When I decided to write an article on fear and democratisation, what I wanted to be in the article: some quotes on fear and the centrality of fear in the essential process of democratisation in the management of human societies and their institutions.

So many people in human history, even in biblical times, have thought about the place of fear in human societies, while others have also touched on the opposite of fear: courage.

Adolf Hitler was always a worried man and built a terror state to mass fear in German population to perpetuate his terror machine. He was not worried that the German people would abandon him. The outstanding reason why the people still supported him was fear – not fear of the Gestapo, but fear of the consequences of defeat and his fall from power. This state of collective mind made the German people bear the ills they faced and suffered in silence rather than fly to others they did not know of.

Most dictators of the world emulate Hitler to some extent to cultivate fear, which they know can glue the people to them, not love. Those who say they love a dictator are liars.

Therefore, do not make the wrong interpretation and/or conclusion that I am digressing from the topic of my choice when I give you a list of some famous quotes on fear. It is a preamble to my topic “Fear is a roadblock to Democratisation: The Case of Uganda”. 

I hope the quotes will guide you in your choice of leadership and governance, or in rethinking your association with and perceptions of leaders, leadership and governance in your country. You can ask yourself: ‘Am I so fearful that I have to suffer these ills in silence?’, ‘Is democratisation a failure?’, ‘Is there hope in putting it on the right path?’

Here are the quotes I thought you should be aware of and think about the relation of fear to democratisation:

Some Famous Quotes in the Bible

Proverbs 3:25: Be not afraid of sudden fear.

2 Timothy 1:7: For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Joshua 1:6: Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land, I swore to their ancestors to give them.

Joshua 1:9: Be strong and of good courage.

Deuteronomy 31:6:  Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you.

Some famous quotes on fear outside the Bible

Mark Twain’s “Courage is resistance to fear”.

Epicurus’ “A man who causes fear cannot be free from fear”

Socrates’ “Fear is the anticipation of harm”.

Plato’s “a perfectly virtuous individual will not fear her own death, nor will she fear or grieve the death of a loved one. 

Aristotle’s “No man loves the man he fears”

Epicurus’ Even death is terrible if we fear it”.

Phineas Fletcher’s “Who bathes in worldly joys swims in a world of fears”

Moonish Proverb “He who is afraid of a thing gives it power over him”

Confucius’ “The way of superior man is threefold: virtuous, he is free from anxieties; wise, he is free from perplexities; bold, he is free from fear.

William Shakespeare’s “Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear.

Jan Masaryk’s “What the world has to eradicate is fear and ignorance”.

Edmund Burke’s “The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.”

Arthur Christopher Benson’s “The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears”.

F.H Bradly’s “A man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care”.

Baruch Spinoza’s “There is no fear without some hope, there is no hope with some fear”.

Phillip Mann’s “It is better to have a right destroyed than to abandon it because of fear”

Michel de Montaigne’s “The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear”.

Carl Jung’s “The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man”.

Andrew Jackson’s “Never take counsel of your fears”.

Confucius’ “A superior man is the one who is free from fear and anxieties”.

Sir Francis Bacon’s “Nothing is as terrible as fear”.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is…fear itself” 

Arthur Wellesley’s “The only thing I am afraid of is fear”.

Albert Einstein’s “I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots”.

Henry David Thoreau’s “The only thing to be so much feared is fear”.

Winston Churchill’s “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”.

Maybe it is best if I start by defining the term “democratization”. As I wrote some time back, there can be as many definitions of something as there are definers. For the purposes of this article, however, simply defined, democratization is the process of subjecting everything to democratic practice. Meaningful democratic practice is when communities make decisions through popular assembly. Unfortunately, in Uganda, community cohesion and resilience have been eroded by representative politics, which is not so representative and in which communities are the losers. Communities are losing belonging and futures.

Almost everything can be democratised:  leadership, governance, political association, education, health, distribution of roads, employment, promotions, scholarships, administration, location of universities, budgetary allocations, recruitment into police, army, prisons, intelligence services, schools and universities. representation, access to natural resources, access to national identity cards, citizenship, belonging, access to land, access to electricity, respect for human rights, et cetera in order to ensure justice for all.

Democratisation should be a continuous process, spirally improving in quality, meaningfulness and effectiveness with the passage of time. However, experience with it, especially in the underdeveloped world in general and Uganda in particular, is that it has instead continuously lost quality, meaningfulness and effectiveness, with deleterious consequences for humanity of the present and future generations. Simultaneously, nationality, sovereignty, citizenship and belonging have been eroded. Many people in Uganda, are asking whether they are independent and sovereign citizens anymore. They see their leaders and governors in the top echelons of power absolutely independent and sovereign at their expense. 

Many Ugandans are increasingly wondering if their descendants will in future belong to Uganda and enjoy their lives in their biocultural landscapes, eating the food that is socio-culturally suitable and produced in their time-tested agroecological systems. They see people with historical, biological, cultural and ecological roots in extraneous environments grabbing their land, destroying their sacred places and establishing themselves in the ancient agroecological systems and forests, thereby disrupting their traditional human-energy systems.   

They see themselves displaced and dispossessed and becoming internal refugees in their own country as the new nomadic invaders are the new settlers while the traditional settlers are the new nomads! They are doubting their futurity in Uganda as the legitimate ecological owners of the country. They are surprised that, on the whole, their leaders and governors are just looking on as if that is what they want the situation to be and persist well in the future. They do not see democracy and justice working despite what the leaders and governors keep on chorusing. Some critical thinkers are saying political military democracy is only promoting the capture of the civilian spaces by the military.

“Continuous democratisation” is usually seen as a process towards democracy defined as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections”.

However, this definition is too narrow as it limits democratisation to the sociopolitical dimension of organisation of society. It ignores societal organisation in the ecological-biological dimension, sociocultural dimension and temporal dimension. That kind of definition is what has encouraged everything to be reduced to politics. It reminds me of the old definition of the environment as “environment is what surrounds us,” which allowed the acquisitive and consumptive culture of greedy and selfish man to perennially destroy the environment through incessant exploitation without effective management and conservation of natural resources.

Thus, the sociopolitical dimension demands there is democratisation towards justice in representation, access to quality life, social improvement, political power, leadership in a way that takes care of the diversity of the indigenous groups of our people. It demands sociopolitical justice in the distribution and access to the national cake. Unfortunately, currently one small ethnic group is enjoying sociopolitical justice. Therefore, social and political development is largely inaccessible to the majority of Ugandans. If it is, it is occurring in apartheid-like fashion, which is unfortunate.

The socioeconomic dimension demands that there is democratisation of participation in the economy by all our various indigenous groups, and that the benefits accrue to them in a just and equitable manner. Unfortunately, a small group of ethnically knit people is explicitly and implicitly the one benefitting from the developments, transformations and progress in the socioeconomic dimension – economically and socially. Most of those who are progressing in business and commerce, or even in institutional leadership and governance, belong to the small ethnic group dominating power in the country.

Most petrol stations, hotels, hostels, supermarkets, ranches, plantations, various businesses, etc, belong to them. In one short sentence, “They own and control the economy of Uganda.” It is as if Uganda is a new colonial state, 62 years after its political independence on October 9, 1962. It is a reversal of the expectations of Ugandans who were there on that day and those who came after.

In the ecological-biological dimension, as I have already mentioned, those in and connected to power are grabbing all the land – public and private – displacing the traditional and cultural owners. They are taking over the ownership of natural forests at will. Yet they have no ecological and cultural experience with forests, since they belong to the nomadic-pastoral human-energy system. It is a new imperialism of primitive accumulation by grabbing. It is a corruption of cultural-ecological community life, which does not augur well for Uganda and its indigenous groups of people well in the future.

In the temporal dimension, wrong timescales are attached to the development and transformational processes, leading to poor productivity and environmental decay and collapse. Many projects and programmes are collapsing because, among other things, wrong time scales are attached to project and programme processes. This might be one explanation of why the Uganda government cannot free itself from incessant borrowing, externally and internally, and why it may not escape from the debt trap in the near future.

As I have stated many times before, if one cannot manage time and attach appropriate timescales to processes, then one cannot manage anything else! One is a time waster and waster of opportunities. Imagine wasting time and opportunities for decades. When does one country catch up with the development, transformation and progress of other countries that value time and opportunities as and when they come?

Thus, democratization does not apply only to the world of politics but all worlds, including the academic and intellectual worlds. Many factors operate to make democratisation meaningless, ineffective and poor in quality. Today, the overriding factor is the greed for power and the urge to dominate others perpetually by those in positions of leadership and governance. These tend, almost universally, to use fear as a tool of subduing, controlling and dominating those under their influence, and excluding others from positions of power and influence. This is political corruption and fear is central to it.

Almost universally, elections are used in many societies all over the world to raise leaders and governors. However, at the centre of the electoral processes is the fear factor. In his article “Fear -a powerful motivator in elections” published by the American Psychological Association (ASA), Kirk Waldroff (2020) submits that fear is an effective way to influence voting behaviour.

In Uganda since independence in 1962, we have seen how political regimes and/or dictatorships have used fear as a tool to dominate or crush the minds of the people and influence their thinking, movements and choices of who should lead, govern or represent them in Parliament or Councils.

Kirk Waldroff (2020) has written that fear can sway opinions, but knowing the deliberate and strategic ways in which our fears are exploited (by politicians, leaders and governors) can help lessen its effects on the people, society, our generation and future generations. As pointed out above, Adolf Hitler used fear to glue the German population to himself. Love of the dictator was not it.

For Uganda, there is no doubt the colonialists – religious and political – used fear as a tool to conquer us mind-wise, politically, culturally, socially, ecologically and spiritually and occupy our territory for their benefit. There is a school of thought that maintains that the same processes of conquest and occupation have been pursued by a small ethnic group of extraneous origin to conquer and occupy Uganda since 1986.

Consequently, argues the school of thought, Ugandans are dominated mind-wise, politically, culturally, socially, ecologically and spiritually by a black caste that is highly power hungry and selfish. Obviously, this claim requires serious study, but the sociopolitical environment, which is not so conducive to free inquiry, at our centres of higher learning, may not allow such study to take place. Topics that simply lead people to acquire qualification and careerism are likely to be more easily approved.

In Uganda, I repeat, the group in power owns and controls everything – money, power, resources and the populations – both politically and militarily. In all cases and everywhere, fear is used to determine the outcomes of the electoral processes. Waldroff (2020) has written thus:

“Campaigns also use fear to drive votes away from political opponents. This strategy may involve factual or misleading statements about the opposing candidate’s limitations or claims that an election victory for the opposition will lead to outright disaster. And on a more personal level, when politician casts doubt on the physical or mental well-being of a challenger, the goal is often to use fear to make supporters doubt his or her competency”.

In Uganda, there is no shortage of causes of fear in politics for those in power or against the challengers. Those in power may accuse the challengers of being weak and likely to sell the country’s sovereignty to foreigners, and working with the foreigners to impose homosexuality on the country. The challengers may accuse those in power of capturing everything that was civilian, wasting the countries budget on their aggrandisement, militarising society, promoting hereditary politics, excluding Ugandans from their natural resources and using them to enrich themselves, corruption, reinventing slavery, ethnicism, greed and selfishness in leadership and governance, and manipulating people through politically loaded schemes such as Operation Wealth Creation, Myooga and Parish Development Model, which end up benefiting those in power and their functionaries. .

Citing Federico Waldroff writes: “… the best way to prevent being manipulated is to understand the emotion of fear itself. Fear induces withdrawal, stepping back, being cautious, fear and anxiety get us to stop and re-assess. But often when we re-assess because of fear, we tend to seek out information that reinforces the idea that a threat exists, which is not necessarily the most accurate or objective information”.

Citing Hurdy’s (2011) article in Political Psychology, Vol. 32 No.3, Waldroff (2020) writes: “If you’re experiencing fear while listening to a politician, it is important to understand that many statements made by politicians and candidates are made for strategic reasons that extend beyond changing your vote to demobilizing the electorate”. 

In Uganda politicians, especially the politico-military ones with exacerbated greed and selfishness, have decelerated the process of democratisation over the past 38 years. They have imposed laws that only service single-party rule, while giving the impression that political pluralism exists, and keep the people constantly under fear. Such laws include the Terrorism Law, Sectarianism Law, Movement Law and Political and Other Organisations Law.

The cardinal question Ugandans is: What are the ways we can resist how deceleration of democratisation affects the people and enhance the value of democratisation in the country well in the future?

For God and My Country.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda