“Socialism with Ugandan characteristics” – Or: Does Uganda have to reinvent the wheel?

Generally Yash Tandon´s book “Common People´s Uganda” delivers a Marxist perspective on Uganda in history, present and future. Still, there is a question coming up by comrades regarding Yash Tandon´s proposal to “find an own model of development”¹ and the refusal to “import the Western European model or the Soviet or Chinese model” regarding socialism, though he acknowledges that lessons from it can be learned². He does not refuse to use the terminology of Marxism at all. Though Tandon does not use the term “Socialism with Ugandan characteristics” by himself, the author of the foreword for his book, Edward B. Rugumayo, uses this term to describe Tandon´s views³.

It is obvious that the Marxist-Leninist theory needs to be applied to the local national conditions. But that changes nothing in the essence of socialism, it changes nothing on the conditions to achieve socialism at all. Blindly copying is of course never a good idea, but in the end socialism is somewhat the “Soviet model”, as it was called by Western authors in a negative way during the Cold War. All socialist countries in the world were sort of based on the “Soviet model”, even though they did not all blindly copy it. The reason is that the USSR, just like the People’s Republic of China under Mao, has many basic patterns that are vital for any socialist country. This is why Obote copied policies from them. Also the capitalist countries share more similarities than differences, which is due to their same socio-economic system.

So: Does Uganda have to reinvent the wheel, does Uganda have to pretty much redefine what socialism means? It does not and such an approach would be a big waste of time and effort. Instead a concrete analysis of the Ugandan society, economic conditions and politics would be vital. Everything else is empty talk to sound “unique” while losing the essentials out of sight.