Dear Africa, Dear World,
We Ugandans return to the polls on the 15th of January, after five years of something best forgotten.
This country has strange politics. In the 20-odd years between 1962 and 1980, when we never held elections of any kind, we changed heads of state six times. In the twenty-nine years since 1996 when we began having regular “elections”, we have been blessed with just one president six times, one, moreover, who had already spent a decade before then ruling over us.
What makes it more interesting is that each of those previous changes of presidency took place in an election year. It is almost as if Ugandan political culture prefers force to any other method.
None of this history will be of interest to the vast bulk of the current electorate, much as it should. Most Ugandans today of voting age, and by a wide margin, have only ever lived under the current perennial presidency. They have no direct experience of the periods before, and have grown up in circumstances much changed from life as it was back then. For many of them, they might as well be speaking about a different country.
This is not to say things are better for them. Far from it. The single most defining thing about Uganda President Yoweri Museveni’s now forty-year regime has not been the militarism that brought it to power after a five-year civil war, but its full-blooded imposition of World Bank neoliberal economic policies on the country, creating a wholly new type of economy and human being living within it.
“The Museveni era has corroded the morals of an entire generation, and there is unlikely to be an easy solution to the problem. A pervasive corruption and cynicism cloud the country like a fog. It will take no less than a generation for the country to come out of it,” observes Professor Mahmood Mamdani, longstanding activist in Ugandan political radicalism, in his latest book, Slow Poison.
With the entire former state economy privatised, our currency thrown to speculators, and the banking sector handed to foreign moneylenders, nothing has been the same; where the previous generations suffered primarily a political kind of terrorism, this younger one is living through an economic terrorism, with results that are just as visceral.
In other societies, one sees information and metrics feed political decisions. Certainly, one sees numerous polls and graphs and discussions taking place in the run-up to a vote based on data. Uganda has a bit of that too, at least in the more respectable media. However, we seem to have historically made or supported momentous political decisions based more on past trauma.
The biggest fear that comes from a bad experience may actually simply be the memory of it. So the politics of the 1960s were dominated, for many Ugandans (especially in the north-west and the north-east), by memories of the period when Anglican warlords then running the Buganda Kingdom dominated their regions after the colonial conquest, and this led to a political crisis which created the 1966–1971 Milton Obote dictatorship, in turn overthrown by the dictatorship of General Idi Amin Dada. Amin’s politics of the 1970s in turn were dominated by memories of the Obote period, leading to a governance culture violently hostile to political parties in general, and to all those suspected of being Obote supporters. The 1980s politics, under which Obote returned to power, were dominated by memories Obote supporters who had survived Amin carried, leading to a very brutal and sadistic treatment of anyone who was deemed to have not been sufficiently opposed to Amin while he was in power. And the politics of the 1990s under the current president lived for a long time off memories of that 1980s bloodbath.
The politics of now, which will shape this election are going to be very different.
Uganda is still far from either an industrialised country, or one engaged in large-scale mechanised agriculture. Most people work in unsupported small-scale subsistence agriculture which, after decades of neglect, is heading towards a terminal crisis and being abandoned by the youth heading for the cities. But then, urban self-employment comes with the immense challenge of accessing credit, and avoiding the rapacious attentions of the tax authorities and local authority licensing.
The prospect of the National Resistance Movement party staying in power for just even another five years will be something that worries any young person. In other words, the regime has succeeded in transforming our politics from being based on fears from the past, to a politics based on fears from the future.
This is what makes the election so pivotal. If the present president and his party remain the same president and ruling party after the elections, then the young people can only be assured of one thing: that they can expect at least another half-decade of the same misery. They will not be able to complete their education. If they do, they are not likely to get the related job unless they can raise money to bribe the recruiters. They will not own a house; they may not even be able to rent a home. They will watch their elders die early because the cost of healthcare is out of their reach; they will not have the money to afford them a decent burial. Their real-time options are crime, political sycophancy, the Hunger Games of the Middle Eastern employment market, or social begging.
After years of war and insecurity, the previous generations were conditioned to put up with a lot of the Museveni excesses as the price of peace. The new generations have little knowledge of such wars. And in any case, lifetimes of poverty and precarity are actually a form of violence. They may not fear what their ancestors feared, because they never saw it. Hunger and want, though, they have seen.
The main opposition candidate, Robert Kyagulanyi has come to embody the hopes of an anxious and dispossessed youth which, as said, is the bulk of the population. His strong return for a second election demonstrates how entrenched the demographic crisis is. It has now taken on the appearance of an election-based insurgency.
Both candidates, therefore, face the opposite side of the same challenge. If Museveni is declared the winner, one can be sure that the vast majority of ordinary Ugandans and other observers will not be convinced that he did indeed win. In all the six elections held here since 1996, there has never been definitive proof that he actually won. His challenge there will be to suppress the anger of a huge population of people who simply cannot take what would mean spending what are supposed to be the most important, energetic, and productive years of their lives in economic stagnation. But the ruling party is built around the army, and the army is built around the personality of the president, as its key founder. So cracking down is familiar work for him and his supporters.
Candidate Kyagulanyi’s own challenge is two-fold. Should he, by some chance be declared the winner, he will have to immediately start managing some ten years of pent-up hope and expectations from a desperate population, as well as a potential backlash from elements of the security services.
If, on the other hand, Kyagulanyi should meet the fate he has faced once before (alongside every other previous leading candidate) wherein the authorities declare him the loser, he will be faced with the challenge faced by all previous “losers” over the decades. Amidst the courts declaring a dysfunctional election “normal”, and the security services targeting any objectors, he will need to know where he is going to direct all that built-up energy and anger among his supporters.
If we are not careful (or should that be: if we are not cowardly enough?), we might perform a quick return to the politics of these voters’ great-grandparents: violence and exile.
Just know that whatever the outcomes, all decisions will be based on hope.
We know that you wish us the best, one way or another.
