Economic liberalism, the mini-skirt and dictatorship in Uganda

Economic liberalism, the mini-skirt and dictatorship in Uganda

Liberalised, privatised, market economy expects individuals to make rational choices about what they purchase, consume, need, want, desire, and can afford. For markets to function optimally there must be a range of goods and services to choose from. But goods and services will enter the market only when there is demand. Because no businessperson worth their vocation will stock what no one needs.


In the New vision of 10 June, 2009; “Gulu chief bans mini skirts”, Odek Sub-County Chairperson, Matthew Olobo, forbade women from wearing mini skirts, short dresses and trousers. That wearing these clothes is bad manners, immoral, and erodes Acholi culture and social norms.


Olobo is angry that miniskirts and short dresses expose women’s body parts. But a casual survey of Acholi sartorial history reveal s that, between mini skirts , trousers, and short dresses today, and Ceno, Cip, Bune , coo-lony or lacomi that their predecessors wore by the turn of the last century, the honour and modest y of the Acholi woman are better preserved and protected today than centuries ago. Ceno and cip, made of strings of beads or chains, the equivalent of g-strings, only covered the front. Even leather aprons bune, coo- lony and lacomi, covered the back and front, leaving the sides bare!




Acholi family portrait, Richard Buchta, 1877/9.


Through adaptation, willingness to change, women no longer wear ceno, cip, lacomi or bune. Successive generations after generations, kept pace with shifts in moral and social perceptions of decency and modesty. Undoubtedly, mini skirts, short dresses, and trousers, will one day take their central places of pride in the average Ugandan woman’s wardrobe without moral qualms.


More seriously, the mini skirt controversy brings to light, important, inter-related NRM/A economic policies and development strategies that deserve public examination and debate. We content that, NRM/A economic liberalisation, privatisation, free trade and foreign investment as development strategies brought mini skirts, short dresses and tight trousers, and alleged, related social, moral decadence.


In the late 1980s, the NRM/A liberalised and privatised the Ugandan economy. With liberalisation and privatisation, our borders were flung open to foreign goods, our resources exposed to foreign enclosure through capital investments. Goods, capital and foreigners streamed across our borders in search of profits. Expatriate managers of foreign capital, their families, and their allies among our political, military, and professional elite stimulated demands for basic, leisure and cultural goods and services reminiscent of their global counterparts in other countries. These leisure goods included cars, televisions, satellite dishes, music, films and videos, books, fashion clothing, and food.


Henceforth, Uganda as a country and a national economy was firmly anchored to the global economy, with its consumption patterns, including its pop culture.


In a privatised economy, people consume what they need, want, and can afford; and they choose from a range of goods and services to satisfy their needs and support their particular lifestyles. Not every Ugandan woman on the street wants or can afford to wear miniskirts, short dresses and trousers. These are fashion tastes that are affected by self-conscious, urban and relatively affluent women, to satisfy their vanities. Self-expression aside, their fashion styles and mannerisms, play to sensual needs of certain class of men who consider women in short skirts, tight, body-hugging trousers and short dresses, hot, fashionable and attractive.


There is no doubt that, these attitudes and fashion styles have come about largely because of the NRM/A’s economic liberalisation, privatisation and trade policies that flung our borders and society open to foreign capital, expatriates, foreign culture, lifestyles and consumption patterns. Therefore, the mini skirt is organic to the development of Uganda’s private economy. This makes chairperson Olobo and Minister Buturo, themselves NRM/A proponents of a liberal and privatised economy, the equivalents of a father who escorts his daughter down the aisle to be wed, but furious when he learns later she is pregnant. The mini skirt, like pregnancy to the institution of marriage and social expectations, is the objective consequence of the logic of the market in a privatised economy, arising-like pregnancy after marriage-from choices of private individuals as rational consumers, who choose goods and services from a range offered by the market, to satisfy their needs.


Through the market in privatised economies, consumers maximise their self- interests and well-being; they accumulate wealth, and express their economic freedom and choice through purchasing of goods and services that support their personal notions of a good life. Their needs and wants signal the market to supply these goods and services.


A liberalised and privatised Ugandan economy puts money in the hands of individuals, who exercise economic freedom and make private investments, lifestyle and consumption choices independent of the state, but the market and their pocket books. But the problem in Uganda is that, economic liberalisation did not come with its necessary twin sister, political liberalisation, which ensures individual economic and political freedom and civil liberties, through legal development in the administration of law and order, protection of private property, enforcement of contracts, and protection of citizen rights.


These have historically been the classical path of liberalism in politics and economics. Progress often came as a result of vested interests pushing back at the power of the state to regulate their activities and contain their political influences. But the economic and middle classes in Uganda are too dependent on the state for it to take independent actions that advance their interests in opposition to that of the ruling NRM/A. Therefore, they are unlikely to play the historical roles played by their bourgeois kin in other countries, at different epochs, to resist the limitations imposed on their economic freedom and power, by NRM/A decoupling of economic and political liberalism, which prevents them from influencing social and economic policies to their advantage.


The dogma of economic freedom and choice, and that of political liberties and freedoms, unify the interests and aspirations of the hapless mini-skirted girl in Odek- unambiguous about her femininity and sexuality-; the wealthy business class who want to trade and influence policies; the political and rights activists, and opposition politicians agitating for freedom to organise and the rights to participate in the governance of their country.


Unfortunately for the mini skirted women of Uganda, rights and democracy crusaders are not about to descend on Odek, to take up their cause. The approach of the social justice and democracy movements to democratisation and rights causes in Uganda is segmentary. They focus on one aspect in exclusion of other planes of rights claims. For instance, the opposition in Uganda will not spring to action on this because they are focused on issues affecting political parties. Until their activists are arrested, detained in safe houses and tortured, you do not hear them frame the democratic debates in terms of a comprehensive and holistic view of rights entitlements. For instance, women’s, gay’s and lesbian’s rights, are understood in isolation from each other, and are neither worthy causes nor part and parcel of the broader body of interrelated, democratic, individual rights and freedoms that inform social justice and equality struggles.


Such episodic thinking blinded rights fraternities and opposition parties from seeing linkages between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency in northern Uganda, and opposition struggles for democracy and human rights. The opposition saw the LRA violence and excesses as ends in themselves, and the struggle as different and separate from their own struggles against repressive and anti-democratic violence by the NRM/A.


Similarly, banning miniskirts ought not to be ignored by any right thinking member of a democratic society. Uganda is a market economy, and a liberal, privatised economy is built around free, individual consumers making independent choices to meet their needs through the market. No one should be criminalised for choosing to consume what is readily, legally available on the market. Furthermore, free choice in the consumption of goods and services in the economic realm, must find corollaries in political liberalisation, where our rights as individuals, our free choices as consumers and market actors, are protected as matters of immutable economic freedom, and democratic rights.


Regrettably, our economic freedom, while tolerated to some extent within a liberalised economy, is in constant collision with imperative need for political liberalisation, which is an inseparable component of a market economy, open and democratic society. The contradictions between economic and political liberalisms in Uganda, expressed through banning miniskirts and routine breaking up of opposition rallies by security forces in otherwise liberalised economy and a multiparty democracy, demonstrate NRM/A ideological, intellectual, discontinuities, bankruptcy, and policy eclecticism.


We should no more accept and condone the harassment and control of women who wear mini skirts in a liberalised, privatised, market economy, than accept and condone the violent breaking up of opposition rallies and gatherings by security forces, in a democratic society.


It is ironic that Ethics and Integrity Minister, Nsaba Buturo should seek to appropriate and frame the mini skirt ban as a moral issue. He hobnobs with the most corrupt and immoral lot of legislators and ministers this side of enlightenment. Who is the greater evil and epitome of immorality; Ugandan women in mini skirts, or NRM/A ministers and military men who have amassed obscene wealth by stripping the state of its public assets, to build for themselves and their concubines, palatial homes on Kampala hills, to buy fleets of the most expensive cars money can buy, while the country must beg to meet its budgetary obligations, and our citizens the poorest souls on earth?


By NRM/A convolution, the poor women wearing mini skirts, rather than the corrupt and ostentatious lifestyles of NRM/A leaders amidst crushing poverty among our citizenry, receive more attention and attract moral outrage and indignation. The police and ministers are impatient to implement and enforce the edict on hapless women, and conveniently charge them with being idle and disorderly- something without merits in law and facts-. This betrays the degree to which the repressive NRM/A dictatorship has managed to turn our world upside down, and the depth of our internalisation of, and acquiescence in, neo-fascism!


The brouhaha about mini skirts in an obscure village is the perennial question of rights, freedom and choice: the rights and freedom of a woman to choose what she will wear, and to control how her sexuality is packaged and marketed to society. If she chooses to dress in mini skirts or trousers, to fulfill whatever needs internal or external to her being, a democratic society must let her. If Matthew Olobo finds her too hot for his own good, or against his personal taste, he ought to not be allowed to conflate his personal insecurities and simpler taste into public morality. In keeping with freedom of choice and the market that his party religiously believe in, he has other categories of women down market to choose from.