|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The meaning and character of the 2026 Uganda general election campaigns began to emerge towards the middle of November, and when the caning of opposition supporters at rallies began, a screen-refresh of what the portrait of the country had changed into emerged. For, beyond the rhetorical electioneering overcharge and the earnest-to-ugly spectrum of personality displays, what a country truly is can best be seen twice a decade. There is a caveat.
Democratic arrears in a time of GenZ uprising
Democracy’s claim to orderly transitions imagines a nation already stabilized by continuity, where the major concerns are keeping established norms running. It does not take into account a society struggling on the verge of survival. The attendant tropes following on from this assumption, of democracy as a feast of euphoric, celebratory ritual, wobble under the jarring crash of unscripted moments, for the sharp disagreements, the unvarnished racial and ethnic hatred spewed out in these seasons, serve to show that “democracy” is also tribal warfare by other means. It is not a third-world preserve.
The richest, most sublimely self-confident nations are not immune to these regresses; it is just that their deft rationalising of this reverse side of the coin of civilisation via a left-right mechanism preserves the myth of high-mindedness. In countries that frequently teeter on the verge of ethnic pogroms, how can liberal or conservative positions be high-minded about the wiping out of a village?
The last two decades have shown East Africans the distance between what democracy means in established states and in the colonised ones still refusing to acknowledge the fact that they are fake entities. We are only a bourgeoisie wet dream, doomed to democratic elections without transitions, to ballots without agency, when what we most need is the rectification of centuries-old injustices. The votes cast under these fabrications can no more turn A.K. Kaiza into Taylor Swift than they can unsink the Titanic.
In its current guise, democracy itself, lest we forget, is the product of concession by the 19th-century bourgeoisie to let the poor make a decision twice in a decade in exchange for not cutting their heads off in retaliation for the catastrophic decisions the rich make daily. And so it goes that the world is not asked to decide at a ballot box whether we now want multipolarity; the most avowedly democratic societies don’t tend to ask their citizens (or subjects, which begs the question afresh) to vote on whether they want a nuclear arsenal or an end to internal combustion engine use; citizens of New York may have the right to vote for whichever new mayor they want, but the decisions that shape their lives the most – that is, who becomes chairman of Morgan Stanley – are not put to the plebiscite. And why not?
1996, neither relief nor purpose
Each half-decade we see whom we have morphed into, and get to despair afresh at how far away that person is from the teenage ideal nation-state’s dream of becoming when they grow up. Even back in 1996, when I cast my first vote, I do not recall the campaign as relief, nor having a sense of purpose. Let’s take a review of Ugandan democracy since 1996.
After the coup of 1986, Mr Museveni promptly banned political parties and cooked up a “no-party” democracy concept. It was its own mockery – don’t look at Uganda for fresh ideas; we are not going to have a party; nothing to celebrate here. He promised that this experiment would last only four years and elections would be held in 1990. The regime then concocted an extension by setting up a constitutional commission and later, a constitutional assembly. It was not until 1996 that Uganda went to vote for a president, by which time Mr Museveni had already exhausted his pro forma constitutional two terms in office.
Still, you could feel that even the humblest citizen well understood that reality was more complex than the expectation of democratic goodwill. After all, here was a badly mauled country struggling to rebuild itself. After 30 years of misfiring in the independence cylinders, things were starting to look up. There had been a series of coups; wait for things to calm down. There had been a civil war; let’s not spoil things by wanting too much. There had been ten years of a Museveni military rule gratis by 1996; see what happened when the last military ruler was overthrown in 1979?
1996, Museveni wins a presidential “erection” against a political eunuch
That year’s elections, contested on “individual merit”, were a contest of absurdities as the more foul-mouthed battalion of his female supporters then shouted: “We wirr give him the erection.” We were voting raw, like having that sugarless breakfast tea they call ommukalu in Buganda, or strungi in Kenya. There was the sight of an emasculated party system pushing forth that palace eunuch of yesteryear, Dr Paul Ssemogerere of the woebegone Democratic Party, to jostle with Mr Museveni in 1996. Looking back, it is clear that Mr Museveni has never once in his life been confident that he can truly win an open election – unless that election is something else so mistakenly named.
In 1996, Mr Museveni agreed to be voted into his own office after ensuring that, unlike in 1980, he had the machinery of state behind him, the party mechanism of the NRM in fine fettle, and Dr Ssemogerere in only the suit he was standing in. It was the safest election for Mr Museveni; the real man he most longed to beat, the man with the sorcerer’s sceptre for whipping up Ugandan hearts, was safely away in exile in Zambia that year. Mr Museveni had long staked him out and understood that Dr Paul Ssemogerere could not win a Dr Paul Ssemogerere look-alike contest in which there was only one contestant.
1996: Uganda, a country in timidity savaged by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, reeling from a still-ongoing war in the north, its sensibilities smitten by the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda which had set even lower the expectation of what is possible in a country. The elements of what we now know to be Mr Museveni’s only pick-up line were at their fullest at the time; vote for me or you shall die.
The road to 2001: Dr Kizza Besigye, the medicine man who cured Uganda of cowardice
Something then had happened between 1996 and 2001, for when next the plebiscite mirror was hoisted up, the timidity had mostly vanished. You have to look back hard now to work out how the shy-faced country of 1996 had in 2001 perked up and looked unblinkingly straight back at the mirror. One important factor would be the rise of Dr Kizza Besigye, whose “Dr” was earned the hard way, by five years spent studying medicine and not via an honorary gift. That man, with his uncommon courage, questioning the gang leader, injected what has since become a property of Ugandan politics. Steadfastness, courage under withering fire, never bowing your head. These essential Dr Kizza Besigye traits may not have fully caught on, but the longer he has stood, the more we have come to fully understand what he arose against.
2001, a naïve country, unsure whether it was still starstruck by its globally popular president or whether it’s suspicions that he did not intend to vacate the statehouse were real, is at crossroads.
From 2001 to 2006, things moving too fast for comfort
There would have been more structural factors in operation that year. The economic ideology of neoliberalism had demanded that the state give up control over economics, and one of the first to go had been control over broadcast media. When you consider that the smooth flow of capitalism mostly involves image creation, a market-led economic reform was always going to require television and radio in some quantities. To keep these stations popular enough to ensure that buyers knew what new cooking oil was on sale, you needed a wall-to-wall carpeting of radios all over the country. So the FM radio stations fought for listeners, and political “talk shows” – ebimeeza as the terminology of the period had it – had in a few short years transformed an ignorant country into a talkative one, however ill informed the talk. This might simplify what happened, but there was a belief that politics was contestable. Flash from his win over the diminishing Dr Ssemogerere, Mr Musveni himself went with the flow.
The malarial relapse of old Museveni fears
The 2001 elections brought back the deep inferiority complex that led Mr Museveni to clutch at his gun constantly. Like a return of 1980, here he was once again faced with an opponent with undeniable charisma. We hence marched into 2006 with that puckered visage hardened in place. If in 1996 we had borne a pimply, giggly face, in 2006, a decade later, we were entering the early years of young adulthood unafraid of death. The childhood fears of bodily harm were overridden by a youth’s hormonal superabundance of confidence.
Amin and Obote deaths free Ugandans
In quick succession, two bogeymen Mr Museveni had used to scare southerners, Idi Amin Dada (2003) and Dr Apollo Milton Obote (2005), died. Their bodies were still warm when the regime was subjected to a contest of intellect and lost. The public witnessed the serial losses before the constitutional court of cases challenging the ban on political parties, at which court it seemed that the government was incapable of winning a case. The one-party state – this timeless oxymoron – that had propped up the fragile egos of the bush-fighter regime, was brought down in case after case. (The hero of these state losses, lawyer Elias Lukwago, would go on to be long-term mayor of Kampala.)
Having parties around the place was after all not unconstitutional. There had been a referendum in 2000 in which the electorate had been asked if they wanted multi-parties or a Movement. They had chosen “movement”. The parties the referendum sought to free had boycotted the plebiscite, and straw men had had to be propped up, so the state had paid one half to say yes, and another, to say no. In 2005, when the constitutional court ordered a return to multiparty politics, the government, under pressure from Western powers, now switched sides and campaigned for a return to multiparty democracy. The parties once more boycotted the voting. Additional straw men were found to front the boycotting side, and a yes return of 90 per cent allowed the government to say the population wanted parties back.
Such acts of self-mockery had consequences, looking back. Respect for leaders who openly behave disingenuously goes and never returns. There is little doubt that Dr Kizza Besigye won the 2006 elections, as the courts said and, later, one-time Museveni confidant and bush-war fighter, then General David Tinyefunza, before he changed names to Sejusa, himself admitted to doctoring the results.
2006, a country no longer foolable, growing up, learning that wars don’t solve political problems.
2006–2011, the grim road to a post-neoliberal hell
2006 to 2011 was a grim march down to the knowledge that a confrontation between not just Mr Museveni and his political opponents, was coming. If a clash did occur, it would henceforth be between Mr Museveni and the people of Uganda. In this period, the return of the politics of mass protests was reignited. Named the Buganda riots of 2009, and during which for the first time since 1966 surfaced seething ethnic animosity, the riots resulting from Ronald Muwenda Mutebi, the Kabaka, being blocked from touring a part of the land the kingdom claimed as its own, threatened to burn down central Uganda. But the luck was Mr Museveni’s, whose hand was inadvertently strengthened by Buganda. The jingoistic, Buganda-centric tone of the rioters, who attacked non-Baganda, stirred fears beyond politics. Mr Museveni scrambled rapidly to shift his support base away from Buganda. He had leveraged anti-Nilotic sentiment to win votes in the South for too long. He had to rapidly make friends with northerners as a counterbalance, including by appointing Dr Obote’s daughter-in-law to a cabinet post.
2011–2021, political recalibration
Mr Museveni may have come to terms with the fact that appealing to the hearts of the electorate was after all not his thing. In a way too, Ugandans in this period may have concluded that elections would always be rigged. And so began that most Ugandan trait – playacting, never saying what you mean and not meaning what you say. This is not a game, but a very deadly stratagem. A bizarre realpolitik took hold of the country henceforth. The Buganda riots had been badly bungled, but the idea of mass action stayed.
The walk-to-work protests of 2011 may have been the fashion for a time under the shadow of the Arab Spring, but they began to drive a wedge between the regime and the people. By protesting, the opposition was forcing the hand of the regime to invite the military to be seen beating the people. The era of the Museveni military as pro-people was ending. It was also a turning point for what had passed for political opposition thus far. The political figures of the time – like Nobert Mao, who had for over a decade promised something – were bound to lead the protests. Looking back, the walk-to-work protests proved to be the swansong of an entire generation of politicians for whom the time to become had passed. Already in this period, Mr Museveni himself was beginning to be yesterday’s man, falling asleep in public, accumulating wrinkles and beginning to sound incoherent.
Bobi Wine, the Songbird that Museveni reduced to silence
When the musician Bobi Wine stood for parliament in 2017, he was leveraging a quantity so new Mr Museveni was caught unawares. It is wrong to simply put his popularity down to music; the man can actually sing and his compositions sink hooks into hearts. It’s not just that he’s young; at 43 now, he’s the same age as Mr Museveni was when he became president. There are several factors, some more rooted in how Uganda became a colony, and others a revelation of the dynamics of ancient African power shifts.
Generation-set systems: The brutally realistic age and generation-set systems that undergirded power dynamics in pre-colonial African societies returned in the post-Covid-19 years with shattering effectiveness. Generational overlaps might occur; a dominant generation, that is, one luckily born in a period whose stability and food plenty enabled its numbers and span to overgrow, stayed on in power so long that the next one or two generations had their ambition snuffed out. A dominant generation might stretch as long as up to 120 years in the age difference between the youngest and the oldest member. (This system is too complex to explain fully here.) By the time the last member dies, the members of two succeeding generations, likely born during war, misrule and famine so that their numbers and mettle is too small, would be too old or emasculated to mount a power challenge. We are likely witnessing this dynamic. East Africans born between the famines of the late 1960s and early 1980s suffered malnutrition, loss of culture and were ill educated, factors from which those born between the mid-1980s and early 2000s suffered less.
This new generation now mounting a power challenge is highly inspired and overwhelmingly numerous enough to throttle the outgoing, older generation. You see the crushing impact of this on the intermediate generation who cannot believe that a “boy” like Kyagulanyi is taking what they thought was theirs by inheritance. The number of people in the arts, law and politics driven mad by this dynamic is astounding. You see them by the beeline they have made to Mr Museveni and his brother Gen. Salim Saleh, looking for handouts and offices. Like Nobert Mao who auctioned off the late Dr Paul Ssemogerere’s party, the DP, for a cabinet post, they have to lie to themselves that they are doing it to create dialogue.
The 1900 Anglo-Buganda Agreement: This second factor is directly responsible, via history’s longue durée, for the rise of Bobi Wine. Three kingdoms – Buganda, Ankole and Bunyoro – signed colonial agreements with Great Britain in the wake of the Lugard settlements, by which these kingdoms were emasculated to the point where they saw no option but acquiescence to colonial rule. The gist of these agreements was that a collaborator class of chiefs in the south and west of the country were bribed by the British into using their own lands to reinforce indirect colonial rule. Overnight, the majority of the populations in these kingdoms were turned into peasants in an astounding reinvention of feudalism in the 20th century. When Dr Milton Obote attempted to undo this evil, via the ill-fated Common Man’s Charter, the collaborators turned against him. Still supported by the British government, they eventually overthrew his government and installed Idi Amin. But that is another story. How does it connect to Bobi Wine?
For central Uganda, or Buganda, the shock of the 1900 betrayal left the kingdom comatose for over a century. Its chiefly class had been used once, and it continued to be used. The commoners, caught between their land alienation, and a post-colonial dispensation led by people from cultures they could not comprehend, played a low-key game of watching and dodging bullets. It was not until the rise of Bobi Wine that Buganda discovered a role it could play in national politics.
The rise of Bobi Wine, therefore, is also the recrudescence of the historical battles that had stalled in Buganda in the post-Daudi Cwa II (Kabaka 1897–1939) years. Not since the days of Ignatius Kangave Musaazi, the anti-colonial trade unionist and founder of the Uganda National Congress party, has a commoner Muganda risen to such national prominence. Nor has the mass of Baganda, who are still getting used to the idea that the country is no longer judging them for collaborating with colonial rulers, ever felt this much affirmed by others. Part of the fear the regime has of Bobi Wine is that he has transcended tribal politics. He has denied Mr Museveni the low-hanging fruit of calling him sectarian. Unable to mount a campaign to match Bobi Wine’s national popularity, the regime has taken to beating citizens who come to listen to him. That he might turn northern Uganda against it panicked the regime into publicly flogging Bobi Wine’s supporters in a gory display of political miscalculation in Gulu City.
(In the past, foreign wars in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and Somalia helped the regime keep power by selling mineral and patronage rights to foreign powers in return for turning a blind eye to atrocities it committed. The only country Uganda has not gone to war with is Kenya. The threats by his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba to invade Kenya and Mr Museveni’s threats to annex the Kenyan coast have won him the undying hatred of an entire country. It is unlikely that a new foreign war will save the regime this time around).
With the once-reliable neoliberal ideology’s eternal promises of a better tomorrow replaced by a looming global crisis and even a catastrophe, not even the biggest optimist can see hope for Uganda.
2026, the country enters uncharted territory. Approaching middle age, its face has frozen into bitter defiance. Mr Museveni will keep his power, but the country will pay a heavy price for it.
