It is More Than Just About Investors and Consumers

A tell-tale dark clouds hanged over the venue for the national fête to the 50 years of "freedom" from our colonial masters as the chief cheerleader pronounced his ambtious plan to catapult the nation to a first-world state.  Key to this latest farce, per The Monitor, is yet another of Museveni's New 10-Point Plan. And the impetus behind all this is "the sovereign" power of "the investor" and "the consumer," so says the master tactician. Whatever happened to the last one as he emerged from the bush? The wonks have often called him to task on the original ten. But the man on-the-move has often answered with more vacuous gimmicks after gimmicks because they sell. The population likes such simplistic one-liners as " Let them get rich," coupled with strategic brown envelops.


Of course, the naked policy of "..sovereign players" as being "..the investor and the consumer" is code for the wild-wild winners-take-all free enterprise. Certainly free enterprise is a good thing, but the so-called investors have to be taken with a jaundice eye. Left alone to run wild, they will soon undermine the "sovereignty" of the consumers. If the wild-wild west prescription were the sine qua non of a free, just and prosperous nation, some western countries would not be having hangovers from the investor-consumer sovereignty orgies of the last two decades. The Spaniards are lining for soup kitchen. The Greeks are.., ah, well, you know the story.

Many Ugandans believe that we were created by a God in the form and faculties that we have today. Evolution tells us something else. Part of our human awareness is said to have evolved over thousands, if not millions of years. The higher brain, the locus of self-awareness that we have, likely came about because of the need to associate and build community in the caves to the present day. The results of alienation and dysfunctional societies are testimonies to what can become in the failure to adhere to the laws of association and community.            
The swashbuckling lone-wolf essence of the "sovereign investor," therefore, runs contrary to our evolutionary survival imperatives. While we tout the progress made in the last twenty five years with the sovereign investor as the captain, we must not forget the gaps in infrastructure, service deliveries and the millions who are burdened by lack of means to satisfy basic needs. A responsible government would fill these gaping gaps in  a balanced way, while concurrently cultivating a culture of fairness and justice for all. Such a government would lead the way to discourage crass consumerism, a consequence of the "sovereign consumer" run amok
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In the end, it is about community, and unrestrained dance of the sovereign investor and the consumer will not take us home.