From no party to multi-party: Can Yoweri Museveni be beaten?

Charles Onyango-Obbo

(February 23, 2006) It’s make or break time for Ugandans as they go to the polls February 23, following a bitterly fought campaign between long-time president Yoweri Museveni and his rival Kizza Besigye. Onyango Obbo, a columnist with the East African Newspaper, argues that it’s the first time the opposition feel that Museveni can be beaten. These elections, they say, present the last opportunity to choose the democratic option.

Ugandans vote in presidential and parliamentary elections February 23,  in make or break polls. It has been the most bitterly fought and personality-attack filled campaign since President Yoweri Museveni came to power in January 1986 at the head of a successful rebellion. It's the first time that the optimists in the opposition feel that Museveni is beatable.

Uganda and Museveni have come a long way. The first presidential  election under the new constitution in 1996 was nothing more than a coronation for the president. That Museveni is thought to be vulnerable today is testimony as much to the corrupting impact a long unchallenged rule can have on what started out as an enlightened presidency, and the toll the passage of time takes on even the best champions.

The Museveni government imposed what it called a "no-party" system, but  critics said was no different than an old-style African one-party rule. Under the "no-party" system, candidates for presidential and parliamentary office stood on their own "individual" merit, not on political party platform.

Museveni's ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM), on the other  hand, could back candidates because, unlike the old political parties, its supporters were understood to be standing on the "individual merit" principle. They would also get campaign contributions from the NRM Secretariat, which was funded by the taxpayer.
This made sure that Museveni won handily. On the other hand, the  pro-multiparty opposition were always doomed to be a tiny minority. To some, it was a little too Kafkesque. But the country embraced the no-party idea, and between 1986 and 1996 Museveni enjoyed a level of popularity unparalleled in recent Uganda history.

One of Museveni's successes came from understanding the country's  desperate need for normalcy, and tapping into it. The results were dramatic. By the mid-1990s, inflation had been wrestled from the highs of 300 per cent just ten years earlier, to –1 per cent! These were the times of heady growth rates nearing 10 per cent. Museveni became the archetype of the "new breed" of African leader, and Uganda was touted as the continent's "economic success model".

Yet, for all that, in 2001 a doctor and former military officer, Kizza Besigye, gave Museveni a run for his money in the presidential elections. Besigye was the NRM's first chief political ideologue, the National Political Commissar, and then minister of State for Internal Affairs. He left in the early 1990s to take a military command at a  barracks in the western part of the country, and little was heard of him. Besigye resurfaced to play a role in the first early crack in the then formidable and united NRM edifice.

In 1994 there were elections to the Constituent Assembly that the NRM swept. The fate of political parties became a big issue in the Assembly. Several NRM supporters, notably the military representatives, argued that the no-party system was a temporary arrangement, and the new constitution should either provide immediately for a return to 
multiparty politics or adopt a timetable for it. Besigye was an outspoken member of that group. However, Museveni cracked the whip and used the ruling party's majority to adopt the no-party (or Movement) system as the permanent form of politics, which could only be changed by a national referendum.

In order to deal with criticism by the small pro-multiparty delegates  that the NRM was creating a one-party dictatorship, some sweeteners were thrown in. Among these was a two five-year term for president. Because at that point Museveni was about to serve out two unelected terms, it was provided that the counting of the two terms began from 
when the new constitution was enacted.In any event, the beginning of the tensions between what came to be known as hardliners and moderates or progressives in the NRM, had been born. In addition, events soon demonstrated that the problem with 
competitive politics in Africa is not so much that it creates divisions, but that the dynamics of elections generally work the same way in most societies. This is because although the NRM banned political parties under the auspices that they create divisions, it proved unable to cure itself of the same maladies. Just as particular  ethnic communities and religions come to dominate particular parties in underdeveloped countries with a multiparty system, so do they come to dominate the sole party under a one-party arrangement. Soon, the Museveni regime was being accused of being dominated by politicians from the western region where he came from.

Parts of the country that weren't substantially represented in the NRM  felt alienated, none more so than the northern region. In the British colonial division of labour, the north was the reservoir for manual labour and the army. The southwest provided the professional classes and civil servants. Despite gaining some power, the elite from the 
region became just another addition to the middle class with other  Ugandan communities. They set up shop and invested their new wealth in the south – helping only to exacerbate the regional differences.

Museveni's ascendance to power brought a profound crisis for the north.  For the first time in Uganda's history, the region neither held military or political power. Without that, it lost all means of negotiating for the political spoils at the centre. It required a great dose of political sensitivity to recognise the crisis that had befallen  the region.

That, and the fact that in many parts of the country "northern rule" had become so deeply resented, combined to make for a potentially explosive situation. The eruption came when after Museveni's victory, units of a right wing group called Uganda Freedom Movement that had been absorbed in the National Resistance Army massacred civilians in the north. Feeling threatened, members of the old defeated army, the 
Uganda National Liberation Army, fled to southern Sudan, regrouped as  the Uganda Democratic Army and started a rebellion against the Museveni government.

That conflict was settled through a negotiated settlement in 1988. However, the fact of the rebellion meant that a wider national reconciliation with the north became difficult. It also reinforced most of the rest of the country's view that the northern leaders remained intransigent and unrepentant about the atrocities of "their" past rule.

To complicate matters, a social movement, which saw the 1988 peace  agreement as capitulation by a corrupt northern elite, mushroomed. A Prophetess, Alice Lakwena, who preached to her believers that if they smeared themselves with shea oil, the bullets of the government soldiers wouldn't kill them, led it. After Lakwena's defeat, the  present Lord's Resistance Army led by her cousin Joseph Kony emerged.

Perhaps without the rebellion in the north, the outcome of Museveni's  rule would have been totally different, and today he might well have been enjoying a status near that of South Africa's Nelson Mandela. However, the insurgency and several other smaller ones in the south and west that were quickly snuffed out, meant that Museveni's consolidation  of power proceeded with a lot of distraction, and the whiff of  illegitimacy from a failure to fully pacify the country.

Today everything is worse off in what was an already economically  depressed northern region than in the rest of Uganda. Poverty levels are almost twice as high; HIV infections are double the national average; life expectancy is nearly 10 years less than the rest of the country; and the school enrolment rate is the worst too.

There is a widely held view that such bleak conditions could have been  prevented, with a different set of decisions in Kampala. In any event, the war in the north strengthened the hand of the hardliners in the NRM, and when the first adult suffrage elections under Museveni came, the fact that the conflict was still alive meant that politicians could 
only exploit it. The rebellion in the north was used by Museveni's  opponents to argue that the "no party" was a failure. For the NRM, it was a reason why they needed to have a strong showing in the CA - to make a constitution that would ensure that the "backward forces of the past", as they called their rivals, didn't return to torment the 
country. And so the country went to the polls.

Museveni's NRM won a marvellous victory in the 1994 Constituent  Assembly election. Sadly, from then on, the NRM grew addicted to playing the "northern card", because it was the magic formula for winning elections. However, that addiction progressively transformed it into a reactionary organisation, and widened the gulf between the 
progressives and the hardliners in the ruling party. The big clash  between these two sides, however, never came until 2001.

Up to about eight years ago, Uganda was heavily dependant on aid. In  return, the donors exercised a lot of influence over government action and policy. After many years of uncritically supporting Museveni, they started to speak, softly though, about the need to find a political  settlement to the war in the north, reducing defence expenditure, and what they called "opening up the political space". However, defence 
expenditure had by now become a critical source of political slush  funds for the NRM.
OIn response to this situation, and the need to find new sources of  support, the privatisation programme was accelerated. The attempt to use the process to create a class of moneyed people who were grateful  to the NRM, led to massive corruption in the exercise. The smell of corruption did a lot to damage President Museveni's standing. Then, with shrinking wiggle room for the government to cream off money from 
the budget without getting the donors' hackles, Kampala found a  disastrous way out.

Uganda had sent its army into a security buffer inside the Democratic  Republic of Congo to prevent attacks by Allied Democratic Front rebels. However, when the DRC's president Laurent Kabila became embattled when fresh rebellion broke out in his country again in 1998, Uganda took  advantage of the resulting chaos and power vacuum to send its army deep into the vast central African nation. There it either occupied or controlled through an alliance of local militia, a large swathe of  territory from the Uganda border up to Kinshasa and beyond.

The DRC expedition became an exercise in which some elements of the  ruling NRM exploited the troubled country's vast resources to raise money for politics back home, particularly for the 2001 elections.  There is a widely held view that the DRC occupation was the turning point for Museveni's presidency.

It was in this situation that Besigye announced in 2000 that he was to challenge Museveni. Unaccustomed to the kind of audacious internal challenge from a Movementist (as supporters of the NRM are known), Museveni overreacted to Besigye's ambitions. A special militia, the  Kalangala Action Plan, was set up to unleash violence on Museveni's rivals' supporters. The election, that Museveni eventually won, was to 
be marred by extensive rigging.

Besigye challenged the result in the Supreme Court. By a unanimous  decision, the five judges agreed that the elections had been stolen. However, by a razor thin margin of 3 against 2, they also held that the  margin by which the election was rigged couldn't have affected the final outcome. In that sense, like US President George Bush in 2000, Museveni owes his 2001 victory partly to the courts. The president's  prestige suffered further, and the star status he enjoyed at home and internationally eluded him in his next term. Besigye, claiming he was being persecuted, fled into exile in South Africa, where he lived until the end of October last year.

The idealism that had made Museveni so admired has been largely shrinking the last five years. And sharp internal divisions inside the NRM marked his last term. Because the reputation of the president and government had taken a big hit, there was no way they could create what critics claimed was a presidency for life, without making some 
political concessions and finding new sources of legitimacy. This they attempted to do by abandoning their long held opposition, and supporting the re-introduction of multiparty politics late last year. The calculation was that the country could live with Museveni being allowed to run again, if it got multiparty politics in return.
 

Besigye's return from exile suggests that that might have been a  miscalculation . Huge and passionate crowds received Besigye. The new party, the Forum for Democratic Change, that had been formed through the merger of Besigye's 2001 election organisation, Reform Agenda, and other pro-democracy groups, quickly elected Besigye as their presidential candidate.

As he travelled around the country, he received a reception that no  other politician had ever got. In some towns, they had to cancel his rallies as the crowds went out of control. Besigye seemed to tap into  the pent up frustrations at 20 years of Museveni's rule. The government panicked, and barely two weeks after his return, Besigye was arrested and charged with a rape that allegedly took place eight years ago, and  treason. At the same time as he faced those charges in the High Court,  he was also charged with terrorism in the High Court.

The day Besigye was arrested, running battles broke out between his  supporters and heavily armed police and soldiers in armoured vehicles. It was the first time since the last years of colonial rule in the 1950s that ordinary Ugandans, other than university students, had taken to the streets in a political protest.

Besigye spent a month in prison, with dramatic scenes whenever he came to court. Because of large crowd turnouts on the days he would be in court, streets would be closed off. And in a shocking display of force,  on the day he and his co-accused were to be granted bail, a hitherto secret commando unit, the Black Mambas, surrounded the court. The prisoners and their sureties, fearing what might happen to them if they 
were taken away by the commandos, gave up their right to bail and  decided to be taken back to the civilian prison.

This was a Uganda many thought had gone with Amin, and it did little to  help Museveni. The only thing it achieved was turning Besigye from a party leader, to a symbol of democracy. It also gave him national recognition far more than anything he or his party would have done to get. However, after his release late December, the novelty that he had as a candidate running from a prison cell seems to have begun to wear off almost immediately.

According to opinion polls, the combined support for Uganda Peoples'  Congress leader Mrs Miria Obote, the country's first female presidential candidate; the Democratic Party's Mr Sebaana Kizito; and the independent Mr Abed Bwanika, is less than 15 per cent. The Daily Monitor polls show that if they were to back the single candidacy of 
Besigye, his support would rise, but not enough for him to leap in the lead. Only the 'Weekly Observer' has, so far, done polls that showed Besigye leading with 47 per cent saying they would vote for him, against 35 per cent for Museveni.

However, so far both Museveni and his trusted generals have suggested  that they will not hand over power if they lost. So whichever way this election turns out, it is difficult to see how Uganda's democracy can win. Indeed since 1980, every election has left the country more divided, and the victor and his government more discredited. It's  therefore unlikely that the elections will result in the notable  expansion of democratic space that happened in Kenya in 2002, for example, with the opposition National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) defeat of the Kenya African National Union, which had been in power for 38 years at that point.

Nevertheless, it could all still have turned out differently. Even  after amending the constitution to allow himself to stand for another term, Museveni would have salvaged some of this old prestige from these elections. Because the other parties have only been able to operate legally for five months now, they face an uphill task running against  an entrenched NRM, which is still enjoying access to state resources.  Already, it's only the NRM that has fielded candidates for Parliament, who will be elected simultaneously on February 23, in all but one of the constituencies. While Besigye might get the bigger crowds, he doesn't have the political machine to turn those numbers into votes.

A free election, as most of the independent polls suggest, would at  worst result in a run off if Museveni, who leads in most of them, wouldn't be able to get the more than 50 per cent that the law requires the winner to get. In a run-off, it's not certain that all the 
candidates would back Besigye. Or that if they did, they he would win  because the polls indicate that Museveni would still do better.

Also Museveni would probably have won clean if he had fought a positive campaign and focussed on his achievements, which still resonate with many voters. However, the campaigns have degenerated into a carnival of crude personality attacks, with everything from the two leading candidates' sexual transgressions, to theirs and their wives and children's health and private shortcomings being aired.

However, a Museveni margin in a high-minded election would be thin. because of the inexplicable mindset in the NRM that a slim win is not legitimate enough, the Museveni campaign has always had to resort to underhand methods to bolster the margin of victory. In so doing, as in the past, he is set to pluck moral defeat out of the jaws of political victory.

At a wider Eastern Africa level, the Uganda elections are being watched for something larger. By 2013, the three partner countries in the East African Community – Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda – plan to establish a political federation. By that time, Rwanda, and possibly Burundi, might have joined the EAC, although they would be part of the common market only, not the political federation. In this grouping, Uganda would be  the only country without presidential term limits. There are many  voices in Kenya and Tanzania that are already saying Uganda has set out on a path that makes it "incompatible". Uganda is also the only country in the EAC that has never had a democratic change of leaders at the polls.

The test for the country has always been whether it can break with its past, and establish civil democratic politics, or would revert to its violent ways to change its leaders. The February 23 elections are the last opportunity to strike a blow for the democratic option.

Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for Convergence 
and New Products. Email: cobbo (at) nation.co.ke
 

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