“Bah! Humbug! Only a sissy is fit to be a servant leader!” At Shilin Station in Taipei, Taiwan, a well-dressed man with grey hair slid onto a seat next to me and shouted out very loudly. I was taking the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) back to my apartment in Danshui District, New Taipei City. I vividly remember thinking, Phew! It is rare to see a severely inebriated Taiwanese person; drinking is not a fundamental aspect of Taiwanese society, thus most people in Taiwan do not drink. And the next thing I knew, he was belching noisily, evidence perhaps of some intestinal embarrassment due to an excess of alcohol, most probably Kavalan whisky, one of Taiwan’s great exports!
2. Leaning across, as it were, to apologise, slurring his words and belching continuously as the waft of alcohol passed me gently in the air-conditioned light railway car, he blabbed out words that I could charitably make out as: “It’s not that I’m this clumsy, but I have had a little too much to drink. It’s been a while since I last had a drop—three years to be exact! But today is a special occasion. My only child, my son, has just graduated from National Taiwan University with a degree in law. I divorced his mother many years ago.”
3. “But I was invited to attend the graduation ceremony, including the dinner afterwards at the Chun Hsuen Sichuan Cusine Restaurant, which I attended. And for the first time, perhaps due to the exuberance of the occasion, I took a little drink this time to help loosen my tongue, as I am a very shy man. My only wish now is for my boy to follow in my footsteps and go to Harvard and read for a doctorate in jurisprudence.” No sooner had he finished apologising than he was off. “Oh, look!” he said, more alive now than moments earlier. “Here we are! Beitou is my station.” And that was that: he was gone! I never got to find out from him why he thought only a sissy was fit to be a servant leader!
I, too, thought, a servant leader to be a sissy
4. However, I must confess with great shame that I was once one of those who believed that only a sissy could be a servant leader. I was convinced of the power of a strong, masculine leader—perhaps akin to the lately re-elected president Donald Trump’s swaggering machismo—who, as some people like to say, gets the job done! Having grown up in Amin’s Uganda, I have personal knowledge of the depressing truth of African hopelessness. I saw firsthand the wanton devastation of property and the needless loss of lives.
5. I well remember as a child seeing for the first time the astonishing sight of fully-grown men cry out of sheer despair. The sight unnerved me. It is true that I did not at the time know the significance of what I was witnessing, but I now understand that theirs were tears of extreme frustration borne out of a feeling of impotence at their particular circumstances. Truth to tell, it seemed to me then, as it does now, that there appears to be nothing in the world that can or is capable of explaining the seeming disregard with which African governments treat their citizens. The consequences resulting from such treatment are such as to leave any reasonable observer utterly speechless—speechless largely out of shock, pure and simple!
Uganda answers to a bloody history
6. For instance, consider the events in Uganda that I can still remember. Eight years of brutal Amin rule (1971–1979), two years of anarchic Uganda National Liberation Force government (1979–80), five years of a cruel and merciless civil war (1981–1985) against Milton Obote’s second attempt at leading the country, six months of chaos under the military junta led by Tito Okello, and finally, what now seems to be an endless vice-like rule of Museveni.
7. Ever since taking power in 1986, the Museveni government has been mired in a forbidding civil war in Northern Uganda, which some have even considered a form of genocide on the Acholi and the Langi people. So bad were the conditions that in 2006 the Civil Society Organisation for Peace in Northern Uganda published its report, ‘Counting the Cost: Twenty Years of War in Northern Uganda,’ in which the report said that “Rates of violent deaths are three times higher than those reported in Iraq following the Allied Invasion in 2003.”
8. There is no doubt that this was a man-made calamity. A catastrophe that was made even more tragic as it appeared to be taking place amid the seeming conspiracy of silence on the part of Western powers. During that period, there was a clear discrepancy, for example, in the response given by Western powers in relation to the appalling situations in Darfur and Zimbabwe, on the one hand, and the apparent genocide in Northern Uganda, on the other.
9. Apart from the late Archbishop Janani Luwum, who incidentally died a martyr in 1977 after he objected to Amin’s brutality, there has been of late not a single cleric of any significance who has had the courage to stand up in protest; rather, the church appears to be more exercised by the sexual mores of LGBT(s) than the travesty of justice in modern Uganda. This discrepancy was very troubling indeed. It still is!
Breathtaking culture of impunity
10. I have difficulty with the use of the word genocide and think it should be applied sparingly when dealing with fraught subjects such as the one that took place in Northern Uganda. To be sure, the United Nations Convention on Genocide defines genocide as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” However, even if we must be careful when referring to the tragedy in Northern Uganda as genocide, we must call a spade a spade since publicly available and independently verifiable data shows that it is. The conclusion that the Museveni administration purposefully killed the Acholi people in Northern Uganda as part of its policy is unavoidable, in fact.
11. According to a growing body of evidence—which is outside the purview of this blog post—the Museveni government deliberately chose not to act sufficiently to end the region’s more than two-decade-long crisis, which ultimately resulted in the significant destruction of the aforementioned peoples. Yes, many African leaders do not set out to deliberately kill people, but the unsettling truth is that they don’t care about their citizens! This disturbing fact is supported by the circumstances that led to the genocide claim! They are far more interested in remaining in power at whatever cost.
12. In the case of Museveni, his administration appeared to have been more concerned about refuting the tragedy’s existence in the area; it wasn’t until April 2006 that they moved to close the camps for internally displaced people in response to intense international pressure. After eighteen years and innumerable other instances of human rights violations and atrocities, such as the “Kasese massacres” in 2016 and the continuing East Africa Crude oil pipeline saga, the message is now crystal clear: Northern Uganda’s and the nation’s future will remain bleak as long as it suits the Museveni government’s agenda.
The promise of a strong leader is a false hope
13. I welcomed Museveni’s rise to power in 1986, despite the fact that he did it with the barrel of a gun, like many Ugandans who saw the state and economy completely collapse during those six months of the Tito Okello military regime. Even so, there were persistent signs that Museveni was just another cruel African tyrant. In truth, Parliament’s outrageous amendment to the 1995 Constitution in December 2017 has fostered a new type of political culture in Uganda: a supreme chief who is extremely powerful and above the laws of the Republic of Uganda.
14. I think Museveni’s hold on power will be maintained for a very long time due to the discovery of oil in Western Uganda. It is clearly obvious that charismatic leaders throughout the African continent, having come to power as liberators or freedom fighters, are hesitant to cede control to anybody save a close relative. This phenomenon is alarmingly widespread throughout Africa.
15. The tremendous lengths freedom fighters and liberators will go to maintain their power, even if it means undermining the very accomplishments they have worked so hard to attain, never ceases to surprise me. Zimbabwe’s late Robert Mugabe serves as a powerful example of this. The only conclusion that can be made about this phenomenon is that the purported constitutional republics are now evolving into presidential monarchies in all but name. This leads to a sombre reality in which corruption and lawlessness replace justice and order, the tears of the oppressed go unnoticed, and the oppressors continue to amass ever-greater wealth.
Dictatorship is an African trap like no other
16. When I went to the UK for the first time in late 1987, I made a startling discovery that made me view Africa quite differently in the years that followed. Up until that point, I was extremely defensive about Africa, just like the majority of Africans are. In fact, my defensiveness verged on being extreme pan-African nationalism. I had accepted without question the notion that, given Africa’s underdeveloped democracy, it might be preferable to give up some freedom in exchange for peace and security.
17. Indeed, I subscribed to the view that a degree of benevolent dictatorship was a good thing on the basis that the real world being as it is, the vast majority of Africans would probably have to endure one at some stage in their life in some way. Why? Because of Africa’s particular circumstances, only a strongman kind of dictatorship could possibly give the continent’s numerous and quarrelling tribes some semblance of order rather than chaos, a situation that occurs on an almost daily basis throughout the continent.
18. Although the circumstances alluded to still remain the same, I have now changed my opinion. I consider this argument as misconceived – the very argument that has provided an alibi to Africa’s failures for a very long time. If there is any hope of breaking the malign force wrought by tyranny and dictatorship, perhaps the time is ripe to look again at Africa with a fresh pair of unsentimental eyes – with a view of seeking out new practical solutions, of which servant leadership is but one – in order to break the African trap of dictatorship.
We need a lot more than the ‘Wisdom’ of Solomon
19. For the sake of clarity, if we use the current state of affairs in Uganda as an example, we will see that even the legendary “Wisdom” of Solomon would be put to the test in order to address decades of a complete moral collapse in Uganda: impunity, corruption, mismanagement of public finances, and flagrant violations of human rights.
20. The ugliness of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, is a glaring illustration of General Museveni’s nearly 40-year-old, vice-like hold over state authority. Furthermore, the sudden collapse of a mountain of refuse at Kiteezi, which claimed the lives of innumerable people—how many is debatable—is representative of his dysfunctional style of governance. No Ugandan branch of government has acknowledged or assumed responsibility for the catastrophe. Indeed, I seriously doubt that Solomon, in his wisdom, would take on a project like Uganda.
21. This is because, in the end, a thorough reassessment of Uganda’s moral principles is the only way to find a solution. In a way, trying to find such a thing would commit many Ugandans to fall into the African trap mentioned above, which is to believe in the antiquated idea of a “strong man leader.” There are no simple solutions.
What then is a servant leader?
22. But we have to try! Because of this, I would want to suggest a different kind of leadership that Ugandans might want to think about: the servant leader. What is a servant leader, though? The definition that the late Robert K. Greenleaf came up with in his well-known article, “Servant as Leader,” is the greatest one outside of the Biblical object lesson in which the Lord Jesus Christ humbled himself and washed his followers’ feet.
23. In 1970, the essay was published. Greenleaf made the following argument in that essay: “Servant-leader is [a] servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. The leader first and the servant first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature… The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant—first to make sure that other people’s highest needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely themselves to become servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”
Examples of a ‘servant leader’ – Nelson Mandela
24. Flipping through television channels the other day, as one does on a lazy Sunday afternoon when nothing much seems to be happening, I stumbled upon a biographical documentary film on the life of Nelson Mandela. Until then, I had never heard of it. The documentary, “How Mandela Changed South Africa: From Prison to President,” brought back many powerful and vivid memories (see video below).
25. I vividly recall being captivated by the image of Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie walking hand in hand out of Victor Verster Prison on that momentous day, February 11, 1990, supported by an incredible crowd; the entire event was shown live across the globe. How he was escorted to Cape Town Hall through a sea of black and white well-wishers, where he delivered a stirring speech in which he urged the minority government in South Africa to start talks as soon as possible and declared that the armed resistance to apartheid’s violence would not stop until there was a realistic chance of a peaceful conclusion.
Servant leader – Nelson Mandela – embraces people(s) and unites a country
26. Nelson Mandela had the extraordinary good sense to rise above his pain and losses and humbly accept the challenge to serve his country in the most remarkable way, especially considering how much he had suffered—specifically, the personal pain he endured, which is too well documented for me to repeat here; he, for example, endured 27 years in bondage, including the forced separation from his family.
27. When he took office, the press made ominous predictions that later turned out to be false, predicting widespread violence and retaliation against the white rulers for the evils of apartheid. Instead, it was his passion for South Africa that was more evident; his belief that the nation should be a democracy with one man, one vote, accessible to all citizens, is truly astounding, especially considering that the twenty-first century seems to be rife with divisive politics.
28. Nelson Mandela is remarkable for setting aside his personal differences, something that is hard to imagine in a modern black African country such as Uganda; he worked with those who had imprisoned him at Robben Island to facilitate a peaceful transition of power. Wonder of wonder: he did the unthinkable by publically embracing his ‘ENEMIES,’ that is, he took the South African Rugby team to his bosom, wearing the South African Rugby jersey, beaming with pride and a Cheshire cat smile plastered on his face! I remember shedding a tear or two, something that was so out of character for me; I was brought up to be a stiff upper-lipped sort of chap. It is not just the English who are stiff upper-lipped! Nelson Mandela’s coup de grace was to willingly walk away from power after serving a mere one term as the President of the Republic of South Africa.
Servant leader – Mahatma Gandhi
29. However, if Nelson Mandela, as a servant leader, was prepared to consider using violence to combat injustice in a socially complex nation like South Africa and guide her to full representative democracy, then another exceptional servant leader stood out for opposing injustice in an even more complex nation—India, which was and remains a fascinating and diverse nation with a wide variety of languages, cultures, castes, and religions—by using nonviolent civil disobedience.
30. Mahandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly referred to as Mahatma Gandhi, was a notable leader of the Indian people and a key figure in the country’s freedom movement. Gandhi applied his servant leadership ideals of non-violence and fasting during the aforementioned Indian independence movement, which resulted in the British Empire’s humiliating defeat and compelled the British to declare India’s independence on August 14, 1947.
Servant leader – Mahatma Gandhi – delights in serving the poor for their joy
31. It is well said that as daylight can be seen through very small holes, so little things will illustrate a person’s character. According to an anecdote, Gandhi frequently volunteered to work as a nurse in hospitals for the impoverished while he was a practising lawyer in South Africa because he wanted to understand their pain. Even though Gandhi was well aware of the risks to himself and his family, he volunteered to nurse victims at Reitfontein Plague Hospital when the black plague struck Cape Town on February 1, 1901, and quickly spread to nearby areas like Port Elizabeth.
32. Writing about his experience in his autobiography, “The Story of My Experiment with Truth,” he writes: “Service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion, it stunts the man and crushes his spirit. Service that is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service, which is rendered in a spirit of joy.”
33. Thus we see that joy lay at the heart of Gandhi’s servant leadership. It’s no wonder that he was the inspiration of many great leaders, such as Martin Luther King and Africa’s very own Nelson Mandela. His life’s work touched even a lowly chap like me; it is Mahatma Gandhi who inspired me to read law, so that I too may one day be of service to others.
Servant leadership works in business as well
34. However, is it possible for the idea of servant leadership to be applied in a commercial setting outside of national politics and governance? According to Ms. Sally Percy’s beautiful article “Are You Ready To Become A Servant Leader?” published in Forbes on August 2, 2018, this blog post was inspired by her. She provided some quite useful advice at the end of her piece, which read as follows:
“So what does it take to become a servant leader? Weston offers some basic tips for those looking to adopt this approach:
1. Remember that the core ethos of the servant leadership style is the wellbeing and the development of people. So replace monthly progress meetings with an ongoing performance management framework that covers work-life balance along with the delivery of tasks.
2. Use weekly one-to-one meetings as a forum to discuss career progression, lessons learnt from mistakes and shortcomings, and to exchange valuable feedback. Employees perform best when they feel as though they’re making valuable contributions, so regular check-ins are instrumental for keeping performance on track.
3. Use specialist software for people-centric insights. This year, analyst and research firm founder, Josh Bersin, predicted that employee feedback software would become widely used within workplaces. Employers have various options for regularly rolling out quick-fire employee pulse surveys to assess workplace culture and increase transparency.
4. Celebrate top performers with incentives that show them that their contributions are valued. Today’s workers often value non-financial incentives, so team lunches, small perks such as discounts or birthday lie-ins, or additional days off are all welcome rewards.
Servant leadership – the arts and crafts
35. Those witty remarks, despite their seeming simplicity, are truly essential to the effective completion of any significant project in real life, even one as modest as a nonprofit art gallery. It is now possible to offer a little example for illustration. An Irish woman friend of mine who had known me for almost 30 years asked me to assist in running the MK9 Art Gallery in Milton Keynes during the height of the 2008 financial crisis, when I was free and unrestrained after closing down my consultancy business. Originally called AIM Art Gallery, MK9 was the creation of the late Mrs. Edna Eguchi Read, FRSA, a remarkable Anglo-Japanese woman.
36. Although the gallery is now defunct, having finally closed her doors for good, I think in 2017, she nevertheless beat the odds and surprised many with her innovative and exciting program of exhibitions; we held a new exhibition every month, and the gallery was the talk of Milton Keynes for a while. Many artists in the counties surrounding Buckinghamshire and beyond beat a path to our doors in the hopes that the gallery would exhibit their work.
37. One eventful day, however, it so happened that we found ourselves with an empty slot in our exhibiting schedule. For the life of me, I cannot remember how we came to have an empty slot, but we were happy to leave the gap as is; we saw it as an opportunity to bring up-to-date our housekeeping, including many other sundry activities. The art business is such that there is always something to do in the gallery.
A local difficulty in a busy art gallery
38. One of my colleagues on the gallery’s management committee called me urgently, I believe, during my brief break following a demanding lecture in “Management Accounting for Decision Makers” at BPP Business School in the City of London. The treasurer exclaimed, “The two want to resign!” in a startled tone. She went on, “We shall be forced to close our doors to the public if we don’t take some swift action. The gallery’s success depends heavily on the two.”
39. The reason for the seeming urgency was that the charity’s future was still in doubt at the time, and we were still in the process of restructuring and had not yet placed the gallery on a more stable foundation. This unexpected turn of events was caused by a group of three young fine art graduates who, I believe, had just graduated in 2011 with a First Class Degree respectively. Since they were each the first members of their families to attend a university, they were naturally quite proud of their accomplishment.
40. But their extraordinary achievement had strangely gone to their heads, to the extent that they imagined they knew everything there was to know about the art business; their arrogance insulted two of our most experienced members on the management team, who were 75 and 89 years old, respectively. Due to their respective careers in the art world in the UK and overseas, they were both well-versed in the field. The 75-year-old had dedicated a portion of his career to advocating for refugees; he frequently mentioned a Ugandan refugee he had personally assisted during his time in college, who later rose to prominence in the Museveni administration. The leading individual in question will not be identified for discretion’s sake.
Seriousness is a hallmark of servant leadership – accountability
41. It was fortunate that the incident happened on a Thursday afternoon, and I became aware of it mid-morning on Friday. This provided me with an entire weekend to effectively handle the situation. I advised the treasurer to let the young men proceed with their plans for the exhibition, taking full responsibility in the setting up of the ‘artworks’ display and hanging (there is a certain skill required in ‘hanging art’ and galleries are distinguishable by their unique signature respecting the way they display art), and that I would look in first thing the following morning to resolve the problem and speak to the offended committee members individually in person if possible.
42. However, how can the issue be resolved without shattering the hopes of the young men and simultaneously appeasing the rightfully irate members? If I claimed to have extensive knowledge of servant leadership at the time, I would be lying. Because the MBA program for that year was still in its early stages, we hadn’t even begun reading about leadership at BBP Business School. However, I was aware that if I went straight to the young men, I would not get anywhere with them, and they would most likely have quit, which would have embarrassed us greatly. In addition, I would have lost two valuable members of my management committee.
43. But I had the courage to walk in and pretend to be a paid servant, cleaning the kitchen, the lavatory, and the storage space. The young men’s outright refusal to volunteer to assist with cleaning the aforementioned facilities because they felt they were above such labour was one of the causes of the argument. Being a small charity gallery, we had to keep expenses down, which meant taking care of most of the odd jobs ourselves. We often asked exhibiting artists to join in, for we were, every one of us, volunteers.
Servant leaders do not ‘lord-it-over’ others – are big enough to be little!
44. So the next Saturday morning I put on my shabby clothes, which made me look like a jobs-no-body, and headed for the Milton Keynes art gallery. The young men and their team were busy putting up their display when I got there, so I cleaned the kitchen, the lavatory, and the storage room without a word. I also made sure they could see me cleaning the gallery’s whole floor.
45. After finishing, I departed and returned home to personally call the aggrieved parties. The young men thought I was a cleaner, and they even told the treasurer how good I was at cleaning, even though she informed them that we didn’t have a cleaner. She found out it was me when she asked them to describe the cleaner they were referring to. She informed them that the little man they had just described was actually the chairman of the gallery and that it was thanks to me that they had initially been granted permission to display their work. My intervention offered them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity after the art selection committee had initially rejected their work.
46. Considering how incredibly difficult it is for young fine art graduates to get their first big break, what they heard left them completely dumbstruck. They repented their folly. They immediately offered to apologise to the two offended committee members and resolved to help out in any way they could, including cleaning the lavatory, which they did to everybody’s satisfaction. The long and short of the story is that the gallery survived to fight another day during the continuing financial crisis, and their exhibition was a success. But what has this anecdote got to do with servant leadership in Africa and Uganda in particular? Answer: a great deal!
Standing up to strong men of Africa
47. History will remember the last 60 years of post-independence Africa as the time when strong men escaped the bar of their country(s) due to their wrong-headed ways of evading the law; they are very good at staying within legal bounds but are nevertheless great villains; or if they cross the line, they hire clever lawyers to plead on their behalf, no matter how guilty they may be, and through crafty pleading they escape from justice.
48. Right-thinking individuals in Africa and beyond are so troubled by this fact that they believe it is time for us to take leadership studies, particularly servant leadership, very seriously. Zooming in on Uganda specifically and to cite but one example, the 2018 by-election in the Arua District of Northern Uganda, where 33 politicians and activists were cruelly tortured and a politician’s driver was brutally murdered in cold blood, it is imperative that a meaningful conversation about the nation’s future take place if Uganda is to survive the escalating crisis.
49. The best evidence we have to support the appropriateness of this study is likely the high-handed government’s response to the Arua incident, which demonstrates that the flaws in Museveni’s NRM system of government are now growing into crevices and that, in the not too distant future, the entire structure—which took 38 years to build—may collapse. Now, with particular reference to Uganda, let us examine the kinds of obstacles that a servant leader may encounter.
A word to the wise – pay close attention to the big picture
50. However, a word of caution to those who believe that the Museveni government is about to fall, particularly those who have joined the new “People Power” movement led by former musician turned politician Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu: Please pay careful attention to the big picture, meaning that you should think about the current situation in Uganda as it is, not as you would like it to be.
51. First, acknowledge that Uganda has changed significantly over the last 62 years, becoming a symbol of moral rot where ideas of friendship, love, humanity, compassion, humility, and forgiveness have lost their significance, nuance, and dimension. Second, acknowledge that Museveni is a man who is incredibly proud. In my experience, proud men tend to take it very personally if they are not allowed to dictate and impose laws on everything that concerns them. They also tend to condemn others as being foolish, stubborn, and anything else that does not allow them to express themselves as they see fit.
52. To put it another way, it is one thing to expect an elderly and frail dictator/freedom fighter like Museveni to change and give up power in order to survive and save his own skin, but it is quite another to expect him to do so peacefully and to do what the Japanese refer to as hara-kiri. Having personally experienced his broadsword in Arua, Northern Uganda, along with numerous other tragic incidents, you should be under no illusion about his willingness to employ terrorism and violence if they suited his purposes.
53. Indeed, I have a dreadful prescience that Museveni will never be dislodged from state power without a bloody fight, and anything less than a complete defeat will be, in the circumstances, not acceptable to many Ugandans who have suffered so much for so long. So what practical steps can we realistically recommend to the likes of the young Kyagulanyi?
Endure the oppressor – Museveni is a mere man
54. A few years ago, I spoke at Ming Chuan University in Taipei, and I still clearly recall a bright law student who had just learnt about the turmoil in Uganda put me on the spot and asked me directly what I would do if I were the young Kyagulanyi or any other opposition leader in Uganda at the moment. I responded as follows: Do not be driven to act precipitously in a desperate bid to remove Museveni from state power, but go the extra mile. Endure him and his oppression.
55. You heard me correctly—suffer the oppressor! The worst thing Museveni can do to you is kill you. And after he has killed you, he is powerless to do anything else! It is important to keep in mind that Museveni is a mere man, made of flesh and blood; just like you or me, he too will pass away. Because every man is appointed to die once and be judged after death, as the author of Hebrews constantly reminds us.Thus, don’t be afraid of him.
56. I now acknowledge that it is a bit rich of me to suggest this, given that I am sitting in relative comfort in Taipei, Taiwan, so far away; I am not at immediate risk of being harassed by Museveni’s security agents; I do not get to feel his broadsword. However, I have spent many years thinking about this matter, and I do not make the recommendation lightly.
57. In ‘Bloody Independence – we wuz robbed! – Part 2,’ I addressed precisely this very situation thus: “Now is not the time to draw the sword of war, but to sheath it. We should, if possible, and in so far as it depends on us, resist the temptation to resort to violence; for anarchy is worse than any government, even a government presided over by [Museveni].”
58. I suggested that “we should make it our business to urge all educated [Ugandans] to be of good courage and get to work cheerfully and patiently. It is needful to sacrifice private interests to the public welfare and to lay aside all animosities among ourselves so that we may cordially unite against a common enemy, dictatorship. We should, however, not work confusedly or in a hurry; but rather, we should take our time, and we shall be done the sooner or at least we shall have done the better; for if we work in a hurry, we shall do the work by halves.”
Uganda is a very young country – every single young life is precious
59. General de Gaulle, I believe, once bemoaned the challenges of ruling a nation with 200 cheeses. Now, Uganda is not France, but how much more difficult do you suppose it will be to rule an impoverished country like Uganda, which boasts 56 tribes, two Abrahamic religions, and a panoply of so-called charismatic churches with dubious doctrine—they teach perverse things instead of speaking the Word of God—bringing shame on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, the great shepherd of the sheep? In addition, there are four officially recognised indigenous kingdoms, plus numerous others that are not yet recognised under Uganda’s current laws, and the country’s population is now exploding, numbering in the region of 50 million, 78% of whom are under 30. Additionally, at least 20% of children between the ages 5 and 17 work as child labourers.
60. The reality is that significant change in Uganda will be exceedingly slow and extremely painful. It is a very difficult task to establish a market economy, which is a framework that allows people’s talents and virtues to be mobilised and not crushed, a successful representative democracy that clearly defines the limits of governmental power, and the rule of law, which provides, among other things, the confidence required for entrepreneurship, banking, and the growth of trade. It is also very difficult to establish legitimacy and stability for private property ownership, as well as a sense of personal responsibility. That will unavoidably take a great deal of time.
The youth are Uganda’s best hope – invest and engage them
61. It is precisely for this reason that I went on to recommend in the blogpost to target young people, the next generation as it were, with a view of supporting them. For “they are liable to make what we might describe as a ‘young person’s mistakes’; they may not apply themselves with sufficient rigour to the small but hugely important business of nation-building. Unless we help the next generation to set the wheels in motion, there is a real danger that they will lose a great deal of time and may even repeat our mistakes, the rather because, being young and inexperienced, they may be tempted to put off or even underestimate the difficult undertaking which is before them; whereas, if we enthuse and equip them and have resources ready to hand, the most challenging part of the work would be over, and this might encourage them to get on with the fiendishly complex work of nation-building in the strength of their youth.”
Ugandans should give a servant leader a try
62. In the end, Uganda’s future needs to be built on solid foundations, which are always moral and social rather than financial—not even oil or foreign aid money. Because Ugandans must ultimately look beyond this generation and the next to see what she may look like in, say, a century from now, the rule of law indicated above is the culmination of moral and social values. Uganda cannot accomplish this without a servant leader at the helm.
63. Accordingly, if I had had a chance to engage that drunken Taiwanese gentleman I met on the MRT as I journeyed home in Danshui District, on the outskirts of Taipei, I would have impressed on him that a servant leader is not a sissy. On the contrary, a servant leader is the very epitome of courage, exactly what an impoverished country like Uganda most needs today in her hour of crisis. Uganda has tried a freedom fighter for a leader who has enjoyed a fair crack of the whip, 38 years and counting; I think it is time now for Uganda to give a servant leader a try. Whether it is the young Kyagulanyi MP or some other opposition leader, we must leave it to the Ugandan people alone to decide on the issue. They deserve better!