I have been reading about Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher who influenced scientific thinking and knowledge a great deal.

Interestingly he based his philosophic thought on the physical notion of motion. He wrote a book titled Leviathan, primarily on social and political philosophy, but had a well-developed scientific mind.

I like the way he easily adopted mathematics – specifically geometry – to influence his thought. Imagine!  A person with a political mind migrating into science and influencing it with the other side of his mind -the scientific one.

Many Ugandans, because of the way they are trained can’t. Imagine a social scientist or lawyer influencing natural science. When they see such a person they say he does not know where he belongs. But that is what an unconfined mind can do: see as far as possible. “See” does not refer to eyes but to the brain; specifically  the mind.

But Thomas Hobbes is not the only one who had the intellectual capacity to do that.

Faraday was a fresh student of law at the University of Edinburgh when he migrated to chemistry without training and made many discoveries. He even innovated Faraday’s law linking volume, temperature and pressure.

Sir Francis Bacon was another one who migrated into science and innovated the observation,  experimentation and induction method.

Michel de Montaigne did a lot to prepare science for putting scepticism (doubt)  to scientific use. He looked upon himself as an unpremeditated philosopher – one not confined intellectually to some rigid set of ideas within which his thoughts and life must be expressed.  So, broadly, you could not put him in the natural sciences,  social sciences or the humanities.  He was a free,  liberated thinker.

Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy,  was comfortable following an education in philosophy,  logic and mathematics, but ended up giving science a method of work, the Descartes Method, that aided the thinking of scientists to be more systematic, using the powers of intuition and deduction. He demonstrated how to use the method of doubt (scepticism) to find an absolutely certain starting point for building up human knowledge. He delved into the science of body and mind. He was the first known rationalist.

Gottfried Wilheim von Leibniz, like Descartes was a rationalist. He started off with studying mathematics, but ended up getting a doctorate degree in law of jurisprudence. He developed the infinitesimal calculus and published it three years before Sir Isaac Newton, who claimed to have developed it, released his manuscript to the publishers. He quarrelled with Newton and was marginalised. His contribution to science, apart from calculus was his thought on substance. He asked, “If things we see…are divisible into small things, why can we not assume that all things are compounds or aggregates?” He distinguished between truths of reason and truths of fact. However,  his reasoning was still impregnated with metaphysics.

Thomas Hobbes?  This is the one I am interested in, in relation to Uganda. Yes true to his background in political philosophy, he gave us a philosophy of morality. He is also gave us the concepts of social contract and sovereignty. But as I said in the beginning he used the physical notion of motion as a basis for his philosophic thought. He also used geometry (a type of mathematics) to influence his thought. Using geometry he was able to give us a mechanical view of human thought.

It is, however, Hobbes’ concern with the laws of nature and how egotistical individuals, in pursuit of selfish interests may offend or have offended natural laws, that attracted me to write this article.

In Uganda, because of the development choice of “development first: people, environment and  nature”  last, we have exacted so much harm to nature and natural laws in the recent past. Natural ecosystems are collapsing as we intensify their simplification. We have destroyed the sociocultural and socioeconomic systems that cannot flourish apart from the natural systems.

Agroecological systems are on the wane. We used to have Uganda divided into seven or so agroecological zones. Those are the ones on which domestic agricultural  production depended. I don’t know how  many are remaining after we have converted many  of them into mono-cultural systems of oil palm,  sugarcane,  Cypress and Eucalyptus.

We continue to wreak havoc, ostensibly to develop Uganda. But instead we are using foreign models and foreign knowledge in the false belief that it is what is foreign that will be effective in doing that. We have even grabbed land for foreigners to establish extensive agriculture, and we are calling it development. In some places we have created environmental conditions that favour floods.

Not long ago continuous rains made Namanve area flooded. Even the factories in the so- called industrial park were flooded. The costs of the flooding are yet to be determined. It is, however,  clear nature was reclaiming the area, which used to be a swamp but is now punctuated by buildings; mostly within the last 10 years.

Nature seems to be more environmentally- conscious than human beings. Because we have disempowered the people and communities these are just onlookers. They are losing their connection with the land.  It is unlikely they will regain it.

It is perhaps Hobbes’ observation and awareness that the logical outcome of egotistical individuals, all deciding how best to survive, would be anarchy, that should spur Ugandans to think and rethink their future in light of what is happening. They might even have to rethink  the commitment of their leaders to their need for tranquil minds and peace well in the future.

“Anarchy,” according to Hobbes, “is where there are no arts; no letters; no society; and which is, worst of all, continued fear, and fear of violent death; and the life of man, solitary,  poor,  nasty, British,  and short…”

While Hobbes advocated for men to renounce their rights or freedoms and enter into a social contract, and thereby create an artificial man, called a commonwealth or a state, the state in Uganda seems to be receding or disappearing.  It is being consummated by a group of people, the egotisticals, who only bother about their own survival and the survival of their families. They are currently being characterised as the mafiaso. They have unlimited power, or access to power, resources and opportunities, and are more outward-looking than they are inward-looking.  For many of them Uganda is a reduced base to support their interests elsewhere (outwardlooking).

Meanwhile society is being dissected repeatedly into small, meaningless entities, unable to stand on their own socially, economically and politically, and increasingly dependent on the centre, itself evermore remote from the periphery.

The only part of the centre that seems to have unlimited access to the periphery is the president of Uganda and institutions such as Operation Wealth Creation, created to empower the periphery socioeconomically but, in reality, are disgusting empowering it.

The false reasoning is that breaking the country into small entities will enable services to reach the people and communities faster and more efficiently. In reality the outcome has been disconnecting clans and communities, and disintegrating  the extended family system that used to provide the weak and poor with social and economic security.

Clans, communities and extended family systems ate now far more vulnerable to machinations and manipulations environmentally, socially, politically and economically. Their connectivity to the land is in jeopardy. They are set to become sources of floating population, more slavish than ever before. But they are being told it is development on course.

What is required is enabling our people to be more broad-minded so that they can comprehend what is happening in their country.

Broadness of mind is especially required among the literate segment of our people, at all levels of society,  but especially at the very top, who have become secondarily illiterate. When this happens it will be easy to conscientise the rest of society to internal and external forces all out to disorient  the livelihood security of Ugandans for their greed and selfishness.

Broad-mindedness will only be achieved through rethinking and redesigning education.

But the leadership must be ready to lead because behind every problem is the problem of leadership.  No solutions will emerge unless the leadership’s choices are congruent with those of the citizens. If the leaders inwardly despise the people, nothing will happen. There will be no change favouring the people.

Currently our education system favours small knowledges and glorified individuals intra-disciplinarily produced. These,  unfortunately, are disconnected and incapable of comprehending wholesome problems, issues and challenges that have no respect for disciplinary confinements.

At best these people may provide solutions to small bits of problems, issues or challenges. And their solutions will more often than not be the new problems to solve. However, since more often than not we are never prepared for the secondary problems arising from the small solutions, we just let them multiply and accumulate. In the end there is no problem solved. Then we spend a lot of time,  energy and money trying to solve problems we can never solve.  Meanwhile the world is moving forward.

Elsewhere in the world there is increasing recourse to what is called “new knowledge production and management”. This is knowledge produced and managed inter-disciplinarily (that is, between two disciplines) or trans-disciplinarily (that is beyond the disciplines). Increasingly, however,   knowledge is being produced and managed non-disciplinarily (that is, without reference to disciplines) too as a result of cyber-dynamics.

Africa in general and Uganda in particular are far behind the current of new knowledge production and management. This means we are also not integral to the main intellectual currents on the globe. Of all our 50 plus only Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) has attempted to keep pace with new knowledge production and management.

Long ago MUST established an Institute of Interdisciplinarity, and now has a Faculty of Interdisciplinarity. It has yet to launch transdisciplinary and non-disciplinary studies.

Africa must catch up. Uganda must catch up. The 21st century is a new century of new knowledge production and management, with new knowledge societies and a new knowledge  worker called the Educated Person. We are stuck with the education system of education as it was in Europe in the early or middle Modern Times, but Europe has fast abandoned it in favour of new knowledge production and management for broadness of knowledge and knowledge workers that are broad-minded.

Since people feel safer where they are than where you want to take them, there will be resistance to this necessary change. Even in the Renaissance in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries there was resistance to new knowledge and new ways of generating knowledge. For example, despite Galileo demonstrating that the Milky Way is a group of distant stars,  renowned academics of the time refused to look through his telescope. This compelled Galileo tell his friend,  Kepler: “Should we cry or laugh?” However, very soon, the world did not wait for resistant academics and intellectuals. New knowledge and discoveries were ushering Europe into the Industrial  Revolution.

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