The immense power of labels

How assigning a name to something changes public perceptions of its character

THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Words are used to obscure the truths. Attach a label to something, and people will see it in a particular way. For instance, in Uganda, a person who is a born-again Christian is assumed or seen to be pious and honest. I see this in President Yoweri Museveni. He appoints born-again Christians into public office on the assumption that they will not be corrupt.

The same applies to our view of liberal democracy. Indulge in the procedures and rituals of democracy as defined in a textbook and everyone will imagine such a government is humane, accountable and serves the interests of its citizens.

Labeling stops people from thinking and analyzing and makes them rely on axiomatic faith. In the Western media, academia and diplomacy, they will label a leader of a particular country a despot, dictator or tyrant and his government (which they will call a regime) authoritarian, despotic, brutal etc. Once labelled so, all thinking stops, and such a leader and their government will be seen and judged based on the label than what it actually does. With a label, no evidence is required to make judgement. We know something by what it is defined as and not by what it really is or does.

These thoughts kept running through my mind as I went through three things. First was a discussion with friends over breakfast in Kigali on October 8th. The second was a debate with three kids whom I consider to be the most intelligent 24-year-olds in the world – Joel, Chefe and Nnanda. The third was reading a book by a former British deputy ambassador to Washington DC, Patrick Davies. Titled The Great American Delusion: The Myths Deceiving America and Putting the West at Risk.

But first things first. In 2022, the government of Rwanda changed the time for reporting at work from 8am to 9am. Why? Because they wanted to give time to parents to drop kids to school. They also reduced the hours one can work in a week to 40. Only Rwanda has universal health insurance of any poor country. As I have written before, by every measure of democracy as written in a textbook; Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Malawi and even Uganda are all more democratic than Rwanda. Yet the government in Kigali is much more responsive to the needs of its citizens even though the lords of wisdom tell us it is despotic.

Since the 2020 COVID lockdown, President Yoweri Museveni has turned the airstrip at Kololo as a ground for many of his public meetings. And whenever he is at Kololo, all roads around the airstrip are closed. Cars are diverted to York Terrace, Prince Charles Drive, Elizabeth Avenue. These diversions have the most potholed roads in Kampala and are very narrow. So, traffic gets jammed, and people spend hours trapped in their cars polluting the air. In four years of Museveni doing this, it has never occurred to the elected representatives of this country and city that they need to do something about it. This cannot be because the public does not hold elected officials to account. In every election, over 70% of MPs in Uganda are not returned.

This cannot happen in Kigali. If such a diversion became regular, the next day, the government would be repairing and enlarging the roads or even building new diversions. In Kampala, people build in swamps, causing flooding whenever it rains. No one seems interested to solve this problem. In Kigali, the city is reclaiming every swamp to stop flooding. And this imperviousness to the public interest is not only in Uganda. Across Africa countries seen as much more democratic, serve the interest of a few elites.

This problem is not just confined to Africa. Indeed, this is the gist of Davies’ book on America. It is a story of how powerful elite interests have captured the state in America and use it to further their own interests, not the interests of the American voter. So big tech, big pharma, oil companies, insurance firms, the arms industry etc. use the power of their money to influence policy to favour their shareholders (1% of the US population) at the expense of the 99%. Consequently, although the US economy has grown tremendously over the last 50 years, average household incomes (after adjusting for inflation) has not grown. America has a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. But because it is labeled a liberal democracy, it is assumed to serve the common good.

Finally, Joel, Chefe, Nnanda and I were discussing John Measheimer’s magnum opus, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. In it are tables of the industrial output of Russia and Germany in World War One (WW1) and World War Two (WW2). In every piece of military hardware, Germany outproduced Russia by almost a factor of 3-1 in WW1. But during WW2, the tables turned and Soviet industry outproduced Germany in tanks, planes, rifles, artillery, munitions etc. by a factor of almost 2-1. And this happened when Germany was occupying 70% of Soviet industrial areas. Yet, we are told communism was a poor system of increasing national output. How did Josef Stalin transform Russia from a backward peasant economy into an industrial juggernaut in ten years?

In the same book are tables of the relative size of the Soviet Economy vis a vis that of the US from 1945 to 1990. In 1945, the Soviet economy was 32% of the US economy. By 1976, it had reached 67%, before it entered a period of decline and eventual collapse. How did this poor system of economic organization compete with the world’s most dynamic economy and for three decades continued to grow and narrow the gap in wealth?

The final issue Joel, Chefe, Nnanda and I puzzled over was the nature of Stalinist Russia and liberal democratic America. The US was built on the genocide of native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. Yet, it is Stalin’s mass murders that are written in history books, not those of America. King Leopold of Belgium killed more than 20 million Congolese while Hitler killed six million Jews.

The former genocide is not talked about, the latter is pumped into our heads and is used to justify an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The lesson is simple but powerful: once we label a country or leader as civilized or liberal democratic, we become blind to its/his horrors. We only focus on the “horrors” of those defined as despotic.

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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug