The Contraction of African Politics

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, in a lecture at the University of Chicago – later published as an article in National Interest Magazine and subsequently expanded into a book, The End of History and the Last Man – declared the ideational triumph of political and economic liberalism. Fukuyama was not alone; soon he would be joined by the columnist Charles Krauthammer who, in the pages of Foreign Affairs, declared ‘The Unipolar Moment’ in which America was the only hegemonic contender in global Affairs. 

The collapse of the Berlin Wall came against the backdrop of a Reagan presidency in the United States and a Magaret Thatcher administration in the United Kingdom. A new ultra-financialised form of capitalism known as neoliberalism – or what is now famously known as Structural Adjustment Programmes – was unleashed and, where needed, forcefully imposed by both administrations. In the orthodox sense, neoliberalism is equated to a radically free market, maximised competition and free trade achieved through economic deregulation, elimination of tariffs, and a range of monetary and social policies favourable to business and indifferent toward poverty, social deracination, cultural decimation, long-term resource depletion, and environmental destruction. 

These heinous effects have led to widespread suffering among the African peasantry, who make up most of the population of the continent. The peasantry has lacked a vanguard party to articulate and voice these concerns onto the political register. This dilemma is best characterised as one of abundant demand and short supply. An abundant demand for the vanguard party representing the grievances of labour, on the one hand, and the short supply of such voices. It may be surprising that this dilemma peaked with the advent of the multi-party dispensation and frequent elections, which for some came to be the total of democracy. What then explains this contemporary crisis? I will discuss this crisis with a perspective from Uganda; I hope the essay’s general significance to the broader African scene will be apparent. I will restrain my analysis to the Museveni years: 1986 to date. 

Opposition under the neoliberal spell

Until the end of his short-lived political honeymoon, President Yoweri Museveni – who took power at the height of neoliberalism (Uganda started implementing SAPs during the Obote 2 administration) – did not meet serious opposition, at least not in the south of the country even as the war raged in the north. The first incursion within the National Resistance Movement (NRM) was the resignation of Kampala District Representative Wasswa Ziritwawula from the National Resistance Council in 1989 in protest at the extension of the ‘interim’ four-year arrangement. This was followed by Dr Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere’s presidential challenge in the 1996 presidential election that took place under the Movement system. This is despite creating the illusion of challenges being tolerated within the system. 

It took a fellow bush combatant, former guerrilla and former National Political Commissar Kizza Besigye’s 1999 dossier and subsequent presidential candidacy in 2001 to shake things up. The NRM state threw the kitchen sink at him in an election that many observers say was reminiscent of the violent 1980 election. During his years in the political arena and in the subsequent elections – 2006, 2011, and 2016 – Besigye succeeded in exposing the democratic credentials of the NRM as the political process became increasingly characterised by wanton abuse of human rights and political interference with the judiciary, among other ignominies. 

In 2016, Besigye was to appear on the same ballot with another disgruntled bush war comrade, the former premier and NRM secretary general John Patrick Amama Mbabazi, who was fronted by a coterie of opposition political parties under the ‘Go Forward’ slogan. Mbabazi, who had decried Besigye’s candidacy in 2001 as ‘jumping the queue’ had too, now run out of patience. Perhaps due to age and ailments, with his knees now feeble, he could no longer wait in the proverbial queue. In 2021, the young and vibrant ghetto songbird Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, alias Bobi Wine, rose to the occasion and became the face of the opposition to the NRM’s long tenure. 

With the exception of Mbabazi whose stay in the opposition arena was short-lived, the politics of the other two protagonists, i.e. Besigye and Bobi Wine, appear to be anchored in pro-poor policies, giving the impression of being ideologically anchored to the left. The smokescreen quickly dissipates under close scrutiny of their global alliances, discourse analysis and policy document inspection which are couched in neoliberal language. Take for instance Besigye’s ‘My Land, My Life’ campaign aimed at sensitising Ugandans about their land rights. This he did, while also maintaining close links with the Tories in the United Kingdom and participating in the International Democratic Union. 

For Bobi Wine and team, one must inspect their 47-page 2021 manifesto. Despite its lack of rigour and depth, the document – that in typical neoliberal hero worship begins with the Party leader’s face swamping an entire page – should be taken seriously, not for the policy alternatives it offers but the lack thereof. It seems, dear reader, like a copy-and-paste of the NRM manifesto. One sentence can summarise the manifesto: ‘Museveni policies are good but are poorly implemented with a mishmash of corruption.’

The same can be said of the fourth estate. The Daily Monitor and its off-shoot the Weekly Observer remain the foremost critics of the Museveni regime. The high point of their critique being the Charles Onyango Obbo, Wafula Oguttu, Kevin Aliro and Andrew Mwenda years. The group mutated from the Weekly Topic that was owned by the Sapoba and Changombe group of Kintu Musoke and Bidandi Ssali. Despite so much vitriol from Museveni who termed the paper ‘an enemy’ that he denied government revenue through adverts and whose reporters he often threw in jail, the Monitor was at an ideological level a key Museveni ally. All its firebrands were dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers who proceeded to get scholarships in Western universities due to their ideological bent. For example, Mwenda’s disagreement – that can be stretched to the Monitor – was a critique against a guarded opening of the market for the penetration of capital from the metropoles and a divestiture of government from all manner of business. Key to this, were the debates about the sale of the Uganda Commercial Bank that he rabidly supported. 

The Monitor, and for the best part, the Observer are critiques of the mismanagement of the debris of the state. If the Monitor took issue with privatisation or SAPs, it was because of their shoddy and corruption-laden implementation and not the SAPs per se. To them, this was a good policy basket that suffered mismanagement. The beacon of this moment, Mwenda has since revised his opinions under the influence of a growing number of studies that seem to cast those policies as anti-development. Had the Monitor been radical it would never have survived both the global context of a unipolar world and a Museveni regime; the fact that it is still here speaks volumes. 

History ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and, through globalisation, a unipolar ideology of the world was passed across the globe. If the Cold War provided alternatives to political alignments, the neoliberal age offers no options. It may not be surprising that parties across the vast continent, with the strict exception of Ethiopia, South Africa, and to some degree Tanzania, don’t differ in terms of the articulation of fancy rhetoric and the quality of leaders. Despite being amenable to the neoliberal ideology, NRM, RPF and ZANU-PF leaders retain Marxist undertones reminiscent of the politics of the Cold War in which all of them participated. 

From the above illustration using the political opposition in Uganda, it may seem as though it has no ideology, but the lack of ideology is ideology itself. It is an endorsement of the prevalent neoliberal hegemony. This shuts down any alternate windows in the organisation of the economy, for example, whose commanding heights are under the firm grip of multinational capital. Relations of production in rural areas remain unexplored and unthought-out in the dominant discourse. Furthermore, the discussions on the structure of the state remain farcical if not laughable. 

It is safe to suggest that, as in Europe or the US, in which the centre-right and the centre-left seem to agree on almost everything – with fringe disagreements in the interstices framed along cultural lines that dissipate under the lens of critical theory – Africa too has birthed and bred its own extreme centre. A typical example is Kenya where politicians often crisscross the aisle and share the olive branch. This type of politics is lauded as progressive. It is easy in the Kenyan context to join your adversary because you didn’t have much disagreement to begin with. This world of no alternatives, I argue, has stifled politics and caused increased voter apathy among the rural peasant subalterns.