The legendary Imam Kasozi tells a story of a school in the famous Luweero Triangle, which quickly turned into battleground for political action and competing development projects in the late 2000s.
In its heydays, Bukuku Hidaya primary school was a training ground for a section of the NRA rebels during their 1980s rebel activities – under the command of Kahinda Otafiire. [He wasn’t Gen then]. But when the rebels ruined the school, they simply forgot about it.
Having learned via radio about Imam Kasozi’s magnificent charity work with schools and related projects, an elderly woman, a former educationist – now blinded by age, possibly in her 80s – took it upon herself to find Imam Kasozi. Amina Kyamulabi had been so passionate about the school that despite her blindness, she was not ready to forget a core school in her home area.
When Imam Kasozi reached the school, it was in absolute disrepair. Learners of different classes – say, primary five and primary four – shared a small dilapidated classroom with the only barrier being the fact that they looked in different directions. Teachers shared a single- stance pit latrine with about 200 learners.
It was an ugly site – and we have seen many of these around Uganda. True to spirit, Imam Kasozi, who had moved with a builder-friend, asked the friend to pull out his measuring tape, and mapped a standard block with five standard classrooms. He asked that digging the foundation begins immediately. When he returned to his Mawanga mosque, he rallied the public to mobilise for the school.
The following weekend, he returned to the site with some volunteers: two engineers, eight experienced builders and eight porters. By the second weekend, the building had reached the wall plate. As soon as the building had emerged from the ground, enjoying a road-side location, the people passing by started talking about it, asking questions.
“Who is spearheading this project?” “Are they children of the area or are they coming from elsewhere?” Some of them were government folks – including the district education officer and the RDC – who quickly learned that the man behind the new gigantic project was Imam Kasozi, “the man who is often critical of the government.”
Afraid that Imam Kasozi was on the journey to embarrass them, these government people decided to give him competition. Just a couple of days later, they also came to construct another block of their own. Since government is more resourced than a single individual, their block would be completed faster than Kasozi’s block.
While this might have been the time of building schools, this small school had been bypassed for not being a government school. I know, the same folks had ruined it. All Imam Kasozi did was throw them a challenge. Either way, the learners and teachers benefited from what seemed like a fight.
A related, more recent, story happened about two months ago, when a man from the UK, Samuel Leeds, announced completing a 63 bedroom hospital in Jinja. It cost him Shs 1 billion. This man turned all our arguments upside down: especially about how expensive public infrastructures are, and how we all have to sit back and wait for government.
OPPOSITION BY BUILDING THINGS
There are two easier lessons to pick from these events: (a) the genius of mobilisation in the ordinary sense of actually doing things, and the extent to which ordinary folks can go if they decided to mobilize themselves and work together and do things that otherwise government has ignored.
Notice that Imam Kasozi never has this money nor the human resources from his personal pocket. He simply mobilizes them. (b) the notion of opposition through development/ transformation. At one level, building things is not necessarily opposing government but, rather, challenging it. At another level, we see it as a form of opposition.
In our still colonised positions, we can do some things. I know, we cannot build roads or transform our public transport. But we can clean our markets, build water-wells and boreholes. We can build ourselves vocational schools or hospitals, and find local ways of sustaining them through crowd-funding and mobilisation.
We can rebuild cooperative societies – around our icons. See, governments collect money from the wananchi forcefully. They call this taxation. But cultural icons with wonderful ideas can actually collect money from individuals willingly and lovingly. This is called fundraising or crowd-funding. Etoffaali.
Government might frustrate these initiatives once they become visible. But better to pursue this direction of opposition than push for hackneyed and borrowed notions as ‘shrinking democratic space,’ or ‘electoral reforms’ under a professed authoritarian government. What is the object of these reforms or a bigger democratic space if you cannot mobilize from even the small space?
Plenty of times, I have urged comrade brother Robert Kyagulanyi to use this rare opportunity of near-cultist support to transform it into some tangible items. Instead, he has exhibited a willingness to campaign for and send more men and women into the clogged drainage machine – where they masquerade as legislators with jingoistic democratic ideas.
I am not saying Bobi Wine channels at least one billion from the annual Shs 5 billion IPOD money into some big project. But rather that he uses his clout to initiates project-targeted drives, say on his tours across the country, Imam-Kasozi style.
The point I am making is this: to be elected the official opposition is immediate iconiclization; it is clout, that ought to be used as a platform for mobilisation of your voters towards tangible things. This does only challenge slackers in government offices, but also endears the icons making them more suitable as leaders.
But even if they never assume political office, they would have used their iconic positions usefully. If there are any lessons to learn from Imam Kasozi, whose years of activism and charity work are only fairly supported – and the man is neither king nor one with a cultist following – it is that folks in the opposition have failed in their core function: community mobilisers.
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University