Let us assume you have a great idea. A vision to solve a persistent problem. A great cause that will require painstaking effort to see through. At the start, you don’t have the necessary resources to have a good go at it. You try and put a team together but it is tough to make headway because you are also severely understaffed – obviously – and under-skilled.
But what you and your team lack in resources and skills, you more than make up for in passion and conviction. So, you punch above your weight and even with the bruises, make it across the aisle. Now, you have built and cobbled together something worthwhile. Things start to look good and there is some legroom to wiggle out of situations that would have had you holding your head only recently.
Partners start to come in. Investors want in. The entire cast is pulling in the same direction at the same time. Success is inevitable. You can smell it. But there is a hiccup. A little bend to negotiate. Your newfound friends say that the methods that got you to this point aren’t sufficient for the next phase. They want you to formalise and build transparent accountability systems. They say you can no longer afford the agility of ad-hoc decision-making and that now you must consult, report, dialogue, and let the best idea win. Even if that idea doesn’t favour your motives or soothe your ego. But that the process is more important than the result. Because that will guarantee long-term survival.
But then you start to think about how you got here and weigh that against the cost of building systems that will be inconvenient. In the end, you decide that accountability is a high price to pay and that you would rather wade your way to a destination where hitherto, everyone else has gotten by playing to the same rules that you are unwilling to take.
You try it your way for a while and hit a dead end every time. And then you decide to lie – to them but inadvertently, to yourself too. You establish processes but circumvent them whenever you have the opportunity. Set standards but only pay lip service to them. Draft and pass laws and policies but only because your funders require you to tick those boxes even if you don’t have the intention to implement them. Accountability? What’s that?
But you can only get away with this for so long. Soon, your funders, clients, and your team ask that you shape up or ship out. You must decide if you are hot or cold – because lukewarm will not cut it anymore. But you have had your way so many times before and don’t think they are serious.
“I will call their bluff,” you tell yourself. You indeed try and nudge them but nothing happens. They are used to, and perhaps, done with your antics. They will not fall for your tricks anymore. So much so that even when you decide to make good on your promises and commitments, they aren’t buying anymore. You took them for a long ride and now they just aren’t going to return to base. So now there is an impasse between the leaders, the led, and the sugar daddies and it is not clear how to go on from here.Critical news junkies must have felt such trepidation observing the political and social debate around last weekend’s bomb scare in Kampala.
Not for the first time, the UPDF found itself in the eye of the storm, accused by opposition politicians, sections of political analysts, and cynics, of playing politics. The accusations are that there are no bomb threats in the way that we have come to know and be frightened by them. That, instead, security forces, either needing money or because they want to stop the opposition National Unity Platform and its popular leader, Robert Kyagulanyi from holding his rallies in Kampala, have engineered terror threats.
Some would ask how it got to a point where citizens’ confidence in their government is so low that they would accuse it of orchestrating terror threats just to score political points. But they would have ignored all the years when processes were circumvented; when systems and institutions were captured; when fortune hunters showed up and cheered loudest, and were thought to be the most qualified. That is how.
Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. @Rukwengye
