How Uganda's Human Rights Movement legitimises State it seeks to challenge

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OPINION

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

There is a risk in human rights activism to inadvertently reinforce and entrench the very systems of oppression it seeks to challenge, particularly by seeking justice from the State and its legal mechanisms.

The Ugandan human rights movement is oblivious and disarticulated from the type and nature of the State, the Republic of Uganda is. If it did, it would be critical of the dynamics of power, resistance and co-optation persistent in Uganda’s political system.  

There is a pattern and cycle in Uganda’s human rights movement. It normally begins with a protest, usually online, and sometimes goes physical on the streets. The next step is arrest. This is usually never simply and only an overreach by security organs against freedom of expression, as it is customarily framed. Instead, it is often pre-planned by the activists.

So, they never evade or resist arrest, but rather, they mobilise resources and contacts to secure their bail upon arrest. And the third and final step is release. This cycle follows a well-designed pattern of pictures of arrest, graphics cards reading “FREE” and later, upon release by courts of law or security organs, another graphics card is published reading “FREED.” And that is the life cycle of the struggle. It creates a continuous sequence of protest and freedom, making the struggle for justice appear like a wave of short-term victories.

Paradoxically, this interplay of abuse of rights, quick protests, and immediate releases from police cells creates symbolic wins for the human rights activists while structurally reinforcing State authority and legitimising it as the granter of rights. And thus, the cycle continues.

Depending on the State’s mechanisms for justice, yet they are its tools of oppression, is an irony and contradiction that the human rights industry should address. I fear that in the long term, what activism does is reinforce the State’s legitimacy as a granter (an inherently denier) of rights, and consequently diverts a well-meaning struggle from addressing structural issues to celebrating individualised and performative outcomes.

Why do I think that Uganda’s human rights activists are disarticulated from the political realities of Uganda? If they were aware of the nature of the State and the politics they are acting, they would act differently. They miss the context that Uganda is not a developed liberal democracy but a hybrid authoritarian regime. The difference in outcomes of activism is that in liberal democracies, if you were arrested and got released after a protest for your justice, it may reflect genuine accountability by the State.

On the other hand, in an authoritarian regime like Uganda, the government releases you tactically. It is not that you have achieved freedom. But rather that maybe you are not much of a threat, or there are other interests that override the need for your continued detention.

What activists also never realise is that if you keep involved in the cat and mouse games of arrest and release by the state, hence making you demand for freedom upon arrest and celebrate with a graphics card reading “FREED” upon release, you are strategically co-opted by the State and you are playing its game of legitimizing its authority and institutions, subconsciously.

Ugandan activists don’t seem to understand power dynamics, or fail to ground their resistance in substance. Therefore, when the State contains their protests and releases them from incarceration, they celebrate it as a triumph of justice... as though they have compelled the State to make a genuine concession to justice. Nothing could be more obscuring of the truth. This is worsened by the human rights awards that come in handy to celebrate victims of human rights abuse as champions of fighting for justice, further burying the abuses from authentic struggles for reform.

We need to redefine the struggle for justice and human rights as one independent of the structures of the State, because the nature of the State we have is structured around authoritarianism. The State cannot give you what it does not have. In fact, the current State emerged out of a violent struggle. It did not beg the previous State for rights and justice. Instead, it dismantled it and constructed new institutions. Therefore, the current State we have is not neutral. It has a peculiar history.

By engaging the institutions within the structure of the State to grant them rights, human rights activists may register some freedom on graphics cards, but they also perpetuate their subjection to the logic of the State, which is to control and regulate how free they are. The alternative is to shift away from state-centred appeals for justice to collective, radical and politicised struggles. If human rights activists are sincere about socio-political reform in Uganda, they must build the movement socially and politically from the ground up, not by seeking co-optation within the framework of the oppressor. 

The writer is a Ugandan.