not even need to go to work; in the other, young Ugandans are forced to travel to the Middle East and other places in a bid to eke a living. It was the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire who in a famous 2009 poem wrote: ‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark’.

Uganda today is the mouth of a shark – and ageing gerontocrat who has run out of ideas and, increasingly, threats. A few nights ago, this old and greying dictator warned the young Ugandans planning the July 23rd march to Parliament that they would be ‘playing with fire’. In the past, these words might have been menacing. In 2024, they are the hollow words of a tired autocrat – out of solutions and out of threats.

I do not know how today’s march will turn out. However, I have no doubt that the tide has irrevocably turned. I saw many young people post on X (formerly Twitter) messages for their parents and loved ones in case they did not return alive from the march, and felt unexpectedly emotional – but also hopeful.

The young people of Uganda are as tired of threats as they are of being tired of the hopelessness of their life in this republic. Many of them, in their ‘In case I do not return’ posts, noted that they had nothing to lose – no jobs, no housing, no medical insurance, no income – nothing. How can you threaten someone who has nothing to lose?

 

Evidently, those playing with fire are those who fail to read the changed times. Those who fail to recognize that – as the disaffected youth have emphatically stated – they are neither your children nor your bazzukulu. They know their real parents, and grandparents. And they fully understand the suffering and frustrations of their parents, grandparents, siblings, relatives and friends.

Importantly, this critical moment has also exposed the inadequacy, and in some cases outright complicity, of a number of actors who ordinarily would have been expected to support the democratic rights of the protesting youth. The Inter-Religious Council of Uganda (IRCU), for instance, issued a strange and prevaricating statement regarding the planned march, which justifiably drew the ire of young Ugandans on Twitter and elsewhere.

Similarly, the now infamous Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) conjured up a Twitter post which placed emphasis on the limitation of human rights, with little said about the important limits - laid down in Article 43 (2) of the Constitution – on any purported restriction of rights.

Indeed, so obvious was the UHRC’s bias that one human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Obbo, was compelled to observe that the Commission should, going forward, change its name to the ‘Uganda Human Rights Limitation Commission (UHLC)’. Equally disingenuous ‘information’ – which emphasized clause (1) of Article 43 but said nothing of clause (2) – was issued by the Government Citizen Interaction Centre (GCIC) clearly exposing it more as a propaganda machine rather an any genuine ‘Interaction’ facility.

A number of media houses too – the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (and some prominent ‘quasi-private’ outfits) – were also clearly skewed in terms of what they reported, and what they did not.

For their part, the police have, true to form, similarly issued threats against the protestors – taking their cue from Museveni’s own ill-advised and ill-informed remarks regarding the constitutional right to assemble and demonstrate.

In addition, those arrested during the protests – and they are already quite a number – will soon be produced before courts. Unfortunately, again, many judicial officers will find a number of technical reasons to keep the accused persons behind bars, in the face of the constitutional rights to liberty under Article 23.

This can only be in the knowledge that such actions – in the Uganda of July 2024 – are the quickest means of catching the eye of the powers that be, and obtaining quick promotion through the ranks of an increasingly discredited judicial branch.

The Ugandan youth protests clearly signal that the time has come for a new national compact – a new Ugandan understanding ultimately to be reduced into a fresh Constitution. One truly arising from the sovereign will of free Ugandan people, rather than that (the 1995 one) supervised, superintended and ultimately controlled by Yoweri Museveni and the guns of his National Resistance Army (which is today dressed up as the ‘Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces’).

Only then can we achieve a truly democratic Uganda - one in which the Uganda Human Rights Commission is truly a Human Rights Commission, rather than a Human Rights Limitation Commission; where the Government Citizen Interaction Centre actually understands its role as being to inform the public rather than misinform them; where the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation and other media houses can be trusted to convey the news without bias; where the Uganda Police Force respects rather than constrains the liberties of Ugandans; where the Judiciary truly understands itself to administer justice in the name of the people of Uganda rather than on behalf of Museveni’s relatives, friends and in-laws; and where the Parliament and all other political actors understand their role as being to create a Uganda which truly promises – and delivers – equality of opportunity to all its citizens.

The writer is senior lecturer and acting director of the Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC) at the School of Law, Makerere University, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Legal Philosophy.