The curse of identity politics and practice

The 7 factors behind the practice of exploiting shared origins and/or beliefs unrelated to performance to gain advantage

COMMENT | Kant Ateenyi Kanyarusoke | In his Independence Day address, President Museveni outlined 8 key issues that we should be addressing as a nation to thrive and even make requirement for so called foreign ‘AID’ unnecessary. To me as a pan Africanist engineering pracademic (academic in industrial practice), three areas touched my passions greatly: Identity politics (to which I will add practices), Wealth creation by a liberated private sector, and Integration of the region and continent towards an economically unified Africa. In a three article series, I will touch on these three beginning with the first, followed by the third, and lastly the second.

Identity Politics (IP) – The practice of exploiting shared origins and/or beliefs unrelated to performance to gain political advantage. This is a cancer that must be fought because it prevents the best from ‘elsewhere’ to serve to their best abilities. In extreme cases, it can even eliminate them from national service. Yet in a country of shortages of higher-level skills, competencies, and positive work attitudes, most needed are people with these attributes from wherever we can get them.

Four Possible Causes – a) Lack of understanding that some people from among those ‘others’ can serve one’s real interests (advancement in meeting one’s growing human needs) better. b) A disturbing history of tribal chauvinism and religious rivalries that some players look back on. c) The mistaken thinking that a country’s revenues form a huge ‘national cake’ that must be ‘eaten’ based on who oversees the country, but not: first raised, then spent or saved based on what needs to be done in the country now and tomorrow. d) the wrong belief that politics, not hard and smart work, directly creates sustainable wealth.

Three Facilitating factors – a) An inappropriate copied and pasted political system of ‘Winner takes all’ in a so-called multi-party dispensation. b) An education and social infrastructure system that increasingly localises thinking and staffing (if you school in one area or belief setting from nursery to university, along with, and are taught by your likes, tackle local issues, how easy will it be for you not to appreciate a tribal or local political upstart?) c) An oversized public administration system amidst a lack of proper balance between mission-critical and administration staffing ratios in the public sector. Ratios in the 3:7 range or worse are common as opposed to a reversed 7:3. Part of the problem is that Mission-critical activities need both specialised (hard) and general (soft) skills while most administration relies on soft skills.

Ways to resist IP – Get rid of the above 7 factors, and you have a fair chance to resist IP. Not easy though! Here, I will tackle the educational issue only and illustrate with a jinx I request you to solve.

Let us teach History at whatever level, to emphasise commonalities of peoples on our continent and lessons drawn from evils of past sectarianism. We should also teach Science to emphasise the commonalities of needs amongst living things and particularly for humans, the equality of the sexes in creating individuals as we see them today. For example, here is a jinx for you to solve: My paternal grandfather was a Munyoro who came to Toro (when it was still part of Bunyoro) and married a mu Toro lady. My maternal great grandmother was a lady raided from ‘Rwanda’ in the 19th century and given to some mu Toro man. She produced my grandma and a son who adopted the cattle culture of the mother. The daughter got married to a mu Toro bark cloth maker-man. They produced my mother who got married to my father in 1954. The maternal uncle passed the cattle culture to her which she then introduced to my Dad, a cultivator-parish chief, then.

Bark cloth making, cultivating, administration, and cattle keeping were later to influence my life, studies and professional work in ways difficult to explain here. In 1959, some Banyarwanda (Tutsi) were displaced to Uganda, and one of them married a Munyankole lady. The two produced a lady with whom I now have children. One of the children is now in a relationship with another lady. This lady’s parents are descended partly from the Malaysia-Indonesia slaves of the 17th-18th century in South Africa, the Dutch settlers of that country, other European seamen, and the African Bantu peoples (the Xhosas). If a child is born of this couple, what ‘tribe’ will it be? Meanwhile, another son of ours has a child with a Gishu lady; another wished for a Sotho lady, and nephews have children with Baganda, Banyankole, Batoro, etc. What are the differences between all these offsprings? And now the most important question: All these offsprings were partly a result of events in Bunyoro, Rwanda, Toro, Ankole, South Africa to mention but a few places. Change any one event – and you have a completely different scenario, including my own inexistence! What then, is the point in pursuing these nationality issues (for which we are not responsible) against what someone is bringing to the workplace?

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The Author is a Pan Africanist Engineering Educator and rural development Entrepreneur.