Not since January 25, 1986 had I felt the slow-burning, debilitating fever that I did on May 20 this year, a fever you would know if you are Iraqi, Syrian, or Ugandan over 20, or South Sudanese of any age or era:
Although akin to malarial lethargy, it is not a proper fever, its toll on your body and mind operating at a remove from the latter. It will neither ground nor kill you, but as with malaria, you are sapped of energy, you have no appetite, the joie de vivre by which you claim membership to life has flown away. You want to withdraw into a dark corner and curl up.
I am labouring to describe in unfamiliar, personal terms, the physiological experience of being caught up in a violent military coup. To live through such a moment, is to experience war compressed into hours, days or weeks. There is a prolonged bath in adrenaline that is physically and mentally draining. There is the upending of routine and rule that kills your spirit.
So on May 20 this year, when I left the house and went to town, and this fever suddenly broke out in me, I instinctively understood that Uganda had turned a corner from which return may not be possible. And yet the trigger could not have been more trivial: My telephone line had been cut.
I had expected that to happen. In fact, I had wilfully participated in the loss of my line. An announcement had been made in early April saying that all phone users must re-register their lines or be cut off in seven days. I refused to comply. On the sixth day, the Prime Minister’s Office said the deadline had been extended by a month. I stayed home. The month came to an end and promptly, the lines were cut.
The people at the mall trying to get their phones reconnected were largely upper crust, in government, in cushy private sector, NGO, UN, jobs – expatriates, well-to-do locals, denizens of Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, well-fed and secure in their status. But now their faces reflected fear mixed with confusion
When I got to town, I was more staggered than I could have expected. There at the mall, standing in ragged lines with the sun beating down on them, was a mass of people, local and international, who could no longer make or receive calls. It was the look on their faces that reminded me of 1979, 1985 and 1986, the coup years. It was the look of people in the midst of a calamity beyond prevention.
Betrayal of the docile consumer
I had refused to comply with the directive. But those in the lines had complied; was it just inefficiency or had they been guilty of forwarding memes the state disliked? It mattered not what had happened. There at the mall, with its high-end branded products, something heartbreaking was happening:
The people there were largely upper crust, in government, in cushy private sector, NGO, UN jobs – expatriates, well-to-do locals, denizens of Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, well-fed and secure in their status. But now their faces reflected fear mixed with confusion. This was their thing, this government and the economic ideology it espoused. Many had got their jobs by following regime diktats, not making noise, not being seen with noise-makers.
The economic encyclical they knew by heart had said that capitalist excess was good. Investors and consumers were protected by the regime. Yet now, the telephone, which had brought vast investments into the country, with its millions of dollars in taxes, had been switched off.
The regime had for over 20 years touted its openness. It had enthusiastically done what the IMF and World Bank had asked it to do, back in the early 1990s when it carried out what was then clothed in the euphemism of “structural adjustment policy” but today goes in the explicit nudity of “austerity”. It had punished its people with gut-wrenching impoverishment so it could please the Western powers and avoid regime change. Over the decades, barriers to “free trade” had come down. Uganda, the IMF told all who cared to listen, was business-friendly.
So to wake up that Saturday morning to the reality of a ham-fisted regulation, one that could strangle any multinational co-operation, was astounding. The faces in that mall asked all these questions but in the abstract: What had we done wrong? Had we not consumed (and done so conspicuously) like all well-brought up boys and girls are taught to? Had we not behaved like responsible adults by heeding Gordon Gecko’s dictum that greed is good? Had we not volunteered our energy and time on earth as a good, mostly Christian country and devoted our energy to making the rich richer? Why this punishment now?
In lieu of competitive politics, Museveni’s first decade in power had operated under a ‘broad-based’ system, a serious attempt at an ideology, a kind of reconciliation by which the soviets set up at parish level (going by the name of Resistance Councils) could also include, rather than execute, kulaks
To such exemplary behaviour were due such little rewards as walking into the most expensive restaurants, not so much to eat, as to snap pictures of the dinner for Instagram. Going out the door each day was a Facebook challenge. Now even that was no longer possible. I saw in their faces horror at the prospect of returning to the anonymity of the 1990s, to operating VCRs and having to twirl cassette tapes on a Bic pen to rewind them.
We always knew the military would turn around and bite us
The Museveni government had acted out of character. What had been concealed and contained for 31 years of his time in power had at last erupted, very publicly. We had lived with a military government for a full generation. One day, we always knew, it would turn around and bite us. If you had watched the Museveni regime for the past three decades, you would have noticed that at the close of each decade, his rule shifted gear in consequential ways. We were at the start of the fourth decade, which meant a new tempo had been embarked upon.
The first 10 years had been unchallenged rule by the complete set of ideologues he had brought with him from the bush war. They were the gushing, forward-rushing youthful stage during which the government could do no wrong and genuinely tried its best not to. That was the forward-rushing youthful stage. In lieu of competitive politics, the decade had operated under a “broad-based” system, a serious attempt at an ideology, a kind of reconciliation by which the soviets set up at parish level (going by the name of Resistance Councils) could also include, rather than execute, kulaks. The “good leadership”, “political will” by which Museveni has been described, were products of this period. Victory had brought goodwill and he was eager to show it.
The period ended with the passing of the 1995 constitution, the biggest goodwill of all. And then it started. Looking back, it would seem that Museveni’s longer lasting troubles began with that document. Ugandans had given the regime the benefit of the doubt in the first decade. Now they wanted something in return. The 1990s ended with the now famous “missive” Dr Kizza Besigye wrote in 1999 declaring Museveni a dictator. Besigye’s courage took Museveni aback, as did the massive crowds Besigye attracted when he first ran for president in 2001, dwarfing the numbers Museveni attracted, for the first time giving the president an undiluted assessment of what Ugandans thought of him.
The departure of Besigye from the war veterans’ camp opened the door for the haemorrhage of Museveni’s bush war colleagues, a bleeding he and the Movement were never to recover from; what was worse, the end of the second decade marked very emphatic victories against him from a Uganda Museveni thought he had vanquished.
Through a series of legal battles, lawyers of the Uganda People’s Congress and the Democratic Party, doyens of the anti-colonial years that had been banned from operating, revealed the contradiction between Museveni’s claim to have returned constitutional rule to Uganda, and his refusal to obey the same constitution. In an attempt to pre-empt the return of political parties, the government had organised the infamous Referendum of 2000, whose cloying rationale fooled few. The banned opposition parties, unwilling to lend political legitimacy to Museveni, refused to participate, whereupon the government propped up straw parties to act the part of the Yes side while it hogged the No role. In a poorly attended exercise, 90.7% of those that bothered to vote, estimated at 30 % of registered voters chose a “No Party” Movement system against the 9.3% who chose a “Multiparty” system.
To show how much it believed in multiparty democracy, the government needed a stronger Yes than the 90% garnered by its No side the last time. It allowed a Yes percentage figure of 92.44 %. Some 4 million democracy-shy Ugandans now resoundingly allowed multiparty politics to operate
The result served as legal cover for one-party rule (described now as “no party rule”). But in 2004 a seven-judge panel of the Supreme Court declared it null and void. As if to save face, to show that it had known what it was doing, the government organised a second referendum on the same question, in 2005. This time, it was a little tricky. The government decided it wanted parties back, which meant that it was now sentimentally on the same side as the parties it had banned. It therefore invited the parties, which by law did not exist, to take the government’s side in declaring that it, the government, had been wrong. The parties refused to agree whereupon the government stood alone in acting the Yes side. But for the suffrage to be legal, there had to be a No side. For two decades, the government had said No. Now the government was saying Yes and therefore no one was saying No. Once again, props had to be found and money found to fund their No.
To show how much it believed in multiparty democracy, the government needed a stronger Yes than the 90% garnered by its No side the last time around. It allowed a Yes percentage figure of 92.44%. Some 4 million democracy-shy Ugandans now resoundingly allowed multiparty politics to operate.
Nobody loves the jackboot
Having kept them under the military jackboot for 20 years, Museveni now castigated the parties for refusing to support their own return to life. They were “not contributing to Uganda’s development,” he said.
That was the spirit in which Museveni ruled for 20 years, that play-acting at magnanimity, the third-rate theatre by which he blarneyed his way through, year after year. He was after all a “good” leader and that called for “good” behaviour. It is easy to forget, but in the first two decades, Museveni cut a figure somewhere between a likeable clown and a deadly fighter.
The judicial humiliations of 2004-2005 were not isolated events. The end of his second decade in power presented Museveni with new realities neither he nor Ugandans could have anticipated. This period of irrevocable change started in 2003 and did not end until 2006-2007. Museveni’s perennial bogeymen, the figures he could invoke to frighten Ugandans into obedience, Idi Amin and Milton Obote, died (2003 and 2005), deaths that left him exposed. Suddenly, he was left alone. The shadows of the past gone, he would now be judged by his actions alone.
And then the war in northern Uganda jolted to an abrupt end. What had provided political ballast, the spectre of Nilotic rule that had made the Bantu southerners so uneasy, faded rapidly. To further complicate life for Museveni, the end of the northern war left him without a diversion to distract restless, politicised military officers, nor cover for the classified budgets to defence that had hitherto provided a useful slush fund.
But not as yet. An election was still looming in 2006 and Besigye had learnt nothing from the beatings and imprisonment he had suffered. Yet if the returned political parties were triumphant, the electorate did not share this triumph. The 92.44% voters who wanted them back did not show up for them. The crowded field of presidential candidates, which included Milton Obote’s widow, Miria Obote, played supporting roles to the protagonists.
Museveni, realising that the constitution he had nursed to life would not be on his side, began to make the moves that would lead to the funereal pall of May 20, 2017. He appointed one General Kale Kayihura as Inspector General of Police. The disastrous militarisation of the police had begun. Kayihura had made his name as commander of the Revenue Protection Unit, which went after smugglers and tax dodgers with methods that threw the operation into disrepute. He was not a nice man.
Kayihura, Uganda’s longest serving IGP
Footage courtesy of New Vision TV
Not forgetting what it had done to him, Museveni also moved against the judiciary through appointments and outright humiliation. In a striking display of what would characterise the next decade in power, the so-called Black Mamba squad invaded the High Court and rearrested 22 suspects granted bail by the judges. They were allegedly part of the People’s Redemption Army, allegedly linked to Besigye.
Newer global forces, particularly ‘terrorism,’ provided fresh nomenclature. Now Uganda was an ally in the ‘war on terror.’ Renewed support from Washington boosted the regime and may well have bought it a decade extra in power. Sending troops to Somalia served to divert the military and inject income-replacing lost revenue from Congo and northern Uganda
The drift away from constitutionalism had begun. It is still unbelievable, the degree of violence that the army and the police deployed in this, Museveni’s third decade in power, from the brutal actions on the streets during the 2011 elections, to the disarmament of Karamoja pastoralists. Whoever was in charge, was not of the calibre of Besigye, whose stewardship of battalions in the first decade of Museveni’s rule had won so much respect in most parts of Uganda. These were a raw, untempered lot. As the decades piled up, principled men and women refused to work with Museveni, leaving the dregs to exercise power.
The cost of doing politics in Uganda goes up
And then, 16 months before the 2011 elections, something exceedingly alarming happened. In September 2009, the King of Buganda, Kabaka Ronald Mutebi, set off to visit a district his kingdom claimed as part of its territory. Kayunga, home to the Baruli community, had been a vassal state in pre-colonial Buganda, so the visit provided ironies all around, not least for Buganda, which was demanding the return of its properties from the Uganda state, the same kind of demand the Baruli were making of the Buganda Kingdom. The government blocked the visit, upon which Buganda erupted. The extremely ethnicised nature of the riots that followed were a frightening demonstration of what people felt, that Museveni and his ethnic group were “oppressors” hell bent on a massive land grab. It brought out fears of the kind that lie just under the surface of African politics.
The cost of doing politics in Uganda had gone up. In the run up to the 2006 elections, plainclothes operatives had fired live bullets and killed a man, just yards from where the Kabaka stood next to Besigye. It had been the single most chilling episode of that campaign period, one which left the Buganda, long mass supporters of Museveni who had in the previous two elections voted overwhelmingly for him, in no doubt of what they were facing. The 2009 riots were a delayed reaction. The country became a less happy place, if it had been happy in the first place.
But newer global forces, particularly “terrorism,” provided fresh nomenclature. Now Uganda was “an ally” in the “war on terror.” Renewed support from Washington boosted the regime and may well have bought it a decade extra in power. Sending troops to Somalia served to divert the military and replace lost revenue from Congo and northern Uganda. The modus operandi of Museveni has been that there must always be a war; as rulers throughout the ages know, war enriches soldiers and is also a neat way to get rid of problematic officers.
The opposition had gained traction by now. The public had seen a side to the regime it would not forget. Only voter intimidation and rigging ensured the ruling party stayed in power in 2006. In 2011, in a bizarre move, Museveni courted northern Ugandan voters. The ballots returned significant gains for the Movement. It was a shocking event, for Museveni had always ignored the northern vote. But now, he had also lost southern support. The cost of buying the northern vote, as well as the amount of fear-mongering needed to secure it, was too high. It was not tried again in 2016, when the opposition returned to its previous sweep of the region.
Newer global forces, particularly ‘terrorism,’ provided fresh nomenclature. Now Uganda was an ally in the ‘war on terror.’ Renewed support from Washington boosted the regime and may well have bought it a decade extra in power. Sending troops to Somalia served to divert the military and inject income-replacing lost revenue from Congo and northern Uganda
However, it must be noted that faith in elections ended in 2001; whatever little remained burned out in 2006. What the government may have missed was that by participating in the 2011 elections, the opposition was in effect, simply looking for a casus belli – daring the government to show its hand – by which to justify its next move. The state duly obliged. The world and the judges agreed that the elections had been a sham. The demonstrations that followed (this was Arab Spring season) in the well-reported “Walk to Work” protests in which political leaders “siding” with the poor ditched their cars and walked to parliament, initiated a novel approach to Ugandan politics. It also neutralised the use of armed force. It was a battle of image for which Museveni the guerrilla-fighter could not have been more ill-prepared.
Neoliberalism begins to unravel
It was also in this decade that the economic policies adopted in the early days of the regime had so endeared Museveni to Western powers, began to unravel. The failure of neoliberal economics to deliver promised “trickle down” benefits had done its damage in the Third World countries forced to swallow it. But following the 2008 banking crisis, the failures of that ideology had crept up from its Third World laboratories into the heartlands of extreme capitalism. While it had never really had a chance to work in a country like Uganda, the crisis meant that the lifeline of foreign aid that had tube-fed the Museveni government suddenly ran dry. Incapable of providing the patronage he had once dispensed, and with poverty underlining the degree of income inequality, things had come to a head by the time the third decade in power was coming to a close.
Enter Amama Mbabazi. He had been Museveni’s co-tribune, a Movement pillar and prime minister from 2011 to 2014. It had always been rumoured that he had been the organiser, the man who made things work. He first publicly expressed his presidential ambitions back in 2000 when he accused Besigye of jumping the succession queue. Had there been a pact between him and Museveni that he would be president after him? And how patient was he going to be? In 2015, when it became plain that Mbabazi had presidential ambitions, the Movement machinery whirred into action to do what it had rarely, if ever, done. It turned against its own.
The crisis meant that the lifeline of foreign aid that had tube-fed the Museveni government suddenly ran dry. Incapable of providing the patronage he had once dispensed, and with poverty underlining the degree of income inequality, things had come to a head by the time his third decade in power was coming to a close
The subsequent ejection, failed presidential candidacy and fall of Mbabazi quickly faded out of sight and he was not to become a subject of public discussion afterwards. The essential rebellion had been Besigye’s 1999 missive. There was to be no repeat. Attention remained focused on the latter, whose arrests and trials continued apace.
That was on the surface. Underneath, the ouster of the cringe-worthily naive Mbabazi, as it is now turning out, was to provide the essential plot and character for Museveni’s entry into the fourth decade in power. It is the thread that led to the fear I read that afternoon of May 20:
The ouster of Mbabazi was accompanied by a purge of the government and of the Movement system of alleged Mbabazi supporters. The high-level paranoia that underneath his own system, rebellion was growing, denied Museveni trust in a system as complex as a government needs in order to function. And yet it had been that trust the knowledge technocrats had that the president was both reasonable and supportive, that had delivered the key achievements of his early days in office, like the economic recovery and the fight against HIV/Aids. These achievements had in various forms not survived beyond the first decade but the original impetus had created a momentum of goodwill, for the image of “good leadership,” once earned, is hard to lose, if only because society is desperate for it. At any rate, Museveni had always profited by the inexhaustible store of goodwill extended to him.
It was inexhaustible until it ran out. By 2014, when Museveni made the ill-advised and very public move to sign the so-called anti-gay Bill, there had been a considerable body of international opinion that he was not exactly a democrat. By inserting himself needlessly into the Western cultural wars, Museveni had blundered in a costly fashion. He may have calculated that it would improve his electoral chances back home, but his opponents were never going to support gay rights to start with. The advantage was cancelled out. His detractors in the West had their opportunity. They pounced.
Aid money was cut left, right and centre. They needed the money for their own people. What had been billed as economic recovery was revealed to have all along been baloney. Uganda under Museveni had never improved its productivity in real terms. It was an aid-money autarky all the time.
By the time the 2016 elections came and went, it was undeniable that the country was in serious trouble. Police and other civil servants, not least teachers, nurses and doctors, went months without pay. Medicine was unavailable in hospitals. At the same time, the internal witch hunt in government, and the air of fear and suspicion following the ouster of Amama Mbabazi was causing a cave-in from the other end: There was no money to pay public workers; at the same time, people in high office became afraid to work, in case they were seen to be ambitious.
Fear and intimidation take over
Museveni’s innate instinct, the use of force and intimidation, seems to have taken over. The perennial troubles of Kasese, the Rwenzururu Kingdom, which predated colonial Uganda, and which had been handled diplomatically since the Obote I government in the 1960s, now met military force. More than 100 people were gunned down. It was not as if such a small kingdom could have caused national damage (its cause remains obscure outside the Rwenzori region), but it reflects what one analyst told me is the mentality of those whom the president now puts trust in – use maximum force.
Every ministry, from Health, Education, to Energy, is feeling the chill wind of administrative paralysis, but not all of them have as yet displayed incompetence in the manner in which famine in eastern Uganda has shown up the Ministry of Agriculture. But it is coming
Without respect and trust in the seasoned technocrats who shepherd political masters through the jungles of laws and acts and regulations that are effectively the “system,” a number of odd things have been happening in Uganda. Foremost among them is the failure to manage a looming food crisis in eastern Uganda. The coming environmental crisis, the first of which is the developing collapse of fish stocks, could have been avoided had the civil service been allowed to do its work. Every ministry, from Health, Education, to Energy, is feeling the chill wind of administrative paralysis, but not all of them have as yet displayed incompetence in the manner in which famine in eastern Uganda has shown up the Ministry of Agriculture. But it is coming. The spectacular bungling of telephone registration brought these issues to the fore.
A boyish, almost flagrant informality
An order was given that telephone users “verify” their numbers. However, Ugandan citizens were told they could not use driving permits, passports, work IDs, local council IDs, only National IDs. It was a telling admission that the Ministry of Internal Affairs was inept, that its identity documents were a sham. A properly functioning government would have been advised against such a move for the demands of one arm of government must be reconciled across all government arms to ensure systemic uniformity. It is the reason there is a prime minister and a Secretary to the Cabinet. This one was a weird call, until it was revealed that the call came from the IGP’s office.
At his first press conference back in 2005, which I attended as journalist at The EastAfrican, I watched Gen. Kayihura’s demeanour. I observed his short attention span, his easily distracted manner, twiddling with his phone in the middle of taking press questions and his affinity for a boyish, almost vagrant informality. It was a frightening projection of things to come.
In 2017, you could see Gen Kayihura’s hand in that telephone debacle. A chess piece moved at the end of the second decade in power, had showed its own hand at the beginning of the fourth decade in power.
What it said, and what precipitated that fever that we felt on May 20, was the fact that the administrative state in Uganda, had been overthrown by the security forces. There had been a coup. The Office of the Prime Minister, which supervised the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which supervised the Police, was forced to humiliatingly “follow” the orders of a policeman; parliament recognised its own impotence by attacking the line minister who formally made the announcement, knowing well that the minister had simply been following the orders of the IGP, whom they dared not touch. Prime minister, parliament and line minister were all to be further humiliated when the NRM parliamentary caucus overruled all of them. Four days after shutting down phone lines, they switched them on back again, and said we would have three more months to comply with the registration order.
It has become clear now that, going into his fourth decade in power, Museveni has effectively shut down the Uganda state and is intent on ruling through a secret and sometimes not so secret cabal of gunslingers, chief among them his IGP
There is the misled belief that an Orwellian-sized national biometric database will give the state means to track everyone and prevent an Arab Spring-style social media uprising. Sources say the government’s investments in electronic surveillance have been extensive. When it first asked citizens to acquire National IDs in 2013, very few people bothered to register. Then someone had a brain wave – threaten to take away their phones, that will bring them running. And so for all of April and May, the entire country was thrown into turmoil. We wait to see what happens in August when the three-month extension runs out.
It has become clear that there are now two centres of power in Uganda, President Museveni and IGP Kayihura. Everyone else, from the vice president to district officers, has gone quiet. In a sign of how disastrous this leadership model is, the “old” model was forced to intervene after President Museveni jumped protocol and directly accused fictitious Chinese diplomats of ivory trafficking. The incensed Chinese put their foot down and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had not been consulted when the letter of accusation was sent out by the president’s office, apologised publicly to China. What it demonstrated was the manner in which Museveni now micro-manages Uganda.
It has become clear now that, going into his fourth decade in power, Museveni has effectively shut down the Uganda state and is intent on ruling through a secret and sometimes not so secret cabal of gunslingers, chief among them his IGP Gen Kale Kayihura. But even in there, things are not going swimmingly, which may explain the ultra-violent execution of Gen Kayihura’s deputy, Felix Kaweesi, on March 17 this year. It was the killing that provided the justification for shutting down telephone lines. There is a deadly power struggle even within the securocratic redoubt into which Museveni’s fourth decade is retreating. The new front of cyber security and fear of the power of social media has meant that a new front of enemies has opened up; it is no longer just past leaders, Nilotics or opposition who are “against development”; it’s also now a teenager with WhatsApp who must be closely monitored.
There is a general realisation that time is running out. Those in positions of power and opportunity are taking as much cash out of the public and through their offices as they can while they still have the chance. Principled and seasoned individuals are opting out, leaving a bevy of the callow and ethnically loyal to take positions of authority. The centre retreats into self-serving fiction.
