The TPA landscape in Uganda

Think piece by Frederick Golooba-Mutebi

Frederick is a Uganda- and Rwanda-based independent researcher and analyst specialising in the affairs of the Great Lakes region of East and Central Africa.

The search for transparent and accountable government in Africa has long been pursued via political and public administration reforms that focus on encouraging or stimulating popular participation. The participation envisaged entails taking part in elections to choose leaders and, thereafter, in decision-making processes alongside the elected leaders, and supporting or contesting the details of their decisions. However, although it is theoretically enticing as an idea, in practice participation runs into difficulties when confronted with contextual political and socio-economic realities. In contexts with shallow traditions of active contestation between leaders and the people they lead, and where, far from reflecting policy choices, election outcomes are the product of vote-selling and buying, participation is difficult to sustain.

In Uganda, citizen participation, transparency and accountability became a major part of the general discourse on governance after the National Resistance Movement (NRM) came to power in 1986. Elsewhere in Africa, preoccupation with participation, transparency and accountability originated in the democratisation wave that swept across the continent during the late 1980s after the collapse of communism and the subsequent explosion of the international debt crisis that devastated so many economies. The collapse of communism enabled major Western democracies to switch from protecting dictatorial one-party client regimes in Africa to pressing them to open up to political pluralism. Meanwhile the debt crisis gifted Western powers and the wider donor community the opportunity to press for far-reaching economic and political reforms, to create spaces for ordinary citizens to influence decision-making.

Uganda was, however, somewhat unique. Donor pressure for change coincided with the government’s own ambitions for post-war reconstruction and governance. It led to a meeting of minds on what needed to be done and how to do it. The NRM’s war-time manifesto and programme for post-war government, the ‘Ten-Point Programme’, contained ambitions to render politics democratic and participatory; make decision-making transparent, and establish mechanisms to enable ordinary citizens to choose their own leaders and hold them to account. There was a clear link between people participating in choosing leaders and in decision-making on the one hand, and transparency and accountability on the other. Participation meant that decision-making would be transparent. Transparency would ensure that citizens knew what to expect of their leaders and to demand it of those who fell short of expectations. This coincidence of interests rendered relations between donors and the government easy, unlike in other countries where governments attempted to resist reform and were literally arm-twisted into instituting the changes that donors sought.

Impact of reform efforts

There are good reasons why the NRM came to power fronting democratisation, which focused on popular participation as a key item on its reform agenda. As an insurgent movement, the NRM waged war on and toppled the then sitting government of Milton Obote, because of the latter’s alleged manipulation of electoral processes, its dictatorship, violation of human rights and general misrule. Until 1986 when the NRM captured power by force of arms, Uganda had been wracked by political instability stemming from unconstitutional changes of government and intra-societal divisions underlain by ethnic and religious tensions. These had been manipulated by successive governments. The NRM sought to steer Uganda away from this legacy. Its leadership believed that regular elections at all levels of government and participation by ordinary citizens in decision-making were necessary to ensure that leaders took the views of ordinary citizens into account at all times.

Ugandans greeted the reforms with enthusiasm. After years of being led at the local level by individuals delegated by the government, they welcomed the opportunity to elect their own leaders with whom they now had the right, through local structures, to discuss matters of interest and identify solutions to collective challenges. Large numbers of people attended meetings that local leaders convened for this purpose and were willing to take part in communal work. The meetings and the communal work demonstrated the high enthusiasm for participation. All adults participated in communal work, building, renovating and upgrading local infrastructure and amenities such as wells, local feeder roads and village paths. These had previously suffered neglect, awaiting action by the central government through its delegated officials. Such action was rare.

Previously, intra-community conflicts ended up in the formal courts. Adjudication usually dragged on for months or even years because of heavy backlogs of cases. With the introduction of new administrative structures, conflicts were now presided over by local leaders. Adjudication now privileged reconciliation and restitution over punishment or retribution. With the reforms, members of local communities could be elected to health-facility and school and water management committees, which would ensure that communities received the best health and education services possible and had access to clean water at all times. Through local councils, communities took charge of their own security by establishing local defence units whose members worked as volunteers.

Externally generated pressure for reform across Africa did not stop at pushing governments to hold regular, competitive multi-party elections and to devolve power, resources and responsibilities to local authorities. It also entailed the promotion of ideas such as the imperative to enact freedom of access to information laws. Uganda enacted its freedom of access to information legislation to much popular acclaim. It was expected that the legislation would facilitate citizens to access information and deter officials who might wish to block such access. Among other things, the law emboldened professional users of information, such as journalists, to make demands on public officials to provide information when they needed it. Sometimes it was made available. In other cases, however, they have contended with a different reality.

Challenges to citizen participation

Soon enough, would-be beneficiaries of the freedom of access to information law encountered problems. First, the process of trying to gain access is so protracted that even where there is no will to obstruct, the time it takes to gain access compels people who are seeking information to give up. The law provides the basis for anyone that is aggrieved to go to court and seek redress. However, one is likely to encounter a large backlog of unresolved cases in many courts. Only the most determined and well-resourced potential litigant will pursue this route. Clearly, making access to information a reality requires more than enacting laws.

As with freedom of access to information, context-specific difficulties have bedevilled the sustainability of popular participation as an accountability mechanism. Popular participation in decision-making in Uganda, especially at community level, has not fared as well as its advocates believed it would. On the face of it, the government still encourages people to take charge of their own communities, including finding solutions to intra-community problems. However, attendance at public meetings, the most elementary form of participation, where problem identification and solving ought to start, fell after some years and is now extremely low. The principal problem is participation fatigue.

One reason for participation fatigue are the many demands it places on people already weighed down by numerous activities. Participation requires people to attend multiple meetings to discuss numerous issues such as security, education, health and access to water, and how to respond to any challenges arising. In reality, the normal demands of simply earning a living and attending to personal pursuits leave little time for activities that are not central to the core needs of households and families.

In Rwanda, attendance at public meetings is an enforceable civic requirement. This ensures that, when convened, meetings are usually well attended. In Uganda, however, attendance is by choice. People with other demands on their time therefore do not turn up. Besides participation fatigue, low responsiveness by officials to concerns or demands by members of the public explains poor attendance. Low responsiveness has led some to regard public meetings as time-wasting talking shops. Knowing that decisions arrived at are unlikely to be acted on, is a major disincentive to participation. Inaction by officials is the product of several factors.

First, is lack of financial and human resources. This means that challenges requiring expertise and financial resources are extremely difficult to address and are, subsequently, never addressed. Second is a lack of mandate to act. Some of the demands that members of the public make are not within the mandate of local leaders to address. However, members of the public tend to believe that if what they want is not acted upon, local leaders are to blame. Further, there is the absence of top-down performance pressures on local leaders to fulfil their functions at all times. While bottom-up pressure or action from local people could spur them into action, there are limits to whether this is or could be feasible at all times. Sometimes pressure from high-level authorities, accompanied by the possibility of sanctions, as is the case in Rwanda, for example, is necessary to push local leaders to focus on their roles and deliver results.

Here, advocacy for participation misses the human element in relations between elected leaders and the communities they lead. Few ordinary individuals possess the courage or the inclination to be seen as the habitual troublemakers who criticise or make endless demands on leaders or officials. Such behaviour has the potential to cause antagonism between the leaders and the concerned vocal individuals. Intra-community social relations tend to be rather intense. As a result, such troublemakers could be ostracised by others in the community. Few people want to risk such sanctions. Consequently, even where demands could be made, the opportunity may not be taken, because people fear repercussions of this kind.

There is also the issue of commitment by the elected leaders. Leadership at village level is voluntary and does not attract regular compensation for time and energy expended. The same leaders who are expected to work for free have families to look after. As already mentioned, earning a living takes up much time and energy. Therefore, many demands made on their time by fellow community members compete directly with personal pursuits. There are sacrifices to be made, which is not always feasible. Besides being a key factor in discouraging elected leaders from executing their functions diligently, voluntarism deters others who might wish to lead from contesting for office.

One consequence of this is that many local leaders have neglected their duties, rendering local councils dormant. Also, many leadership positions remain unfilled, which has the same effect. Further, leaders occupying positions that no one wants to take up may occupy them for so long, unwillingly, that they end up abandoning most of the associated roles and duties. Remarkably, the only duties that local leaders continue to fulfil are those that are associated with settling conflicts or with the sale and purchase of property. These attract fees before they are attended to, which the leaders can share, and which therefore serve as compensation for their time and energy. It reveals the importance of remuneration. Remuneration is, however, difficult because of the sheer number of elected leaders. There are (or should be) 10 for each of the more than 45,000 villages across the country.

Elsewhere, some bilateral and multilateral development agencies, led mainly by the World Bank, have dedicated much time, resources and energy to promoting participatory budgeting. This, too, was initially greeted with enthusiasm, especially at the local government level. The enthusiasm was because efforts to promote participatory budgeting were accompanied by financial resources from donors, some of which could be creamed off by the local political and technocratic elite in the form of allowances. As in the case of intra-community participation, the initial enthusiasm eventually petered out.

As with the intra-community participation, a combination of participation fatigue and the collapse of interest by ordinary people undermined its sustainability. As elsewhere, ordinary citizens were encouraged to attend meetings and share whatever ideas they had about issues they wished to be included in budgets as priorities for funding. Again, the weight of multiple obligations, and awareness that expressing views or making demands would not always mean that the financial resources needed for them to be acted on would be made available, undermined the sustainability of participation in meetings to discuss budgets.

Wider cultural and political challenges

These observations highlight a number of dilemmas. Let us consider the idea of actively making demands on leaders, to ensure that they do what they are supposed to do. It is difficult to make this work in a context with a longstanding culture of subservience to, and obedience towards, people who are considered to be important or of high status. In countries with long histories of hierarchical social and political relations, as is the case in Uganda, it raises questions about the specific steps required to stimulate a culture of questioning authority and making demands on leaders.

Other types of participation such as advocacy by citizen movements or civil society groups and direct action such as protests have the potential to fill gaps left by the shortcomings of popular participation. These, too, however, have their limitations. In Uganda, there are laws that the government uses to limit these kinds of actions. They include the Non-Governmental Organisations Act 2016 and the Public Order Management Act 2013. The former prohibits non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations (CSOs) from engaging in politics or partisan politics — which can be open to interpretation — putting offending organisations at risk of de-registration or denial of registration renewal. This has made NGOs and CSOs cautious. The latter requires would-be organisers of demonstrations or protests to inform the police in advance. The police could prohibit any event on account of its potential, also open to interpretation, to disrupt order.

There is also the question of what should be done in contexts where, despite the enactment of freedom of access to information laws, governments or officials are reluctant to facilitate such access in practice, with most victims of this reluctance feeling unable to do anything about it. These questions take us to the issue of collaboration among development partners, which might contribute to efforts to render initiatives to promote participation, transparency and accountability effective.

Approaches to potential solutions

There is something to be said for promoting a ‘culture’ of participation, transparency and accountability. Cultures emerge and become established over long periods of time, during which deliberate efforts are made to promote and nurture them. Efforts to promote transparency have emerged after long periods of emphasis on the importance of public officials upholding secrecy by safeguarding state secrets. This has begotten a culture of secrecy and reluctance to share information, except with those who are authorised to access it, usually fellow officials. This is not easy to reverse. It requires concerted efforts. These could combine, among other steps, the following:

• Sensitisation, through public education campaigns, focused seminars and workshops, and sustained lobbying targeted at both the government and public officials, civil servants especially, to re-orient them from their inclination to want to hide information, to being open to sharing it.
• Facilitate the emergence of networks of collaboration among key users of information, such as civil society groups and media, to enhance their ability to compel officials to provide access, via advocacy and, if need be, litigation. Litigation costs resources and, in Uganda, time because of case backlogs in courts. Most users of information cannot afford the financial costs and the waiting entailed in litigating successfully. Consequently, development partners and other actors that are endowed with resources could come in, to finance public interest litigation designed to encourage governments and officials to move beyond merely enacting freedom of access to information legislation, and instead actually ensuring that when required, information is made available on demand (within justifiable limits).
• At an elementary level, efforts to stimulate and sustain high levels of interest in participation in public life would call for the enactment of laws that oblige people within communities to attend public meetings. Such laws must be accompanied by mechanisms that ensure that local leaders are suitably incentivised. First, they should be compensated for their time and efforts. This could be supplemented by the use of sanctions by higher-level authorities whenever they do not measure up to expectations in terms of performance. In addition, local authorities should be furnished with the financial means to respond to the expressed demands and wishes of the public.
• It is important to seek to review laws that prohibit or interfere with freedom of association, with a view to creating more space for direct action such as protests and demonstrations where members of the public may choose to use them. A key difficulty would be that these laws were designed to facilitate the NRM’s ambitions for regime maintenance. For as long as the NRM is in power and overwhelmingly dominant in terms of the number of parliamentarians it has, and as long as the logic of winner-takes-all politics where inter-party consensus is extremely difficult to achieve prevails, change is unlikely.

In conclusion, efforts to promote participation, transparency and accountability will have greater chances of success where the peculiarities of the contexts in which the promotion is to happen are well understood and taken into account. Understanding the context ensures that problem solvers recognise what is feasible and worth pursuing, and what is not. Also, it ensures that change agents pursue solutions that fit the context, rather than promoting ‘best practice’ where chances of success are, from the very beginning, limited or non-existent.

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