So the Ugandan army chief, one General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has decided that the press is a nuisance best silenced. He has shut down media outlets with the casual brutality of a Roman proconsul pacifying a restless province. Britain, ever the moralising schoolmaster, has issued a condemnation. How predictable. How hollow.
The fall of Rome was not a single cataclysm but a thousand small erosions of liberty. Here we see the same pattern: a general who believes his uniform grants him the right to censor. The media outlets in question had, presumably, reported something unflattering. In a functioning democracy, you sue. In a failing state, you send in the soldiers.
We in the West are quick to tut-tut, but let us not be smug. The same impulses exist here, just better dressed. When a Prime Minister threatens to 'take on the enemy within' or a Home Secretary rails against 'left-wing bias,' they are playing the same tune, merely on a different instrument. The difference is that our generals are still in their barracks. For now.
The Victorian saw these flare-ups as evidence of the 'white man's burden,' a justification for empire. We have shed that language but retained the condescension. We condemn, we sanction, we issue statements. But we offer no real alternative. We cannot export our own fragile system because we no longer believe in it ourselves.
What Uganda needs is not a lecture from London but a robust civil society that can resist such strong-arm tactics. What it has is a president's son who commands the army and apparently the loyalty of its censors. This is not a breakdown of democracy. This is the logical endpoint of patrimonial rule.
The question for us is whether we are witnessing the birth pangs of a new authoritarian era or the death throes of an old one. History suggests we are too late to stop the former and too early to celebrate the latter. The general in Kampala may yet prove a prophet of our own decline.
