Nabbanja: case for structuralism & political economy

COP28 the United Nations annual climate change conference is ongoing in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

It’s become a sort of ritual where the global political elites make grand pronouncements that the climate activist Greta Thunberg termed as “bla, bla, bla”. Uganda’s delegation is led by Robinah Nabbanja the Prime Minister.

It’s been hard for our “elite” (I use elite to describe them, not because I trust its potency to transmogrify our kin that have some literacy skills oriented in an empty neo-liberal education one that’s neither aesthetic nor global within its most private drives and intuitions) these folk and their kin have never come to terms with her appointment as the premier.

Despite their empty affectations, of having egalitarian and public sphere intuitions for Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” angst and disgust for those that tap into the public purse without the sanction of law or policy.

These chaps think of themselves as only representatives of the simulacrum of the subaltern without whom, their essence steeped in the existence of subalternity will evaporate. Pejorative comparisons of Robbie with yester-years premiers are legion. A declaration of some sort of dystopia that romanticizes the past is thrown around and couched in empty statements such as “At least Mbabazi or Rugunda.”

Hell broke loose when Robbie had an interview with the BBC while in Dubai. Like many lawyers that push paper trained from all sorts of dangerous places and other technical people such as journalists or even “world leaders” for whom these annual mass gatherings are now rituals, she spoke generally hitting east, west, everywhere, and nowhere.

These duplicitous folk took to X (previously Twitter) to castigate and declare what sort of “national embarrassment” Robbie’s interview was. But maybe Robbie, like Freud’s dreams reveals some inconvenient truths about these lawyers. She like them, uses generalities, that language of “bla, bla”.

It’s in broadcast and social media. Unfortunate phrases such as “we are in a crisis” “we have good policies that are not implemented” among other dystopian phrases that declare the end as nigh. The emptiness only unfolds when one inquires at the mode of reason or method that our sanctimonious elite use to derive such photo-realistic “analysis.” Their claim of reading history is non-exegetical and anti-method.

Am I, therefore defending Robbie whatever the inequities are? I, think not. What Robbie is doing is what all these premiers and world leaders do but in brionis while often massaging the latest gadgets. It’s what the Twitter lawyers do, to read and speak like a paper abstract, the aesthetic of the knowledge is what matters not the content of the speech.

These ahistorical masses are thus only looking at themselves though Robbie. One must appeal to intersectionality to reveal the closeted baggage that Robbie carries. Her gender, her height, education, and certainly social strata are not favorable variables at patriarchal class stratified pretentiously elite rostrums. So, she gets it (ridicule and contempt) in many ways.

Do individuals matter? I would say minimally because what significant difference did her male counterparts who went to colonial schools make to Uganda? In its most vulgar sense did Uganda become Singapore? Even then, the Office of the Prime Minister was, and still is, poisoned chalice.

Political Economy with its rich breadth of method and analysis will unmask the lie that leaders through agency have and can beat structure. The misplaced argument of “everything rises and falls on leadership” “Africa is out of good leaders” that Twitter absurdism rehearses emanates from the East Asian tigers. Economic historians have pointed to larger structures within which this was possible.

This was an extreme and exceptional manifestation agency. Dependency theory would be a good start. The valorization of agency is thus ahistorical.

The phantasm of annihilation that seeks to annihilate Robbie is mis founded and therefore one concludes that our politics of viscerality that always seeks the destruction of the “Other “commits homeopathy (to take poison as medicine) for Robbie is part  of us and just used a bigger mirror to call us to reflection.

Dear, Ssabaminista if you read this, you have a fanboy in me.