OWEYEGHA-AFUNADUULA: How Uganda Became And Continues To Be A Country Of Empty Promises Under Movement Governance

Keeping your promises reflects your ethical and moral standing in society. It reflects to what extent you respect other human beings. If you promise but continually break your promises, superseding your capacity to keep them, this can tell a lot about your upbringing. It could mean that as you were growing up you heard those who were much older than you making promises but breaking them before your own eyes.

Or else you grew up making false promises, even to your elders, but no one was available to help you grow up learning that it is ethically and morally wrong to make promises that you know you can never honour. Many people who habitually make empty or false promises do so to capture the unsuspecting or win them over to satisfy their own desires, goals, aims and purposes in life and society. They take advantage of the vulnerability of others to empty or false promises.

Consequently, a habitual empty promise maker grows up not respecting those he or she makes empty promises. He or she only values his or her own desires, goals, aims and purposes in life or society. Un fortunately, he or she ends up eroding the capacity of many to have confidence in authority or power and trust that authority or power can ever honour any promises made or deliver on anything effectively. If authority or power honour any of the promises made it will be taken as accidental by conscious or right thinking people.

Making empty or false promises is not unlike lying. Unfortunately, if you have many young people over whom you have a lot of influence, they might take you as their model and begin to do exactly what you do. The ultimate result is that a whole generation of human beings may be anti-ethics and anti-morality and end up being practitioners and lovers of dubious deals and corruption.

Making false promises, therefore, can destroy the moral and ethical foundations or fibres of whole families, whole societies, whole institutions and whole countries with dire consequences for humanity of today and tomorrow.

False promises in governance are an aspect of bad governance since we cannot build meaningful and effective leadership, governance, equity, equality and justice, nor sustain patriotism in the country in the long term. Patriotic people are not made through a chain of false or empty promises, especially when some sections of the population actually get promises fulfilled discriminatively at the expense of others.

Countries, governments, institutions, including families, that thrive on abusing others by feeding them with false or empty promises are dead a thousand times. They are just existing, not surviving. They cannot be trusted by right-thinking or conscious people. They value more the manipulation and exploitation of those over whom they exercise power and influence than genuinely delivering goods, services, security, peace and a future worth living.

In this article, I assume (i) centrality of false or empty promises in the governance of Uganda; (ii)  that they threaten the survival of the country as secure, peaceful and united, with confident and trustworthy people across all social strata well in the future; and (iii) that governance of the country will be based on week ethical and moral foundations. Empty or false promises in governance is bad governance, not good governance. If this continues the governance of Uganda in future will be extremely difficult.

So far, I have assumed that my readers know what false or empty promises are. Of course, a good number of my readers know what false or empty promises are. However, many others will welcome them and celebrate them as honest promises, praise and worship the promiser, and do exactly what the promiser wants to make them do: fall prey to the empty or false promises so that he or she can use the victims to achieve goals, aims and purposes that have nothing to do with the victims.

The goals, aims and purposes so frequently have to do with power, wealth, glory, ownership, belonging and other narrow interests, all of which have the capacity to destroy the identities of the country and their different and collective futures.

False and /or empty promises are promises made by the promiser when she or he knows that they are not true or cannot be realized within the time period attached to them. However, they are often cast in such a way that the victims cannot perceive them as false or empty.

If the false promise stands the test of time, it may be repeatedly used to stupefy the victims well in future. In Uganda of the 21st Century, empty or false promises have emerged as one of the big problem and roadblock to good governance, effective leadership, justice, change and development.

It is often said that behind every problem is the problem of leadership. Even today, the problem of false or empty promises is the problem of leadership. The problem cannot be effectively dealt with unless the people are politically developed and politically literate enough to perceive and understand that they are under the spell of false or empty promises and that they are under captivity through and by them. In Uganda, the greatest number of false promises are made by our political leaders. History in the making has been recording them although most Ugandans are not conscious of them.

Many of our people are not conscious of the false or empty promises because of their blind love for their leaders, especially the President of Uganda, Tibuhaburwa Museveni, whom they still believe went to the bushes of Luwero to liberate them from past regimes. However, the boundary between past regimes and the current regime in power is becoming more and more blurred.

The regime has been able to captivate the minds of its victims and actively encompass them in its party, the National Resistance Movement Organisation (NRMO) as registered by the Uganda Electoral Commission. Today even underage children are being recruited in the organisation as was the case when children were recruited in the rebel group called National Resistance Army (NRA), which had a sizeable number of Rwandese Tutsi refugees, including big names such as Paul Kagame, Fred Rwigyema and Bunyenyezi.

False or empty promises are likely to continue to be a valued weapon in the governance of Uganda towards 2050, and will definitely play a big role in the 2026 Presidential and Parliamentary elections. False or empty promises are already central to the political-cum economic campaigns of the President of Uganda but are disguised as integral elements to poverty eradication and development programmes, particularly the Parish Development Model (PDM).

PDM might end up being a a highly costly false or empty promise of freedom from poverty, just as those other programmes that preceded it, namely: Rural Farmers Scheme (RFS); Entadikwa (Starting Capital, SC); Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP); Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP; Bonna Bagaggawale (Prosperity for All); Operation Wealth Creation (OWC); and Emyooga Programme (EP).

If we take criticality as important in development discourse in Uganda, as President Tibuhaburwa Museveni desires it to be, then critical minds would characterize all these programmes as “a system of false or empty promises underpinned by false hope of illusionary richness Virtually all of them are based on giving money bonanzas to a few individuals within the rural community guided by the falsehood that prosperity will flow from those individuals and then permeate throughout the community. It is a unique approach to development known only in Uganda.

Researchers need to delve into the system of false promises and false hopes and provide us with data that can be critically analysed to inform us to what extent Uganda has lost or gained as a result of being hooked to the system of false promises and false hopes perpetuated by politicians in power.

As Daily Monitor (2021) observed, a great number of election promises are broken. There is great pressure on politicians to make promises that they cannot keep. Many times, the promises are made in haste. Knowingly making false, unachievable and illegal campaign promises amounts to a political lie, breaches ethics and honesty (William Gumede, 2021).

Gumede called for punishment of politicians who give empty, false promises. Punishment for electoral lies would be possible if there was a law against such lies. However, Uganda lacks such a law. The best punishment of an electoral liars would be for the voters to reject the liar at the polls.

But with extremely low civic education, spiralling corruption, vote thefts, vote buying and militarization of the electoral process often resulting in violence and death, many voters either abandon participating in the lections or vote the culprit in fear of reprisals endangered by political, police and military repression during the elections.

In 2015 the Parliamentary Committee on Government Assurance reported that President Tibuhaburwa Museveni had not delivered on 817 promises he made since 1986 (Monitor, 2017). The Presidential pledges, according to the Committee amounted to Shs 12.9 trillion (Monitor, 2017).

Today the figure could be considerably higher. It means nearly 40 years of broken promises but the President still firmly in control of the country and the people. Recently the President and his party celebrated the nearly 40 years in power at a time when the government is making more promises yet it steadying the country and people on the road to nowhere, everything is in a mess, there is no clear plan to tackle deadening corruption, the basics are not right, the President is not in touch with Uganda’s deep-seated problems.

And false promises of the President spiral supersonically upwards. Clearly, as we head towards the 026 Presidential and Parliamentary elections, Uganda is a nation of empty promises.

The consequences of unfulfilled promises can be dire. Azwifaneli Managa (2012), in the case of South Africa, recorded that the failure of the post-1994 government to meet its promises has sparked unrest, as manifested in service delivery protests that have marred the country for almost a decade now.

It further reflects that government’s response to the crises using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach could have aggravated the problems, as communities have different issues for which they are fighting.

For Uganda we are still swimming in the peace and security ushered in by the rebels of Luwero, which is external and physical and based on gun power. However, if we wake up to our reality of continuous deprivation, we might sooner than later follow the experience of South Africa.

For God and My Country