By Timothy Kalyegira, Sunday 21 June 2015, Sunday Monitor (Uganda)
Eventually, it ceased to matter what the official Electoral Commission timetable stipulates about the launching of campaigns for the 2016 general election. At certain times, the national mood becomes the timetable. The much-anticipated announcement for a presidential bid by former prime minister and all-round chief of security of the NRM military-intelligence state, Amama Mbabazi, finally was made in the early morning hours of Monday June 15.
President Museveni (L) and former premier Amama Mbabazi at a function recently. Mr Mbabazi finally made his much-anticipated announcement for a presidential bid on Monday
Later that day, President Museveni, a veteran politico-guerrilla operative and leader who knows a thing or two about the realities of practical politics and the reading of the national mood, responded to Mbabazi’s five-minute video published on the US video repository website YouTube with a video statement of his own. The President just had to. He more than any other politician knows Amama Mbabazi and what Mbabazi is capable of. More important, he knows that a large section of the ruling NRM party could be loyal to Mbabazi.
‘A man deeply hurt’
His televised reaction to Mbabazi’s video upon his return from the African Union summit in South Africa struck most who saw it as panicky, almost of a man deeply hurt by the developments.
But he had no choice in the matter. When Dr Kizza Besigye made his dramatic announcement that he would be seeking the presidency in the 2001 general election, Museveni set about planning to take on and overcome Besigye’s challenge.
He made no publicly-known effort to persuade Besigye to return to the NRM fold because what mattered was that Besigye and several other NRM leaders and cadres had left the NRM and, in a sense, helped reduce the challenge to Museveni from within the NRM.
In Mbabazi’s case, the situation can only be taken as a severe crisis within the party, because for the first time since 1986, somebody has stepped forward with the temerity to state his wish to wrest the leadership of the NRM from Museveni, the so-far undisputed leader of the 31-year-old political organisation.
No futile effort
This was not a token challenge such as the one by Felix Okot Ogong or the one by the former Museveni aide Capt David Ruhinda Maguru, a challenge most Ugandans treated as an amusing but ultimately futile effort.
This is a challenge from the innermost chambers of the NRM. As this writer stated in the Sunday Monitor of February 16, 2014, the day after the NRM retreat at the Kyankwanzi national Leadership Institute, Mbabazi was the operating system of the NRM dating back to the early 1980s and further back to Museveni’s anti-Amin guerrilla group FRONASA.
Mbabazi is to the NRM what Akena Adoko was to the UPC government in the 1960s or Paulo Muwanga to the UPC government in the 1980s, or what Nicholas Biwot was to the ruling KANU party in Kenya under president Daniel Arap Moi.
The use of the computer software imagery in that Sunday Monitor article of Mbabazi as an operating system, an Android, an iOS, a Windows or Linux seemed a touch exaggerated at the time to many readers, but the events of last week have borne out that analogy.
By the next day, the truth of what was happening started to come to the fore. On various radio and television stations, NRM members and analysts met to discuss the developments. It was fascinating to hear one NRM member pledge support to Museveni and another in the same show state their support for Mbabazi.
When the Minister for the Presidency, Frank Tumwebaze, declared that Mbabazi was not presidential material because, said Tumwebaze, Mbabazi had not mentored anybody, a photo of Tumwebaze and his family at a thanksgiving event in Kampala upon his appointment as minister four years ago immediately began to circulate on Facebook.
‘Guest of honour’
In that photo, Tumwebaze stood next to the guest of honour whom he thanked for helping him become a minister. That guest of honour was Amama Mbabazi, the same guest of honour at the wedding two weeks ago of the “rebel” NRM MP Barnabas Tinkasiimire.
These glimpses into Mbabazi’s mentoring not only point to the crisis brewing over the split loyalty to Museveni and Mbabazi within the NRM, but also reveal just how strong a personal power base Mbabazi has created within the NRM. The question is how many more Mbabazi supporters are quietly lying low within the NRM, State House, the army and intelligence and across various districts, the diplomatic service and the civil service.
That is why, as has been stated, President Museveni simply had to respond to Mbabazi’s video message. In his televised response to Mbabazi, Museveni conceded that many things had gone wrong in the NRM but sought to remind viewers that Mbabazi rather than try to distance himself from these failures, should own up to them as he was at the time an integral part of the NRM government and party.
In this, the President had a point. Mbabazi’s announcement while delivered with the calm and courteousness expected of him, glossed over too much recent Ugandan history to not seem disingenuous. Mbabazi painted a positive, optimistic picture of Uganda since independence, briefly mentioned his involvement in the armed anti-government struggles of the 1970s and 1980s.
He stated that the NRM had been “weak” in matters of public service and delivery of the basics to the society, weaknesses that he, Mbabazi, seeks to rectify of an otherwise commendable record by the NRM.
Mbabazi, in this view, left out so much painful history – the intelligence torture safe houses, the rampant corruption that sometimes seems deliberate, the plundering of resources from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the brutal counterinsurgency operations in Teso and northern Uganda by the army and the pathetic state of government hospitals and schools upcountry and even Mulago in Kampala.
To present these huge NRM injustices and crimes euphemistically as “weaknesses” is to either indicate how detached from reality Mbabazi is or how his quest for the presidency is simply one of (to paraphrase the author Michella Wrong in her title of a book on post-Moi Kenyan politics), “It’s our time to eat”. However, so frustrated and desperate with this 30-year state of affairs have Ugandans become that right now anybody who appears able to remove the present order from power will be welcomed with open arms, his recent involvement in that same injustice notwithstanding.
In his televised reply to Mbabazi, President Museveni acknowledged something important when he said “Yes, there is tiredness, there is corruption, and I think the Right Honourable Mbabazi will owe you an explanation.” It was eye-opening to hear the President acknowledge the reality of “tiredness” or what Ugandans colloquially term a state of being “Bakoowu”. He has on several occasions acknowledged corruption as a fact of life in Uganda today but explained his failure to clamp down on it as being the lack of evidence.
This might have been the first time Museveni acknowledged that the national mood is not simply one of disgruntled Opposition leaders like Kizza Besigye and Erias Lukwago, of frustrated unemployed youth or an anti-government media, but rather a pervasive sense of accumulated fatigue and “tiredness” with the whole three-decade experience of the NRM government.
That Museveni, usually an intransigent man, can even come round to acknowledge the national mood of fatigue with his rule is significant.
In that sense, Museveni’s video message was more truthful and honest than Mbabazi’s surely inaccurate that what is wrong in NRM Uganda is just a case of a few “weaknesses”.
The keen public interest in Mbabazi lately is one such indication. On Thursday, June 18, the radio station 93.3 KFM conducted a listeners’ live phone-in and Internet opinion poll on a hypothetical election choice between Museveni and Mbabazi.
Of the first 10 votes, nine went to Mbabazi. Eventually votes for Museveni started coming in too. When the final tally was compiled and invalid votes from the radio poll and the repeat votes on KFM’s Facebook page had been removed, the result stood as follows: Mbabazi 71.3 per cent, Museveni 28.7 per cent. A similar KFM poll a few weeks earlier had resulted in an overwhelming win for Kizza Besigye. In either case, Museveni trailed both Besigye and Mbabazi.
KFM poll
Even if any other radio station in Kampala were to conduct a Museveni vs. Mbabazi poll, it is doubtful with such a wide margin the results would be different from the June 18 KFM poll.
Something seems fairly clear that the Ugandan public desperately wants change. At present, President Museveni still wants to dig in and retain power.
The face-off between the general public mood and the fact that Museveni has no wish to leave State House is the crisis. A meeting between the two rivals took place behind closed doors after both videos had been aired. This is the crisis now facing Uganda. The open voting at Kyankwanzi in February 2014 had secured Museveni an overwhelming count of 202 votes, including Mbabazi’s, as the sole NRM candidate for 2016.
Mbabazi was later dropped as prime minister and then NRM secretary general. To many analysts, this clearly showed that once again as had happened many times since 1986, Museveni was the undisputed political leader in Uganda. Museveni himself, though, seemed to see and know things differently. He seemed to know that Mbabazi was far from finished, even when Mbabazi appeared to drag his feet, remain silent, his supporters getting arrested and he remaining silent right up to his June 15 video statement.
On Friday June 19, an interview with Mbabazi was aired by the BBC World Service. After this, there is no turning back. The Mbabazi who seemed hesitant and vague in 2014 and the first half of 2015 was now acting calm and confident. It is significant that Mbabazi in his video and Museveni in his response both spoke only in English rather than the populist tendency by NRM leaders from the southern part of the country to play to the “masses” by speaking Luganda in major speeches.
This was deadly serious business and there was no attempting to go populist. But it could also be a clue into which audience the two video messages were aimed at. Mbabazi used the international video channel YouTube and Museveni delivered his rebuttal to major English language Kampala TV stations. Mbabazi’s first radio interview after this was to the BBC World Service, not a Kampala Luganda station. As has been alluded to in successive Sunday Monitor analysis of the face-off between Museveni and Mbabane, a foreign force in one or two Western countries might be at play here.
Might these two rivals know that the final decision over this will have to be settled by the Western countries, which is part of why the President still acts as if Mbabazi, whose only remaining public office is as Member of Parliament for Kinkiizi West, is a power to reckon with precisely because of support he may be getting from international players? On Friday morning, meanwhile, Gen David Sejusa was arrested. Since returning from exile in Britain last December, the mercurial general had largely had his way, defiant in his message for change in spite of suspicion that he was a secret Museveni decoy.
The police spokesman Fred Enanga said: “Sejusa mobilised boda boda people and other members of the public to join the illegal procession and head towards Jinja Road. The purpose of the procession was illegal.” The previous week, Sejusa had said force was still an option among many for removing Museveni from power, a reason some analysts gave for his arrest.
As has already been stated, Mbabazi’s official declaration of his presidential bid was the official political start of the 2016 campaign, even though it was not official in the legal and administrative Electoral Commission sense of the word.
Arrest of Gen Sejusa
Therefore any moves by the State will now also be viewed by the public and the international community as political. The arrest of Gen Sejusa is being interpreted that way, as will any future police efforts to prevent Mbabazi from holding consultation rallies. Each effort to arrest or block a challenger or perceived challenger to Museveni will only anger pro-Mbabazi supporters in the NRM and help increase the public awareness of the man and even grow him much-needed public sympathy.
Each such effort to quote the law and Electoral Commission timetable (a commission, in the first place many view as handpicked and biased in favour of Museveni) will be interpreted as a sign of panic or cowardice by the Museveni camp, even where the police might technically be acting within the law. This is what usually happens when an idea whose time has come, finally arrives.
The people to feel most sorry for from now until the 2016 are not Mbabazi or his immediate family but the magistrates, police commanders, intelligence officers, immigration officials, prisons officers, NRM officials, State House aides, Cabinet ministers, ambassadors and others who are going to be dragged into this bedlam, given verbal orders from above to “do something”, which something will not be spelt out.
THE BACKGROUND
This is a challenge from the innermost chambers of the NRM. As this writer stated in the Sunday Monitor of February 16, 2014, the day after the NRM retreat at the Kyankwanzi national leadership institute, Mbabazi was the operating system of the NRM dating back to the early 1980s and further back to Museveni’s anti-Amin guerrilla group FRONASA.
Mbabazi is to the NRM what Akena Adoko was to the UPC government in the 1960s or Paulo Muwanga to the UPC government in the 1980s, or what Nicholas Biwot was to the ruling KANU party in Kenya under president Daniel Arap Moi.
