We have witnessed leadership failure in Sri Lanka, Great Britain and Italy this millennium. Those who have lived long enough as Ugandans whether they are in or outside the country, witnessed many such failures in Uganda. There is growing evidence that leadership failure is manifesting itself – again – in Uganda in the 21st century.

Failure, like success, is not an event but gradual process. And as I intimated in another article, failure and success are interconnected in a cyclic manner: the decline of one leading to the rise of the other. In my long life of nearly 73 years on Earth, I have gone through several cycles of failure and success in several stations, but have not allowed failure to be the ultimate.

I have always used it to rethink and re-valuate my life’s trajectory, with the full understanding that God created me to be a different being, not like another being. That’s why I have publicly valued difference far more than similarity. That’s why I abhorred President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s individualistic political project of making everyone belong to his National Resistance Movement (NRM), be born in NRM, grow in NRM, manifest in NRM and think only in NRM, not beyond it. That is why I struggled to build an open, pluralistic society of free-thinking people, who can associate freely and speak without fear or favour on their own will.

Unfortunately many Ugandans, perceived me as just an opponent of government. This perception was also entrenched in the academia of Makerere University, where I worked for many years, yet a university is where independent and critical thought and analysis is supposed to be the norm.

Individuals fail. Institutions fail. Projects and programmes fail. Governments fail. And above all, leadership fails, yet we need leadership to develop, transform and progress humanity and society in whatever way or dimension. The dimensions may be social, economic, political, environmental, cultural, spiritual, ethical, moral, ecological, mental, academic, intellectual, health, educational, technological, et cetera.

It is, however, important to stress that there is both good and bad of leadership failure. There are many causes of leadership failure. Leadership failure may initiate many bad things. That is why the title of this article is, ‘The good and the bad of leadership failure in Uganda’. And as I said in a previous article ‘Can President Tibuhaburwa Museveni conquer corruption in Uganda’: we benefit when we can learn, relearn and unlearn from failure.

In this article my thesis statement is: As a country we have not learnt, relearnt and unlearnt from leadership failures and have tended to recycle the same leadership failures or made worse ones.

Before I delve into the good and the bad of leadership failure in Uganda, let me say something about the good of failure and the bad of failure. This will make it easier for you to appreciate and understand the good and bad of leadership failure in Uganda since independence on October 9, 1962.

Most people, institutions, governments fear failure, and really get stigmatised of the mere thought of failure. They do not know that failure and success are interconnected, that once you succeed you must begin thinking of the possibility of failure and vice versa. Albert Einstein, the innovator of the first atomic bomb that shattered Japanese militarism in 1945, and effectively ended World War 2, when two atomic bombs were separately dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had this to say of failure: “Failure is success in progress”. So, we do not have to fear failure. We should take it as the pathway to success.

Many people think it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, former President of USA, who originated the famous phrase “We have nothing to fear except fear itself”, another way of saying that we should not fear failure. However, the phrase originated with the Great French writer Michel de Montagne in the 16th century when he wrote “…the thing of which I have most fear is fear itself”. In another translation, the wording is slightly different thus: “The thing in the world I am most afraid of is that passion alone, the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents. The British intellectual, Francis Bacon, borrowed the idea from Montagne when he wrote in 1623 thus: “Nothing is terrible except fear itself. Then in the 19th century – in 1851 – Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear itself.”

Therefore, fear rather than failure is to be feared. In fact, Alice Dartnell has written that failure is good for many reasons, including:

• It provides a reality check on where we are;
• The lessons learned are priceless;
• It teaches to aspire to do better;
• It builds strength of character; and
• It realigns us to our goals.

In 2011, Army C. Edmondson wrote that failure is sometimes inevitable, good or bad. However, he went on to give a spectrum of reasons for failure, ranging from deliberate deviation to thoughtful experimentation, which may be praiseworthy. Edmondsons spectrum of reasons for failure thus include:

• Deviance, which is deviation from prescribed process or specification.
• Inattention, which is inadvertently deviating from specifications
• Lack of ability, which due to having no necessary skills, training, knowledge, wisdom, understanding or insights to execute the prescribed or necessary task.
• Process inadequacy
• Task challenge
• Process complexity
• Uncertainty (lack of clarity)
• Hypothesis testing
• Exploratory testing.

This spectrum of reasons for failure should be a good guide to why failure can supersede and has superseded success. The reasons will manifest in every policy, legislation, jurisdiction, project, programme or strategy intended to bring about change of one kind or another.

Unfortunately, politicisation and militarisation of everything possible has become the norm rather than the exception in Uganda. In many cases, hypothesis testing and exploratory testing are eliminated and what is desired is implemented, often at very high cost in terms of energy, time, money, justice and development.

Brittany Binowiski (2012) has in her book, The Failure Myth: Why Failure More Often is Bad for You, details the bad consequences of failure. But Samuel West, the curator of the World’s Museum of the World’s most notorious failures, located in Helsingborg, Sweden, and whose main message is “It is OK to fail” says, “Failure is a deviation from expected and desired outcomes”, but he adds: “One serious concern that I do have is when a product is overhyped, and then when it is launched, it does not meet those expectations and then there is a big risk of risk”.

I think this is where I should introduce my thoughts on The Good and the Bad of Leadership Failures in Uganda. The leadership I am focusing on is National Resistance Movement (NRM) leadership, which gave us a lot of hope when it introduced to us its governance blueprint known as The Ten Point Programme in 1986. I will not list the 10 points in the Ten Point Programme, but will only underscore from it what we should have been able to achieve if we had taken it seriously.

If the Ten Point Programme were not abandoned along the way it would be effectively guiding us in:

• Building an integrated and self-sustaining economy
• The fight against corruption and misuse of power
• The fight against human rights violations.
• The fight against extrajudicial killings
• The struggle for good governance
• The struggle against injustice
• The struggle for democratic leadership and governance.
• Equality and equal opportunity
• Quality education and health for all
• Ensuring security for all without discrimination
• Respecting human dignity without allowing a few to displace and dispossess many
• Ensuring effective restoration and improvement of social services for all
• Ensuring Genuine National Unity and elimination of sectarianism from top to bottom
• Defending and consolidating National Independence and sovereignty
• Building a truly mixed economy with all citizens able to participate in it without preference being given to a few
• Discouraging the use of money, jobs and other means to disadvantage some citizens while enabling others to assume leadership in the economy of things
• Taking environment seriously
• Taking Science as One with three dimensions (Humanities or Arts, Social Science and Natural Science) without taking Natural Science and pertinent fields of knowledge band professions as the only science.
• Ensuring that there is no discrimination and segregation in Uganda on basis of ethnicity and fields of knowledge, creed or religion.
• Ensuring that the country’s natural resource belong to and benefit Ugandans primarily.

There are many indications that there has been more failure than success stories in the implementation  of aspects of the Ten Point Programmes. The failures reflect leadership failures. One reason for the failures is the consummation of the leadership roles of different institutions of government by, not the presidency or State House as many would tend to think, but the president of Uganda, Tibuhaburwa Museveni. Few institutions are functioning effectively. These include the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. Their own leadership has been obscured by the person of the president. I have called this presidentialism in another article. They have all been tuned to the survival of the political regime in power in general and political power retention by the president himself. As a result:

• We have failed to build an integrated and self-sustaining economy
• Corruption and misuse of power (especially by the Executive) have proliferated. Corrupt deals and preferential treatment of foreign investors against local investors is undermining the economy
• Human rights violations by the instruments of coercion, sometimes ordered by the President himself, have proliferated. Otherwise constitutional institutions, that would otherwise protect the human rights of citizens are violating them with impunity
• Extrajudicial killings are on the rise, almost supersonically
• Good governance is being challenged by excesses of one type or the other
• Injustices – social, economic, political, environmental, ecological, cultural, etc are on the rise
• Democratic leadership and governance are on the wane
• Equality and equal opportunity are on the wane
• Quality education and health for all seems to be a sweet dream
• Security for all is becoming more and more difficult to realise with passage of time
• Displacements and dispossessions for the gratification of a few are on the rise
• Social services are decaying and collapsing
• National unity on basis of the gun is becoming more and more difficult to assure and sectarianism is on the rise
• National independence and sovereignty are being deliberately eroded
• A truly mixed economy is becoming difficult to assure
• Money, jobs are being increasingly used to defeat democracy and independence
• Environment is incrementally degrading
• The sciences (Humanities, Social Science and Natural Science are being segregated
• Discrimination and segregation are on the rise
• Natural resources are benefiting foreigners and a few people in power and connected to power.

Collectively these are leadership failures. The bad of each is that it is hurting the people and the society. The people expected so much in 1986 when the NRM/A captured the instruments of power, but with the passage of time hopelessness and haplessness have consummated large sections of the population. They see foreigners enjoying the fruits of the independence of the country far more than themselves. Making ends meet for the majority is becoming a thing of the past. They do not see why they should continue to pay multiple taxes if they do not get improvements in the quality of their lives.

The good of leadership of the multiple leadership failures is that, if we take them seriously, we can learn, relearn, unlearn, set new goals and chart new directions for the country. However, the leaders seem not to be learning, relearning and unlearning from their leadership failures. They are doing things as if nothing is grossly wrong. For example, from Bonna baggagawale, to NAADS to Operation Wealth Creation to Myooga to Parish Development Model, they have continued to do things the same way – originating with President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and ending in failures, with consequent loss of public money in the billions. If you add the 10 trillion the Inspector General of Government (IGG) says the country loses annually, the country is bleeding. The country needs new directions.

I am not sure these new directions can be set by our cohort of leaders. However, I believe if we take the leadership failures seriously as a country, and we drop the No Change philosophy and stance of President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, we can make good out of the numerous leadership failures we are faced with.

From Army D. Edmondson’s thesis, we can mould a new national character. Right now the national character is distorted by things like official sectarianism, ethnicity, discrimination, corruption, nepotism, land grabbing accompanied by distortion of our biocultural landscape, refugee syndrome and export of slave labour to the Middle East along with booming, officially supported trade in human organs, among others.

A character of a nation depends largely on the status and future of its youthful population. Our youthful population almost has no leadership and is not effectively involved in leadership and governance in the country. It is either used or exported to serve as slaves under very inhuman and degrading conditions, which slaves of the past suffered, and our youth are suffering, although today slaves are paid for their slave labour.

We can now use the numerous leadership failures to rethink the national goals set new strategies for development. Long ago the president of Uganda said privatisation had failed it we are still stuck with it as if it is really benefiting the country, not a few individuals, increasingly foreigners. We have to rethink privatisation and balance public participation with privatisation if we are to make meaningful and effective headway in development. If an investor takes all the money he makes outside, what benefit does the country get by his economic activities here?

We can use the leadership failures for measurement of the successes we have made towards realising the national goals set out in the Uganda Constitution of 1995. If the failure story outweighs the failure story we should rethink the goals and set new realistic goals. But whatever goals we set, they will not be realised if individual goals of a few Individuals are the ones government creates a conducive environment to be realised at the expense of the public. Where individualism is preferred in practice, collective benefits are difficult to realise.

We have now to aspire better as a nation. The lessons we have learnt as a nation should not be ignored. One lesson is that it is good to renew leadership because leadership, like any phenomenon grows, tapers off and then heads downwards. Oh cannot re-energise it for the better. It has to give way. If not, then people have to prepare to go down with it.

Lastly, we can learn from the innovation in Helsingborg, Sweden, of the Museum of the World’s Most Notorious Failures, and set up our own local Museum of the country’s own ‘Most Notorious Failures’, from which future generations could take a cue. The Helsingborg Museum is based on the dictum Think Global Act Local. But we have an opportunity to Think Local Act Local. We have had numerous notorious failures in Uganda since we got independence in 1962.There have probably been far more notorious failures in the last 36 years than at any other time of our history. So then it pays to think of something like “The Kampala, Uganda, Museum of Uganda’s Most Notorious Failures”. They all reduce to Notorious Leadership Failures, since behind every failure is the problem of Leadership.

 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