A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba

Recent weeks have seen increased global media attention to Uganda following the incidents surrounding the arrest of popular musician and legislator, Bobi Wine; emblematic events that have marked the shrinking democratic space in Uganda and the growing popular struggles for political change in the country.

The spotlight is also informed by wider trends across the continent over the past few years—particularly the unanticipated fall of veteran autocrats Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Yaya Jammeh in Gambia, and most recently Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe—which led to speculation about whether Yoweri Museveni, in power in Uganda since 1986, might be the next to exit this shrinking club of Africa’s strongmen.

Yet the Museveni state, and the immense presidential power that is its defining characteristic, has received far less attention, thus obscuring some of the issues at hand. Comprehending its dynamics requires paying attention to at-least three turning points in the National Resistance Movement’s history, which resulted in a gradual weeding-out of Museveni’s contemporaries and potential opponents from the NRM, then the mobilisation of military conflict to shore up regime legitimacy, and the policing of urban spaces to contain the increasingly frequent signals of potential revolution. Together, these dynamics crystallised presidential power in Uganda, run down key state institutions, and set the stage for the recent tensions and likely many more to come.

The purge

From the late 1990s, there has been a gradual weeding out the old guard in the NRM, which through an informal “succession queue,” had posed an internal challenge to the continuity of Museveni’s rule. It all started amidst the heated debates in the late 1990s over the reform of the then decaying Movement system; debates that pitted a younger club of reformists against an older group. The resultant split led to the exit of many critical voices from the NRM’s ranks, and began to bolster Museveni’s grip on power in a manner that was unprecedented. It also opened the lid on official corruption and the abuse of public offices.

Over the years, the purge also got rid of many political and military elites—the so-called “historicals”—many of whom shared Museveni’s sense of entitlement to political office rooted in their contribution to the 1980-1985 liberation war, and some of whom probably had an eye on his seat.

By 2005 the purge was at its peak; that year the constitutional amendment that removed presidential term limits—passed after a bribe to every legislator—saw almost all insiders that were opposed to it, summarily dismissed. As many of them joined the ranks of the opposition, Museveni’s inner circle was left with mainly sycophants whose loyalty was more hinged on patronage than anything else. Questioning the president or harboring presidential ambitions within the NRM had become tantamount to a crime.

By 2011 the process was almost complete, with the dismissal of Vice President Gilbert Bukenya, whose growing popularity among rural farmers was interpreted as a nascent presidential bid, resulting in his firing.

One man remained standing, Museveni’s long-time friend Amama Mbabazi. His friendship with Museveni had long fueled rumors that he would succeed “the big man” at some point. In 2015, however, his attempt to run against Museveni in the ruling party primaries also earned him an expulsion from both the secretary general position of the ruling party as well as the prime ministerial office.

The departure of Mbabazi marked the end of any pretensions to a succession plan within the NRM. He was unpopular, with a record tainted by corruption scandals and complicity in Museveni’s authoritarianism, but his status as a “president-in-waiting” had given the NRM at least the semblance of an institution that could survive beyond Museveni’s tenure, which his firing effectively ended.

What is left now is perhaps only the “Muhoozi project,” a supposed plan by Museveni to have his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba succeed him. Lately it has been given credence by the son’s rapid rise to commanding positions in elite sections of the Ugandan military. But with an increasingly insecure Museveni heavily reliant on familial relationships and patronage networks, even the Muhoozi project appears very unlikely. What is clear, though, is that the over time, the presidency has essentially become Museveni’s property.

Exporting peace?

Fundamental to Museveni’s personalisation of power also has been the role of military conflict, both local and regional. First was the rebellion by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, which over its two-decade span enabled a continuation of the military ethos of the NRM. The war’s dynamics were indeed complex, and rooted in a longer history that predated even the NRM government, but undoubtedly it provided a ready excuse for the various shades of authoritarianism that came to define Museveni’s rule.

With war ongoing in the north, any challenge to Museveni’s rule was easily constructed as a threat to the peace already secured in the rest of the country, providing an absurd logic for clamping down on political opposition. More importantly, the emergency state born of it, frequently provided a justification for the president to side-step democratic institutions and processes, while at the same time rationalising the government’s disproportionate expenditure on the military. It also fed into Museveni’s self-perception as a “freedom fighter,” buttressed the personality cult around him, and empowered him to further undermine any checks on his power.

By the late 2000s the LRA war was coming to an end—but another war had taken over its function just in time. From the early 2000s, Uganda’s participation in a regional security project in the context of the War on Terror, particularly in the Somalian conflict, rehabilitated the regime’s international image and provided cover for the narrowing political space at home, as well as facilitating a further entrenchment of Museveni’s rule.

As post-9/11 Western foreign policy began to prioritise stability over political reform, Museveni increasingly postured as the regional peacemaker, endearing himself to donors while further sweeping the calls for democratic change at home under the carpet—and earning big from it.

It is easy to overlook the impact of these military engagements, but the point is that together they accentuated the role of the military in Ugandan politics and further entrenched Museveni’s power to degrees that perhaps even the NRM’s own roots in a guerrilla movement could never have reached.

Policing protest

The expulsion of powerful elites from the ruling circles and the politicisation of military conflict had just started to cement Musevenism, when a new threat emerged on the horizon. It involved not the usual antagonists—gun-toting rebels or ruling party elites—but ordinary protesters. And they were challenging the NRM on an unfamiliar battleground—not in the jungles, but on the streets: the 2011 “Walk-to-Work” protests, rejecting the rising fuel and food prices, were unprecedented.

But there is another reason the protests constituted a new threat. For long the NRM had mastered the art of winning elections. The majority constituencies were rural, and allegedly strongholds of the regime. The electoral commission itself was largely answerable to Museveni. With rural constituencies in one hand and the electoral body in the other, the NRM could safely ignore the minority opposition-dominated urban constituencies. Electoral defeat thus never constituted a threat to the NRM, at least at parliamentary and presidential levels.

But now the protesters had turned the tables, and were challenging the regime immediately after one of its landslide victories. The streets could not be rigged. In a moment, they had shifted the locus of Ugandan politics from the rural to the urban, and from institutional to informal spaces. And they were picking lessons from a strange source: North Africa. There, where Museveni’s old friend Gaddafi, among others, was facing a sudden exit under pressure from similar struggles. Things could quickly get out of hand. A strategic response was urgent.

The regime went into overdrive. The 2011 protests were snuffed out, and from then, the policing of urban spaces became central to the logic and working of the Museveni state. Draconian laws on public assembly and free speech came into effect, enacted by a rubber-stamp parliament that was already firmly in Museveni’s hands. Police partnered with criminal gangs, notably the Boda Boda 2010, to curb what was called “public disorder”—really the official name for peaceful protest. As police’s mandate expanded to include the pursuit of regime critics, its budget ballooned, and its chief, General Kale Kayihura, became the most powerful person after Museveni—before his recent dismissal.

For a while, the regime seemed triumphant. Organising and protest became virtually impossible, as urban areas came under 24/7 surveillance. Moreover, key state institutions—the parliament, electoral commission, judiciary, military and now the police—were all in the service of the NRM, and all voices of dissent had been effectively silenced. In time, the constitution would be amended again, by the NRM-dominated house, this time to remove the presidential age limit—the last obstacle to Museveni’s life presidency—followed by a new tax on social media, to curb “gossip.” Museveni was now truly invincible. Or so it seemed.

But the dreams of “walk-to-work”—the nightmare for the Museveni state—had never really disappeared, and behind the tightly-patrolled streets always lay the simmering quest for change. That is how we arrived at the present moment, with a popstar representing the widespread aspiration for better government, and a seemingly all-powerful president suddenly struggling for legitimacy. Whatever direction the current popular struggles ultimately take, what is certain is that they are learning well from history, and are a harbinger of many more to come.

–

This post is from a new partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

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A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda By Michael Mutyaba

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba

While Donald Trump’s administration completely neglected America-Africa relations, the blind spots bedeviling America’s Africa policy preceded his 2016 election. Correcting the systemic flaws of the past 30 years will require a complete rethink after the controversial President’s departure.

To remedy America’s Africa policy, President Joseph Biden’s administration should pivot away from counterterrorism to supporting democratic governance as a principal rather than as mere convenience, and cooperate with China on climate change, peace, and security on the continent.

America’s Africa policy

America’s post-Cold War Africa policy has had three distinct and discernible phases. The first phase was an expansionist outlook undergirded by humanitarian intervention. The second was nonintervention, a stance triggered by the experience of the first phase. The third is the use of “smart” military interventions using military allies.

The turning point for the first phase was in 1989 when a victorious America pursued an expansive foreign policy approach predicated on humanitarian intervention. Somalia became the first African test case of this policy when, in 1992, America sent almost 30,000 troops to support Operation Restore Hope’s humanitarian mission which took place against the background of the collapse of the Somalia government in 1991.

On 3-4 October 1993, during the Battle of Mogadishu, 18 US servicemen were killed in a fight with warlords who controlled Mogadishu then, and the bodies of the marines dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The media coverage increased pressure on the politicians and six months later America withdrew from Somalia — a case of the New World Order meeting the harsh reality of civil conflict.

The chastening experience resulted in America scaling back its involvement in internal conflicts in far-flung places. The result was the emergence of the second phase — non-engagement when Rwanda’s Genocide erupted in 1994 and almost a million people died in 100 days revealed the limitations of over-correcting the Somalia experience. This “non-interference” phase lasted until the twin Nairobi and Dar es Salaam US embassy bombings by Al Qaeda in 1998.

This gave way to the third phase with the realisation that the new threat to America was no longer primarily from state actors, but from transnational non-state actors using failing states as safe havens. The 2002 National Security Strategy states: “the events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states . . . can pose as a great danger to our national interests as strong states.”

Counterterrorism training and equipping of African militaries is the central plank of this new security policy. As a result, counterterrorism funding has skyrocketed as has America’s military footprint in Africa. As a result, Africa has become the theatre in which the Global forever War on Terror is fought.

The counterterrorism traps

The reflexive reaction to the events of September 11 2001 spawned an interlocking web of covert and overt military and non-military operations. These efforts, initially deemed necessary and temporary, have since morphed into a self-sustaining system complete with agencies, institutions and a specialised lingo that pervades every realm of America’s engagement with Africa.

The United States Africa Command (Africom) is the vehicle of America’s engagement with the continent. Counterterrorism blurred the line between security, development, and humanitarian assistance with a host of implications including unrelenting militarisation which America’s policy establishment embraced uncritically as the sine qua non of America’s diplomacy, their obvious flaws notwithstanding. The securitisation of problems became self-fulfilling and self-sustaining.

The embrace of counterterrorism could not have come at a worse time for Africa’s efforts at democratization. In many African countries, political and military elites have now developed a predictable rule-based compact governing accession to power via elections rather than the coups of the past.

“Smart” African leaders exploited the securitised approach in two main ways: closing the political space and criminalising dissent as “terrorism” and as a source of free money. In Ethiopia, Yonatan Tesfaye, a former spokesman of the Semayawi (Blue) Party, was detained in December 2015 on charges under Article 4 of Ethiopia’s Anti-Terrorism Proclamation ((EATP), arguably one of the the country’s most severe pieces of legislation. But Ethiopia has received millions of dollars from the United States.

The Department of Defense hardly says anything in public but gives out plenty of money without asking questions about human rights and good governance. Being a counterterrorism hub has become insurance policy against any form of criticism regardless of state malfeasance.

Egypt is one such hub. According to the Congressional Research Service, for the 2021 financial year, the Trump Administration has requested a total of US$1.4 billion in bilateral assistance for Egypt, which Congress approved in 2018 and 2019. Nearly all US funding for Egypt comes from the Foreign Military Finance (FMF) account and is in turn used to purchase military equipment of US origin, spare parts, training, and maintenance from US firms.

Another country that is a counterterrorism hub in the Horn of Africa is Ethiopia. For the few months they were in charge, the Union of Islamic Courts (ICU) brought order and stability to the country. Although they were linked to only a few of Mogadishu’s local courts, on 24 December 2006, Ethiopia’s military intervened in Somalia to contain the rise of Al Shabaab’s political and military influence.

The ouster of the ICU by Ethiopia aggravated the deep historical enmity between Somalia and Ethiopia, something Al Shabaab — initially the youth wing of the ICU — subsequently exploited through a mix of Somali nationalism, Islamist ideology, and Western anti-imperialism. Al Shabaab presented themselves as the vanguard against Ethiopia and other external aggressors, providing the group with an opportunity to translate their rhetoric into action.

Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia could not have taken place without America’s blessing. The intervention took place three weeks after General John Abizaid, the commander of US forces from the Middle East to Afghanistan, met with the then Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The intervention generated a vicious self-sustaining loop. Ethiopians are in Somalia because of Al Shabaab, and Al Shabaab says they will continue fighting as long as foreign troops are inside Somalia.

America has rewarded Ethiopia handsomely for its role as the Horn of Africa’s policeman. In both Ethiopia’s and Egypt’s case, on the score of human rights and good governance, the net losers are the citizens.

Drone attacks

In keeping with the War on Terror being for forever, and despite departing Somalia in 1993, America outsourced a massive chunk of the fight against Al Shabaab to Ethiopia primarily, and later, to AMISOM. America is still engaged in Somalia where it has approximately 800 troops, including special forces that help train Somalia’s army to fight against Al Shabaab.

America carried out its first drone strike in Somalia in 2011 during President Barack Obama’s tenure. Under the Trump administration, however, the US has dramatically increased the frequency of drone attacks and loosened the oversight required to approve strike targets in Somalia. In March 2017, President Trump secretly designated parts of Somalia “areas of active hostilities”, meaning that the high-level inter-agency vetting of proposed strikes and the need to demonstrate with near certainty that civilians would not be injured or killed no longer applied. Last year, the US acknowledged conducting 63 airstrikes in the country, and in late August last year, the US admitted that it had carried out 46 strikes in 2020.

A lack of transparency regarding civilian casualties and the absence of empirical evidence that the strikes lead to a reduction in terrorism in Somalia suggest that expanding to Kenya would be ill- advised. The US has only acknowledged having caused civilian casualties in Somalia three times. Between 2016 and 2019, AFRICOM failed to conduct a single interview with civilian witnesses of its airstrikes in Somalia.

Despite this level of engagement, defeating Al Shabaab remains a remote possibility.

Containing the Chinese takeover

The Trump Administration did not have an Africa policy. The closest approximation of a policy during Trump’s tenure was stated in a speech delivered by John Bolton at a Conservative think tank decrying China’s nefarious activities in Africa. Even with a policy, where the counterterrorism framework views Africa as a problem to be solved by military means, the containing China policy views African countries as lacking the agency to act in their own interests. The problem with this argument is that it is patronising; Africans cannot decide what is right for them.

Over the last decades, while America was busy creating the interlocking counterterrorism infrastructure in Africa, China was building large-scale infrastructure across the continent. Where America sees Africa as a problem to be solved, China sees Africa as an opportunity to be seized.

Almost two years into the Trump administration, there were no US ambassadors deployed in 20 of Africa’s 54 countries even while America was maintaining a network of 29 military bases. By comparison China, has 50 embassies spread across Africa.

For three consecutive years America’s administration has proposed deep and disproportionate cuts to diplomacy and development while China has doubled its foreign affairs budget since 2011. In 2018, China increased its funding for diplomacy by nearly 16 per cent and its funding for foreign aid by almost 7 per cent.

As a show of how engagement with Africa is low on the list of US priorities, Trump appointed a luxury handbag designer as America’s ambassador to South Africa on 14 November 2018. Kenya’s ambassador is a political appointee who, when he is not sparring with Kenyans on Twitter, is supporting a discredited coal mining project.

The US anti-China arguments emphasize that China does not believe in human rights and good governance, and that China’s funding of large infrastructure projects is essentially debt-trap diplomacy. The anti-China rhetoric coming from American officials is not driven by altruism but by the realisation that they have fallen behind China in Africa.

By the middle of this century Africa’s population is expected to double to roughly two billion. Nigeria will become the second most populous country globally by 2100, behind only India. The 24-country African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) entered into force on 30 May 2019. AfCFTA will ultimately bring together all 55 member states of the African Union covering a market of more than 1.2 billion people — including a growing middle class — and a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of more than US$3.4 trillion.

While Chinese infrastructure projects grab the headlines, China has moved into diversifying its engagement with Africa. The country has increased its investments in Africa by more than 520 per cent over the last 15 years, surpassing the US as the largest trading partner for Africa in 2009 and becoming the top exporter to 19 out of 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Some of the legacy Chinese investments have come at a steep environmental price and with an unsustainable debt. Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway is bleeding money and is economically unviable. A fresh start

Supporting democratic governance and learning to cooperate with China are two areas that will make America part of Africa’s future rather than its past.

America should pivot way from making the military the most visible face of its engagement with Africa and instead invest in deepening democracy as a principled approach rather than a convenient choice.

Despite the elegy about its retreat in Africa, democracy enjoys tremendous support. According to an Afro barometer poll, almost 70 per cent of Africans say democracy is their preferred form of government. Large majorities also reject alternative authoritarian regimes such as presidential dictatorships, military rule, and one-party governments. Democracy, while still fledgling, remains a positive trend; since 2015, there have been 34 peaceful transfers of power.

However, such positive metrics go hand in hand with a worrying inclination by presidents to change constitutions to extend their terms in office. Since 2015, leaders of 13 countries have evaded or overseen the weakening of term limit restrictions that had been in place. Democracy might be less sexy, but ignoring it is perilous. There are no apps or switches to flip to arrest this slide. It requires hard work that America is well equipped to support but has chosen not to in a range of countries in recent years There is a difference between interfering in the internal affairs of a country and complete abdication or (in some cases) supporting leaders who engage in activities that are inimical to deepening democracy.

The damage wrought by the Trump presidency and neo-liberal counterterrorism policies will take time to undo, but symbolic efforts can go a long way to bridging the gap.

America must also contend with China being an indispensable player in Africa and learn to cooperate rather than compete in order to achieve optimal outcomes.

China has 2,458 military and police personnel serving in eight missions around the globe, far more than the combined contribution of personnel by the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council, Russia, the US, France and Britain. China had more than 2,400 Chinese troops take part in seven UN peacekeeping missions across the continent — most notably in Mali and South Sudan. Of the 14 current UN peacekeeping missions, seven are in Africa, consuming two-thirds of the budget.

Climate change and conflict resolution provide opportunities for cooperation. Disproportionate reliance on rain-fed agriculture and low adaptation to the adverse impact of climate change make Africa vulnerable to the damaging effects of climate change, the consequences of which will transcend Africa. Through a combination of research, development, technological transfer and multilateral investment, America and China could stave off the impact of climate change in Africa.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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Follow us on Twitter. A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba

Western powers slowly tied a noose round their own necks by first installing Uganda’s National Resistance Movement regime, and then supporting it uncritically as it embarked on its adventures in militarism, plunder and human rights violations inside and outside Uganda’s borders.

They are now faced with a common boss problem: what to do with an employee of very long standing (possibly even inherited from a predecessor) who may now know more about his department than the new bosses, and who now carries so many of the company’s secrets that summary dismissal would be a risky undertaking?

The elections taking place in Uganda this week have brought that dilemma into sharp relief.

An initial response would be to simply allow this sometimes rude employee to carry on. The problem is time. In both directions. The employee is very old, and those he seeks to manage are very young, and also very poor and very aspirational because of being very young. And also therefore very angry.

Having a president who looks and speaks like them, and whose own personal life journey symbolises their own ambitions, would go a very long way to placating them. This, if for no other reason, is why the West must seriously consider finding a way to induce the good and faithful servant to give way. Nobody lives forever. And so replacement is inevitable one way or another.

But this is clearly not a unified position. The United Kingdom, whose intelligence services were at the forefront of installing the National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A) in power nearly forty years ago, remains quietly determined to stand by President Yoweri Museveni’s side.

On the other hand, opinion in America’s corridors of power seems divided. With standing operations in Somalia, and a history of western-friendly interventions in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and even Kenya, the Ugandan military is perceived as a huge (and cut-price) asset to the West’s regional security concerns.

The DRC, in particular, with its increasing significance as the source of much of the raw materials that will form the basis of the coming electric engine revolution, has been held firmly in the orbit of Western corporations through the exertions of the regime oligarchs controlling Uganda’s security establishment. To this, one may add the growing global agribusiness revolution in which the fertile lands of the Great Lakes Region are targeted for clearing and exploitation, and for which the regime offers facilitation.

Such human resource is hard to replace and therefore not casually disposed of.

These critical resource questions are backstopped by unjust politics themselves held in place by military means. The entire project therefore hinges ultimately on who has the means to physically enforce their exploitation. In our case, those military means have been personalised to one individual and a small circle of co-conspirators, often related by blood and ethnicity.

However, time presses. Apart from the ageing autocrat at the centre, there is also a time bomb in the form of an impoverished and anxious population of unskilled, under-employed (if at all) and propertyless young people. Change beckons for all sides, whether planned for or not.

This is why this coming election is significant. If there is to be managed change, it will never find a more opportune moment. Even if President Museveni is once again declared winner, there will still remain enough political momentum and pressure that could be harnessed by his one-time Western friends to cause him to look for the exit. It boils down to whether the American security establishment could be made to believe that the things that made President Museveni valuable to them, are transferable elsewhere into the Uganda security establishment. In short, that his sub- imperial footprint can be divorced from his person and entrusted, if not to someone like candidate Robert Kyagulanyi, then at least to security types already embedded within the state structure working under a new, youthful president.

Three possible outcomes then: Kyagulanyi carrying the vote and being declared the winner; Kyagulanyi carrying the vote but President Museveni being declared the winner; or failure to have a winner declared. In all cases, there will be trouble. In the first, a Trump-like resistance from the incumbent. In the second and the third, the usual mass disturbances that have followed each announcement of the winner of the presidential election since the 1990s.

Once the Ugandan political crisis — a story going back to the 1960s — is reduced to a security or “law and order” problem, the West usually sides with whichever force can quickest restore the order they (not we) need.

And this is how the NRM tail seeks to still wag the Western dog: the run-up to voting day has been characterised by heavy emphasis on the risk of alleged “hooligans” out to cause mayhem (“burning down the city” being a popular bogeyman). The NRM’s post-election challenge will be to quickly strip the crisis of all political considerations and make it a discussion about security.

But it would be strategically very risky to try to get Uganda’s current young electorate — and the even younger citizens in general — to accept that whatever social and economic conditions they have lived through in the last few decades (which for most means all of their lives given how young they are) are going to remain in place for even just the next five years. They will not buy into the promises they have seen broken in the past. Their numbers, their living conditions, their economic prospects and their very youth would then point to a situation of permanent unrest.

However, it can be safely assumed that the NRM regime will, to paraphrase US President Donald Trump, not accept any election result that does not declare it the winner.

Leave things as they are and deal with the inevitable degeneration of politics beyond its current state, or enforce a switch now under the cover of an election, or attempt to enforce a switch in the aftermath of the election by harnessing the inevitable discontent.

Those are the boss’ options.

In the meantime, there is food to be grown and work to be done.

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A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba Dear Readers/Viewers,

For four years now, The Elephant has been one of the premier online sources of news analysis in the East African region with a fast-growing readership across the African continent and beyond.

For about a month now, some of our readers within Uganda have been reporting problems accessing the website. Following receipt of these reports, we launched investigations which have established that The Elephant has been blocked by some, though not all, internet service providers in the country.

We have further ascertained that the directive to do so came from the Uganda Communication Commission (UCC) and was implemented beginning 12 December 2020, when we noticed a sudden traffic drop coming from several providers in Uganda, including Africell and Airtel. A forensics report, which provides technical details on the blocking, is available here.

We have written to the UCC requesting a reason for the blocking but are yet to receive a response.

The Elephant wholeheartedly condemns this assault on free speech and on freedom of the press and calls on the Ugandan government to respect the rights of Ugandans to access information.

We would like to assure all our readers that we are doing everything in our power to get the restrictions removed and hope normal access can be restored expeditiously.

As we do this, to circumvent the block, a Bifrost mirror has been deployed. Readers in Uganda can once again access The Elephant on this link.

Thank you.

Best Regards

John Githongo Publisher Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba

In the campaign for Uganda’s presidential election, 2021 has started where it left of in 2020. The 38- year-old musician-turned-politician, His Excellence Ghetto President Bobi Wine aka Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, as well as his team and supporters, are being harassed, arrested, violently deterred and blocked from campaigning by Ugandan authorities bent on ensuring that President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, stays there. Bobi Wine and his People Power Movement are not unlike other youth-driven protest movements across Africa that are making their voices heard by organizing through digital media. But while the international community celebrates the emancipatory potential of these new young voices, the complexities of their political engagements as well as the consequences of the abuses that participants face seem to fade from view. In Uganda, specifically, the emergence of cultural figures in politics is rooted in how the role of popular musicians changed in the elections of 2011, which coincided with the height of Bobi Wine’s musical career.

Bobi Wine rose to fame in the mid-2000’s Kampala, as an Afro-pop star inspired by global icons like Michael Jackson and Bob Marley. Bobi took on the title Ghetto President and his Firebase crew jokingly became the “ghetto government” of Kamwokya, the neighborhood was where he was from. Though Bobi released socially conscious songs advocating for “the ghetto people,” the crew considered formal politics in Uganda as dangerous and would warn ignorant friends, like me, not to “get mixed up in politics.”

The more than 100 artists and music industry professionals that I interviewed throughout the 2000s were, with a few exceptions, not into politics. They had grown up in the 1980s war-time Uganda, and saw the emerging, largely informal, music industry as a chance to cast off the burdensome ties of kin and ethnicity that seemed to rule politics. They rather saw themselves as entrepreneurs and brand names in a global market for music; as individual stars lighting up the skies above Kampala. Wine and his fellow superstars like Chameleone and Bebe Cool instead politicked in diss- songs and beefs about being the biggest name, the most famous artist, in the country. Not many would have imagined that beef would one day challenge President Museveni. But as anthropologist Kelly Askew duly warned, in Eastern Africa “economic and political practice need not be conceptualized as distinct from aesthetic principles.” New forms of “bigness” and power emerged around the young musicians with digital means of production and the aesthetics of entrepreneurship.

On July 7, 2010, the extremist group Al Shabab, which had been operating in East Africa, attacked several night-time venues in Kampala. Insecurity and cumbersome new security measures meant empty concert halls and night clubs, and this was bad business for artists. Around the same time the election campaigns for the 2011 elections were taking off, and musicians now found work performing at rallies and allowing politicians to use their hits as campaign songs. “After all, I am a business man, and there’s too much money in politics,” said one of my friends who was on the campaign trail for the ruling NRM of Museveni. But this did not mean that singers were now the clients of the “big” men and women of politics. Rather, they framed their relationship with politicians as a market transaction, as just another sponsored show. The Firebase Crew too performed at rallies for candidates of opposed parties in 2010, and one crew member commented: “If I go for his [the politician’s] show, then he has to pay me. Then voting is something else.” In this way, they enforced their status as street-wise, self-made men and women, hustling the old, political elite without being caught in their patrimonial networks of political allegiance.

While career politicians in Uganda usually emphasise belonging and legitimacy with voters in election campaigns through direct exchange and by engineering relations of mutual dependence to gain influence, pop artists make their livelihoods and fame through mediated connections to fans and consumers. The relational form of their “bigness” can neither be characterised as relations of political activism, nor as patronage, nor as pure market relations. Rather, young musicians here operate as kind of cultural brokers within the tensions of all three forces at once.

A second way that artists brokered between music, market, and politics in the 2011 elections was as candidates for political office. As the industry grew, artists and celebrities in Uganda were beginning to show the same material properties as the more traditional elites. They built mansions and drove cars more extravagant than any politician; they owned businesses, as well as the means for the production of their “bigness”—studios, night clubs, and concert grounds. One of these candidates was Eddy Yawe, musician, producer, studio owner—and Bobi Wine’s older brother. As a candidate for Member of Parliament, he remarked that musicians had so far been considered as bayaye (hoodlums, hustlers) only to be used by the elite as entertainers in formal politics, but this was about to change:

In the eloquent imagery of what the political scientist Jean-Francois Bayart referred to as the “the politics of the belly,” Eddy explained how artists could broker their fame beyond the kitchen, where power is cooked, for a seat the dining table and a bite of the national cake. He was neither singing praises, nor protesting an increasingly authoritarian regime, but rather sought to extend his sphere of influence as an artist by entering into politics. Though Eddy Yawe had a big turnout at rallies, he did not win the election, according to some, because of electoral fraud.

While musicians brokered their fame in the field of politics, some politicians also sought to extend their power through the field of music. If there had been any doubt about the political elite taking the music of the new generation seriously as an effective means to mobilise voters, it was put to rest when President Museveni launched his own campaign rap song, “Do You Want Another Rap?”

In early 2017, a parliamentary seat opened up in Kyadonddo East. Wine shaved off his dreadlocks and ran as an independent candidate, with a campaign based largely on music and social media. His stance was clear: he was not a politician, but had come to politics as a musician to represent the young generation, the Ugandans whose interests were being ignored by the government. He won. When the political platform, People Power – Our Power, formed by Bobi in the struggle against the removal of the presidential age-limit which allowed Museveni to rule for life, it was not a political party but a movement. He released the People Power anthem “Freedom” and continued to host shows at his concert grounds One Love Beach. When his driver was shot and Wine himself arrested and tortured in August 2018, protests broke out across Uganda and fellow artists came out to support People Power in songs and social media. In the following months the Ghetto President started hinting at a run towards presidency in both interviews and quite direct diss-songs against Museveni.

People Power launched the party the National Unity Platform as their political wing in July 2020 and Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu as their leader and presidential candidate. Using social media and beef tactics from the music industry to gain traction in politics, Bobi Wine successfully insisted on his integrity as an artist. But this also drew the music industry into politics in ways that made music the battleground for the future of the country.

As the 2021 elections approach, the Ugandan government has used a progressively more violent repertoire of strategies to repress Wine’s run for president and stifle the music industry. On one hand they confirm Wine as a legitimate candidate and the political power of music, but they also point to the limits of the cultural brokerage and “bigness” of artists in the face of state repression and violence.

One strategy is the use of legislative power to block political opponents. Since 2018 the police have systematically denied security clearances to venues and shows that include Bobi Wine, the Firebase Crew as well as other singers associated with People Power. While Bobi Wine flew abroad to perform, less known singers now effectively became clients of People Power as their livelihoods as artist-entrepreneurs had been undermined.

In early 2019 the parliament sought to update the “Stage Plays and Public Entertainment Act Cap 49”—hitherto a legislative, colonial leftover from 1943. The act requires all music, stage and film producers to be licensed by Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), limits touring and number of performances by singers, and requires them to submit their lyrics, music, and visual material for approval at a government censorship board. The enforcement of such a law would, naturally, devastate the cultural industries in Uganda. Further, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world in 2020, the authorities have weaponized the emergency for repressing political opposition and militarizing public space.

A second strategy was co-optation. In the second half of 2019, music stars and celebrities who had been People Power supporters and critical of NRMs politics were invited to visit personally with Museveni and were gifted large sums of money to change sides. For some, the switch seemed voluntary, while the musicians I interviewed in December 2019 described being both cajoled, intimidated, and threatened into publicly accepting money “gifts” and entering into a patron-client relationship with the president. At the same time Museveni attempted to appropriate the imagery of the Ghetto Government, when he hired former Firebase Crew member Buchaman as his special “ghetto” advisor, launched new initiatives in Kampala’s slums as well as a paramilitary group of crime-fighters, the “ghetto army.”

Thirdly, the violence that the Ghetto President’s campaign has been subjected to demonstrates that beefing with the president of Uganda is no joke. Bobi Wine was arrested minutes after submitting his presidential nomination forms, and this led to riots across the country, with more than 50 civilians losing their lives, and many more injured, in November 2020. Members of Bobi Wine’s campaign team have been shot with rubber and live bullets, knocked by cars, killed, ambushed, and arrested. On December 30, 2020, the entire campaign team of more than 90 people were arrested and their cars impounded. Firebase Prime Minister and signer Nubian Li, Producer Dan Magic and bodyguard Eddy Mutwe and 46 other civilians were court marshaled on January 8th based on dubious evidence collected four days after their arrest.

These violations have been documented by Facebook Live and YouTube channels run by young men with cameras, at times just mobile phones. The daily streams allow both Ugandan and international audiences to participate in the campaigns, but is also a strategy to Bobi Wine and his team safe from harm.

The NRM government has a history of controlling Ugandan media and shutting down the internet during elections and protests. But in December, the Uganda Communication Commission reached all the way to Silicon Valley and requested Google and Facebook to shut down eight of the social media channels for inciting violence. Meanwhile, both Ugandan and foreign journalists have been injured and their credentials revoked. “We don’t have guns to fight, but use the camera as our weapon,” Bobi Wine said as a reaction to this in a press conference on December 15, 2020.

While his entire campaign and security teams are incarcerated and his campaign suspended by the country’s Electoral Commission, Bobi Wine has filed a complaint with the International Criminal Courts against Museveni and Minister of Security Elly Tumwiine (also an artist), among other officials, for crimes against humanity. During a video call with international press about the ICC case, he was assaulted by police officers. After returning to the video call a visibly affected Bobi Wine, with running eyes from the tear gas, commented: “I am a presidential candidate. But as you can see, if I can be harassed like this, you can imagine what is happing to Ugandans who don’t have a voice.”

–

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A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba

Since taking power in 1986, President Yoweri Museveni has enjoyed total bipartisan support from six American administrations. Along with America’s help, Museveni’s domestic repression has grown steadily, stymying Uganda’s fledgling democracy. Uganda’s next general election will take place on 14 January 2021, a week before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The Biden administration must not give Museveni carte blanche but should instead make America’s continued support contingent on good governance and accountability. When he first became president five years after launching a rebellion against President Milton Obote over the disputed December 1980 election, Museveni portrayed himself and his movement, the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) as the antithesis of all previous groups. After 33 years at the helm, Museveni and the National Resistance Movement are indistinguishable from the people he launched a rebellion to dislodge from power.

The speech and the memo

A speech given and a memo written 13 years apart, laid out the vision and the contradictions within the NRM, and more broadly within Uganda, and cast the authors as protagonists in the struggle for democracy in Uganda. The speech was given by Yoweri Museveni in 1986, shortly after he seized power. Kizza Besigye issued the memo on 7 November 1999.

The speech, often referred to as the “fundamental change” speech, laid out the future of Uganda under the NRM, while the memo, “An insider’s view on how NRM lost the broad base”, was the most realistic appraisal of the NRA/M 13 years after it took power.

When he delivered his speech on 29 January 1986, Museveni said, “No one should think that what is happening today is a mere change of guard: it is a fundamental change in the politics of our country.” Museveni added,

“The people of Africa—the people of Uganda—are entitled to democratic government. It is not a favour from any government: it is the right of the people of Africa to have a democratic government. The sovereign power in the land must the population, not the government. The government should not be the master, but the servant of the people.”

Regarding democracy, Museveni said, “It is a birthright to which all the people of Uganda are entitled.”

In November 1999, while still a serving army officer, Col. Kizza Besigye offered an opposing view of the NRA/M when he said, “All in all, when I reflect on the Movement philosophy and governance, I can conclude that the Movement has been manipulated by those seeking to gain or retain political power in the same way that political parties in Uganda were manipulated.” Besigye went further to say that, “[W]hether it’s political parties or Movement, the real problem is dishonest, opportunistic and undemocratic leadership operating in a weak institutional framework and a weak civil society which cannot control them.”

Museveni’s vision of “fundamental change” has produced “no change” and the servant leadership and democracy espoused in his speech are illusory. Besigye’s assessment of the selfish, opportunistic and undemocratic leadership within the NRA/M and in Uganda is all too familiar and the competing realities embodied by Museveni and Besigye have dominated Ugandan politics for over a decade.

A central plank of the NRM was the establishment of a broad-based government and the elimination of all forms of sectarianism. To make good on its promise, the NRM introduced an anti-sectarian law in 1988. The NRM also instituted a no-party system where elections were contested on personal merit rather than party affiliation. For Museveni and the NRM, political parties were the root cause of Uganda’s crises since independence—as they inherently promote “sectarianism”, unlike the Movement, which “fosters consensus”.

Three elements have sustained Museveni’s vice-like grip on power in Uganda: the use of the security apparatus to suppress the opposition, the passing and selective application of laws—even when the courts strike them down—and America’s generosity despite Uganda’s dubious human rights and governance record.

Electoral violence

Three years after publishing the memo, Besigye ran against Museveni in the 2001 general election. The electoral commission declared Museveni the winner. The run-up to the election saw the arrest and assault of Besigye’s supporters. A Select Parliamentary Committee established to examine electoral violence stated that, “violence experienced in elections includes physical assault and shooting, intimidation, abduction and detention of voters”. In all, according to the commission, 17 people were killed and 408 arrests were made.

A few months after the election, Besigye was detained and questioned by the Criminal Investigations Division (CID), allegedly in connection with the offence of treason. Besigye left the country In September 2001, citing persecution by the state. He returned on 26 October 2005.

Unlike in the 2001 elections, in 2006 the state was keen to derail Besigye’s candidacy through legal manoeuvres from the outset to prevent his name from appearing on the ballot. The police filed a case in court accusing him of rape and treason, and arrested him on 12 November, barely a fortnight after he returned to Uganda from exile, and a few months before the election scheduled for March.

When the military realised that the civilian court would grant bail to Besigye and his co-accused, the military prosecutor brought terrorism and weapons offences charges. The court eventually acquitted him of the rape charge. In dismissing the case, high court Judge John Bosco Katutsi said, “The evidence is inadequate, impotent, scandalous, monstrous against a man who brought himself up to compete for the highest position in this country.”

Despite already competing in an election with the odds stacked against him, Besigye lost six weeks to legal fights in the courts where he spent as many days as he did on the campaign trail.

The defiance campaign

After losing two elections, Besigye realised it was almost impossible to beat Museveni at polls which were neither free, nor fair, nor peaceful, or by having the courts overturn the election results and sought to employ other means.

In 2011, Besigye joined other activists in a Walk to Work campaign, a simple yet profound form of protest that highlighted the stark economic realities in Uganda. Even as many Ugandans were struggling to meet their daily needs, the country bought at least eight fighter jets and other military hardware worth US$744 million. Museveni’s inauguration ceremony cost US$1.3 million. That the protest came a few weeks after the electoral commission declared Museveni the winner of the election with over 60 per cent of the vote illustrated the hollowness of Museveni’s victory.

The election took place against the background of the Arab Spring and its potential for contagion, with Museveni viewing the remarkably benign act of people walking to work instead of driving an existential threat. Museveni and the security agencies could not countenance the Walk to Work or other similar activities turning into a popular movement. The 2013 Public Order Management Act and its convenient interpretation came in handy.

Museveni fell back on the template set during the 2001 election. Security agencies visited unspeakable violence on Besigye and his supporters during the election campaign and Museveni was declared the winner by the electoral commission. Besigye contested the validity of the election in court but, while it recognised that there were irregularities, the court ruled that they were not sufficient to modify the outcome of the election. Enter Bobi Wine

State violence against Besigye and his supporters has been a constant in the Besigye-Museveni contest but for the first time, Museveni‘s opponent is not Besigye. He will be competing against the Kyaddondo East Member of Parliament, Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known by his stage name Bobi Wine. Kyagulanyi was four years old when the NRM came to power in 1986.

And just like with Besigye, Bobi Wine has been at the receiving end of the violence of the state agencies ahead of 2021 election. The police have disrupted his campaign and detained him several times and he has on occasion suspended his campaign in protest at the violence meted out against him and his supporters. He was recently arrested for defying the COVID protocol while campaigning. Predictably, the protocol does not seem to apply to President Museveni, who has been campaigning unimpeded.

America’s support

Museveni’s ascension to power also coincided with the deterioration of the security situation in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with Muammar Gaddafi’s actions to prop up various African regimes. An astute political entrepreneur, Museveni put Uganda at the service of America and in return, successive American administration gave him political support and financial backing.

When President Ronald Reagan warned him to be wary of Gaddafi’s activities during their first ever meeting, Museveni told Reagan that he had fought Gaddafi before the Americans started fighting him, to which Reagan replied, “I am preaching to a choir.”

Since then, Museveni has made himself indispensable to America’s security calculus in the region. During her visit to Kampala in 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright called Uganda a “beacon in the central African region.”

Uganda is among the largest beneficiaries of the Department of Defense “Train and Equip” programme. The Department of Defense has notified Congress of over US$280 million in equipment and training for Uganda since the 2011 financial year, over US$60 million in joint support to Uganda and Burundi for AMISOM and significant funding for the 2011-2017 counter-LRA effort (Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency). Additionally, Uganda also receives counterterrorism aid through State Department funds. It received over US$30 million in support via the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership (APRRP).

The state is coming down hard on Bobi Wine because he is tapping into and articulating the latent discontent among the vast majority of Ugandans, those under 30 who make up over 70 per cent of the country’s population and who cannot relate to Museveni’s self-aggrandising rendering of the Bush Wars or the Idi Amin scarecrow. America has a choice: to side with most Ugandans who would like to see democracy take root in Uganda or with Museveni under the pretext of maintaining stability.

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Follow us on Twitter. A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba 1500 – 1852 – Bunyoro Kitara Kingdom: Bito dynasties of Buganda, Bunyoro and Ankole founded by Nilotic-speaking immigrants from the current southeastern Sudan. Expansion of Buganda at the expense of Bunyoro and take control of the territory bordering Lake Victoria from the Victoria Nile to the Kagera river.

1862 – The first European, British explorer John Hanning Speke visits Buganda.

1875 – Christian missionaries are allowed to enter the realm of Buganda King Mutesa 1.

1890 – A treaty signed between Britain and Germany gives Britain rights to what was to become Uganda.

1894 – Uganda becomes a British protectorate.

1900 – Britain signs an agreement with Buganda giving it autonomy and turning it into a constitutional monarchy controlled mainly by Protestant chiefs.

1958 – Uganda granted internal self-government.

1962 – Uganda becomes independent with Milton Obote as prime minister and with Buganda enjoying considerable autonomy.

1963 – Uganda becomes a republic with Buganda’s King Mutesa – Edward Luwangula Walugembe Muteesa II – as president.

1966 – Milton Obote ends Buganda’s autonomy and promotes himself to the presidency.

1967 – New constitution vests considerable power in the president.

1971 – Milton Obote toppled in coup led by Army chief Idi Amin.

1972 – Around 60,000 Asians Ugandan citizens expelled by Amin from Uganda. 1976 – Idi Amin declares himself president for life and lays claims to parts of Kenyan territory.

1978 – 1979 – The Uganda – Tanzania war known as the Kagera War in Tanzania and The 1979 Liberation War oust president Idi Amin from power.

1979 – Tanzanian forces invade Uganda, unifying the various anti-Amin forces under the Uganda National Liberation Front. Amin flees out of the country; Yusuf Lule installed as president, but quickly replaced by Godfrey Binaisa.

1980 – After elections Milton Obote returns as the president of Uganda.

1985 – Milton Obote is deposed in a military coup and replaced by Tito Okello. The new military leaders Tito Okello, Bazilio Olara Okello and Gad Wilson Toko hold onto the presidency for under a year before they are also ousted from power by the National Resistance Army (NRA) on January 26, 1986.

1986 – Yoweri Museveni becomes president after National Resistance Army rebels gain control of Kampala.

1993 – Yoweri Museveni restores the traditional kings, including the king of Buganda, but stripped of their political power.

1995 – The new constitution legalises political parties but maintains the ban on political activity.

1996 – Museveni returned to office in Uganda’s first direct presidential election.

1998 – Ugandan troops intervene in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of rebels seeking to overthrow Kabila.

2000 – Ugandans vote in favour of continuing Museveni’s “no-party” system rejecting multi-party politics.

2001 – Museveni wins a new term in office, beating his rival Kizza Besigye by 69% to 28%.

2005 July – Parliament approves a constitutional amendment which scraps presidential term limits. Voters in a referendum overwhelmingly back a return to multi-party politics.

2005 November – Kizza Besigye, opposition leader is imprisoned shortly after returning from exile having undergone a trial in a military court on various charges including treason and illegal possession of firearms. Supporters claim the trial is politically motivated, and take to the streets. Besigye is released on bail in January 2006, ahead of presidential elections.

2006 February – President Museveni wins multi-party elections, taking 59% of the vote against the 37% of his rival, Kizza Besigye. EU observers highlight intimidation of Mr Besigye and official media bias.

2010 October – Constitutional Court quashes treason charges against opposition leader Kizza Besigye.

2011 February – Museveni wins his fourth presidential election. Challenger Kizza Besigye alleges vote-rigging and dismisses the election result as a sham.

2011 April – Kizza Besigye arrested several times over ”walk-to-work” protests against rising fuel prices.

2016 February – President Museveni wins re-election against veteran candidate Kizza Besigye, amid opposition, Commonwealth, US and European Union concern about fairness and transparency of the electoral process.

2017 January – President Museveni appoints his son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, as a presidential advisor

2017 April – Former musical artist Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu popularly known by stage name Bobi Wine wins a by-election to become the legislator for Kyadondo County East against formidable opposition and draws attention in Uganda and abroad.

2017 December – Parliament votes to remove the age-limit for presidential candidates, clearing the way for President Museveni to run for another term.

2018 – The arrest and torture of Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu known as “Ghetto president” ignites popular protests with demands for his release.

2019 – Ugandan Musician and opposition leader Bobi Wine announced he’ll run for president in 2021, in an effort to thwart President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power in Uganda since 1986

2020 – Political fever spikes as Uganda elections near with Bobi Wine running in 2021. Kizza Besigye challenged Museveni four times since 2001 and is no longer going to contest any election organized under the ruling NRM. Gregory Mugisha Muntuyera, the former Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) president, and Bobi Wine have joined forces in a new alliance called the United Forces of Change.

Source: News Articles, BBC News , World History Archive

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Follow us on Twitter. A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba

In all too familiar scene, a number of Ugandan civilians were shot dead by men with guns (some in uniform) in the process of the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) government quelling public unrest in various locations around the country in mid-November. The disturbances, which mainly took the form of wananchi blocking highways with burning barricades, some stone-throwing, and also the emergence into broad daylight of muggers and highway robbers, had erupted because of the arrest and detention of the popular opposition presidential candidate Robert Kyagulanyi (aka Bobi Wine) and continued after a fashion until he was produced in court some six days later.

This is not to say that the reported sixty or so fatalities (and many more injured), largely from gunshots, were actively involved in the rioting. Neither is it to say it should be an acceptable method of stopping mass disturbances.

The best indications of how wilfully random these shootings were are the oldest and the youngest shooting victims, both in Kampala city: Amos Segawa was a 15-year-old schoolboy who was killed while standing next to his mother while she locked up her shop as they prepared to leave town; John Kitobe, a 72-year-old retired former accountant and academic, who happened to be in town on personal business, was shot as he made his way out of an office building towards his car.

The intention was clear: deadly collective punishment in a deliberate act of mass intimidation in the name of “security”. This was a continuing fulfilment of a 2016 promise made by the Secretary General of the NRM party, one Justine Kasule Lumumba, to a restive population back then: “The state will kill your children,” she stated in a public speech to parents about the then post-election demonstrations. We now know that she meant their grandparents as well.

But this is completely normal. And that is the tragedy of Uganda’s politics. It is also the ultimate triumph of the NRA/M as an organisation: to have seduced the country into mistaking the political value of security for valuable politics itself.

Without being forensic, one can trace a direct line from these latest killings back to the 1990 shooting dead of two Makerere University students at a sit-down strike protesting the abolition of student allowances; the military deployments against the repeated 1990s attempts by now-forgotten opposition activist Michael Kagwa to hold demonstrations for a return to multipartyism (eliciting the taunt from President Museveni for them to proceed “if you wish to see dead bodies”); the increasingly regular violence from the 1996 election onwards; the 2009 Buganda uprising shootings; the 2010 shootings of demonstrators protesting the burning of Buganda’s royal tombs; and the 2016 killings of over one hundred Rwenzururu palace guards and others in Kasese, and so on.

There is absolutely nothing new in what has just happened, how it happened and what will (not) happen next.

The core item that the National Resistance Army brought to the political table in the 1980s was security. This has remained its primary identity, and key selling point – the issue that made many choose to ignore or overlook its multitude of sins, flaws, and contradictions, but also what made it so valuable to imperialism, concerned, as it has always been, with ensuring its grip on this bounty at the headwaters of the Nile, which feeds other areas of its bounty.

The backstory to this is very critical in understanding why the regime can send operatives on the streets – on foot and in random vehicles, without uniforms or insignia – to shoot to kill an assortment of civilians, with no consequences, domestically, internationally, legally or morally.

The space called Uganda has historically been unstable. However, it suffered two particular periods of intense social and political turmoil that resulted in armed conflict.

The core item that the National Resistance Army brought to the political table in the 1980s was security. This has remained its primary identity, and key selling point…

In the first instance, this was the politics that created the country, where, after some twenty years or so of preaching to children, they had raised an army of militant Christians who proceeded to conquer the region. What we call “Uganda” is actually the end-product of the 1899 victory of the Anglican Christian militia over the rival Muslim and the Catholic militias intent on the same goal: control the Nile at source, and therefore control Egypt. The victors have since then presented this factional advantage as the introduction of “order”, or “peace”, or even “civilization” to the region, delivering it from centuries of slave-dealing, war-mongering heathen African despots. They conveniently forget to mention that it was their religious activism that started the conflict in the first place.The underlying theme to this had been the propagandistic idea of Africa as a chaotic, brutal place in need of a civilizing order.

In the second instance, it is this very same theme that Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Army updated, mined extensively, and carried forward as the essential value of their project: their militarist outfit as the competent sub-contractors for the bearing of the White Man’s Burden, bringing an order to a place bedeviled by mad and incompetent despots. Again, what was not mentioned was how all those previous despots had been installed by the West in the first place.

So, the real “consumer” of this security has been the Western corporations, whose investments in minerals, agribusiness, predatory banking and the rest, are kept safe by these excellent askaris. Any local that benefited did so only as an afterthought. Pax Anglicana

The everyday greeting in the Gisu area of Eastern Uganda is “Mirembe?”, asked as a question. This word literally means “peace”. However, this is not the actual indigenous traditional greeting. It is a form of salutation that emerged from the Anglican military conquest of the East for the emerging British colony as its Christian army marched eastwards between 1898 and 190, under the trusted generalship of the Muganda Anglican Semei Kakungulu. It was a statement of affirmation between the greeters that all resistance was over, and the new dispensation was now imposed. Shall we accept it, and call that peace?

This is the birth of the duality in Ugandan political thinking, where the absence of overt conflict is mistaken for “peace” as an actual condition. It is a thinking birthed by the contradiction of colonialism: on the one hand, its need to extract and make profit off the colonised space means it must arrive through deception, blackmail, and a lot of violence. On the other hand, there needs to be some kind of order, if not regimentation, for exploitative production to then take place. It is that order that is being misnamed as peace, whereas in fact all it is, is the provision of some kind of security to the new owners.

Even after (southern) Ugandans eventually got tired of reminding each other of how much more “secure” their lives had become after period of the overt military rulers between 1966 and 1986, the NRM continued to do it to them, loud and long, in the decades that followed. Certainly, business- oriented Ugandans (which is most of us) were initially relieved that they could go about their lives without having their homes and businesses invaded, or without being mugged and extorted by individual soldiers jealous of their progress. But they were unable to speak out because such private complaints could then be deliberately misunderstood as public political pronouncements against the government.

It is a thinking birthed by the contradiction of colonialism: on the one hand, its need to extract and make profit off the colonised space means it must arrive through deception, blackmail, and a lot of violence. On the other hand, there needs to be some kind of order, if not regimentation, for exploitative production to then take place.

There were only two flaws with this argument. First, most of north and northeastern Uganda were anything but secure, let alone peaceful, for the first nearly two decades of the NRM period. Second, it is the NRM regime that has gone on to facilitate the robbing, extortion and mugging of the entire Ugandan society of their historically accumulated wealth by removing all remaining barriers to foreign capitalist looting.

Many could not see it then, in the main. “Kasita twebaka ku ttulo” (at least we get to sleep now) emerged as the smug, fatuous and deliberately disengaged response to any attempt to educate them about the new dictatorship being assembled in plain sight. The result is a society of economically and socially insecure, under-skilled, landless underemployed people whose plight has been articulated politically and musically by the very presidential candidate whose arrest sparked these disturbances. They certainly see it now.

So we are back to the stand-off set up in 1897, when the Anglican “order” first asserted itself by imposing a “treaty” on the throne of Buganda, using a two-day gunpoint ultimatum, in which tax revenue, control of weapons and trade routes had to be surrendered to the Imperial British East African Company. This anti-native coup d’état thus check-mated the intentions toward the Nile of other imperial powers: Leopold’s Belgium from its Congo base in the West, Arab expansionism from Sudan in the north, and even the more remote French, German and Italian speculations, embedded in the Catholic mission stations, and budding in military bases on the other side of Ethiopia, dreaming of an opportunity.

Whose violence, whose state?

The only violence the West will accept is violence carried out in its own interest, when it is replacing one regime with another, or when its chosen regime is keeping “order”.

The mass killings in 1966 did not deter Britain from protecting the new government until it also became dispensable. Likewise, after the 1971 coup that brought Colonel Idi Amin to power, the West enjoyed very warm relations with him until he chose the other side in the Cold War.

Britain was deeply involved in seeking to violently destabilise the 1979-1980 post-Amin Marxist-led coalition government, and finally succeeded in toppling it through Paulo Muwanga’s May 1980 coup, which was the stepping stone to returning Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) party through the violent rigging of the December 1980 elections.

Britain then went on to heavily backstop the violence that the UPC government meted out to the population in an attempt to steady itself in power. When that government collapsed in June 1985, the West was faced with a choice of two purveyors of political violence: the Okello junta that had overthrown Obote, or the NRA/M, still recovering in western Uganda to where it had relocated following some better organised government offensives against it, just before the coup. Finally, the West settled on the NRA as its latest sweetheart, and after six months of heavy investment, January 1986 happened.

Like the original 1899 Anglican factional victory, it was sold as “Liberation” and “Peace”. In reality, it was the latest imposition of violent “order” by the real owners of the colony.

With the exception of Rwanda, Uganda is significantly smaller than any of the countries that border it. But these intense imperial maneuverings of over a century and half, plus her permanent presence in the commentaries of the Western media since the reign of Kabaka Muteesa I (r.1837-1884), betray an interest that far outweighs her relatively small size: again, the Nile headwaters, and all that flows from that physically, therefore economically, therefore strategically, therefore politically, and therefore militarily. The leadership of the NRM understood this intimately, and chose a side. And it was not the side of the native.

This is why, by contrast, any spontaneous or autonomous activity, especially one with a capacity for its own violence that cannot be imperially co-opted (as the NRA/M was) is brutally suppressed, as the NRM (now as a tool of the West) has done again and again with spontaneous outbursts, and before that in northern Uganda, to Buganda demonstrators, and to subjects of the Rwenzururu kingdom, as well as far beyond Uganda’s borders to “secure order” in the literal Eden, lying between the two Rift Valleys with the Nile at its centre, for the Empire.

In all such cases, the West has, and will, look away, after maybe a bit of anodyne hand-wringing, just as a memsahib would not want to know the gory details of exactly how her houseboy removed a rat from her kitchen, only that he did it effectively. She will even indulge in a bit of grumbling about how much of a mess he has left her kitchen in, in the process. But the critical thing is that she wanted the rat killed, and now it is dead. Good boy.

So, political agitation is one thing, an actual uprising is quite another. It does not matter what the issue is, the West will not tolerate an actual popular uprising in Africa. The natives must never develop the means to reclaim what was taken from them at gunpoint in 1897. Certainly, the natives must be prevented from regaining control over the source of the Nile.

This is why we have almost been workshopped to death by donor activism – to learn how to express our political aspirations within the acceptable (which basically means ineffective) methods and language of political careerism. Once we step outside those boundaries, either spontaneously or otherwise, then Kakungulu’s death machine is activated, and people are killed like kitchen rats until “order” is restored.

So, political agitation is one thing, an actual uprising is quite another. It does not matter what the issue is, the West will not tolerate an actual popular uprising in Africa. The natives must never develop the means to reclaim what was taken from them at gunpoint in 1897.

This is why we can experience a mass killing in the middle of a general election campaign, and the elections will still carry on. It is because these are, in fact, two separate “political” processes being implemented: one to keep the political classes co-opted, and the other to keep the natives excluded.

Nothing valuable, beautiful or just can be built on such an iniquitous foundation.

We need to be clear: what we have had was never “peace”, but simply security for the Empire’s interests.

And without real peace, even that security will eventually disappear.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba “If I can’t have you I’ll go out of my mind” -Whitesnake

Just how serious the moment was comes to you afterwards. Caught in the centre of the riot, the adrenaline high, the gauntlet of fire, smoke, tear gas and gunfire raging around you, you are shielded from the knowledge that this could be the day they kill you.

Afterwards, when you have escaped the bullet and the gas, and have made it home, and the adrenaline has worn out, the pain begins. What if I was among those that died?

It is the evening of trauma, the time for unanswerable questions. You look at the images coming in and think, a week ago, I stood by this mall searching for twine. I was at the same spot the retired lecturer, 71-year old John Kittobe, was cut down. How about the 15-year-old Amos Segawa, bleeding to death, killed on Kafumbe Mukasa Road where there are things I always need to buy?

There is more. The videos keep coming in. Where the yellow, sporty hatchback with the president’s poster drove into a crowd (Charlottesville-style) you too had wedged your way out between a Mercedes Benz trailer and an Isuzu Bighorn. At each Christmas, you regularly drive past the town the church laity Richard Mutyaba was killed in. And the sunny-faced Onesmus Kansiime was shot in a place I went past just a month earlier.

Is there a formula to empirically plot these events? How did the angels of death that roamed this bit of earth in mid-November bearing AK-47s look at a figure and decide that that body, that young man, that woman will die today?

Then comes the impossible matrix: what can I do to not be killed? Should I not raise a defiant voice, not write this article? But then none of those killed were rabble-rousers.

Talk, you die; keep quiet, you die

So why was it them and not me? Why did the shooting happen this week instead of last week when I was right there? Then, survivor’s guilt: I should have been there holding the hand of that boy whose legs were crushed to smithereens. What right do I have to remain alive when they are all gone?

Perhaps this comes closest to answering these wearied questions: a sheer coincidence of missed appointments and of a malfunctioning carburetor that kept you parked by the roadside, you realise, was all that stopped you standing at the spot where the bullet went through Mr Kittobe.

Those that were killed led quiet, unprotesting lives. Talk, you die; keep quiet, you die. How about the rest of us noise makers, who write articles like this, the makers of music, the poets and activists who are frequently warned, “There is a plan for you”. Every day, you walk past your designated killer and even say good morning to him. “Your time will come. Be careful.”

You realise there is a bullet out there with your name on it. They just haven’t fired it yet.

The bridge

The hand of fate had me and a writer friend drive a few kilometers north of the city centre. Hard rain in the morning had kept me an hour behind my intended time of arrival. There were a couple of things I needed – and still need – in the downtown area that bore the brunt of the violence. But the rain had ruined my day so I cut the city centre out of my planned schedule.

Meeting done, and as the two of us were approaching the overpass at Bwaise at precisely 3 p.m, it was reported that Mr. Kittobe had been shot dead.

Every day, you walk past your designated killer and even say good morning to him. “Your time will come. Be careful.”

The pillars of black smoke rising everywhere did not yet register. A group of young men were running across the road hurriedly. But they do that in Kalerwe, no? A couple of police officers in heavy riot gear were waving their arms in command. That too has been standard in the last 20 years.

But past the gentle curving section that takes you from the Kalerwe-Mpererwe junction, the pile of burning tyres is ominous. Before we get there, there comes the smell of tear gas and a single shot. Burning tyres, tear gas and gunshots – the macabre trinity.

We remember the news of the arrest of Bobi Wine and understand it fully.

The overpass raises the ground underneath us but we will never make it past it. We slow down. A young man shouts in urgent Luganda. We press on. At the top of the bridge, we see his point. Down beyond the overpass, the hundreds of unmoving vehicles are jammed. To our left, clogged up on Sir Apollo Kagwa Road, even more vehicles. To our right there is the actual event, the crackle of gunshots interspersed with shouts of heightened emotions. The only clear route out of this is behind us and it is filling up fast. We need to act.

Gunshots, and that eerie clarity when you know they are shooting to kill.

Now that we are fully aware, we start to notice, in every movement, an affirmation that the Museveni regime had not given up.

Something is building up, like an approaching storm. We must get out. We make the U-turn. We never made it across the bridge. Below, a maelstrom. The uncrossed bridge, the bridge of burning tyres and missing phones.

Cassava, potato and banana gardens

The old Bwaise road is blocked by a massive, burning barricade. We swerve right in time to avoid the gridlock. I wrack my brain to remember the muddy, potholed backyards of Makerere Kavule, where I grew up in the 1990s. Lord, let it not be too far ahead. Just ahead, the biggest burning barricade we will see all day, in Makerere Kavule. The Lord is kind. We find the easy-to-miss byway.

“Enkuubo enfu”. The road is bad, a young man warns us.

“I know this place,” I reassure the poet and press on.

U-turns

Lesson learned: keep away from big, smooth roads. Cling to byways and earth ruts. You clamour up the back of Makerere hill on number one and number two, there with the ugly cassava and lianna side, with the burrs and forget-me-nots, the side of its hill that Makerere does not put on its admission prospectus. We intended to slingshot across the city westwards. But the Kikoni-Kasubi districts, from the ridge overlooking Makerere West, was a disturbed beehive of burning barricades and military and zero vehicular traffic.

An afternoon of U-turns. Rapidly back up, head directly south and at the Sir Apollo Kagwa Road (in Kampala you can’t escape Sir Apollo Kagwa, a relentless, tyrannical memory of the seminal betrayer of Uganda) and Makerere Hill junction, a sharp turn west. Cars rapidly going uphill on third gear, as quickly as they can before the inescapable Nakulabye junction is shut. And just in time to catch youths tearing the pavements, a troop of riot gear- and gun-wielding soldiers steadily pacing in their direction. The clash is inevitable. But the distraction buys us a few seconds. We shield behind a blanket of raging tyre fire and smoke, and leap onto Namirembe district.

From Sir Apollo Kagwa Road to Namirembe Cathedral, we have been in the open air of modern roads too long. Time again to dive out of sight on back roads.

In the backwaters of the Nateete-Mackway suburb, the air seems the most riotous – the giant barricades, youths clutching shirts, running, soldiers and police alert and trigger- happy. A quick left, and at the early Martyrs Church, searching an option route out west. It is more cassava, banana and potato fields and villagers watching curiously this unscheduled invasion of town cars in their shambas. But there are barricades even this deep. The difference is that there are no soldiers or police, so it’s a civilised pleading with the motorists – don’t cheat us poor people; don’t take our land.

The realisation comes that when the big moment of history approaches, there is no out of sight to fall into.

It is at the top of the ridge, just before Busega, when we feel out of the danger zone, that I realise how much trouble we had escaped.

After nearly an hour hunting through the sidelines of banana, yam and cassava fields for a way out of the city, a black Toyota Harrier stood thrumming ahead of us, not moving.

“Get out,” he yells. ‘Mr Bobi Wine I arrest you because you do this so many times’

In the days that follow, when all the headlines have been scanned and radio analyses have been listened to, and the unwatchable videos have been watched and re-watched, we all know what we have always known: We Ugandans are being punished for falling in love with Bobi Wine rather than with the other one who considers himself the more attractive suitor. Has this not been the story for four decades now? That Mr. Yoweri Museveni, having failed to win at the ballot box, has lashed out in violence?

It is said that the most deadly thing that Milton Obote ever wielded was a microphone. And in 1980, it is said, his listeners never stood a chance when faced with his killer tongue.

Kizza Besigye is like that. He stands up and moves a hand. Not a word said but already there are tears streaming down faces. He speaks and something moves in the crowd, an almost metaphysical, transcendental transformation.

It is different at Mr. Museveni’s rallies. At your kindest, you might call him a policy wonk, a man who likes to string off measures, deliverables, reasons and figures. He does not speak to the heart. Without the military reining the crowds in, as happened on the day Daniel arap Moi stepped down in Nairobi, he will move his listeners to jeer and boo him. He does not have the words that will make people feel warm inside. He has a pathological fear of elections. Thoroughly wooden, his best pick- up line is, “I will crush you.”

It is said that the most deadly thing that Milton Obote ever wielded was a microphone. And in 1980, it is said, his listeners never stood a chance when faced with his killer tongue.

At Besigye’s rallies, they jostle, push forward, slip and fall for the privilege of handing him some money, or a chicken. He makes them believe in something. But Museveni had him tear-gassed, beaten and blinded – to disfigure the face they found irresistible.

In Shakespeare’s play, Othello, the hatred-blinded Iago, unaccepting of the fact that someone he considers dark, ugly, without substance, and full of pompous emptiness can be attractive to someone else, says venomously:

He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly

But take Obote and Besigye and add them up. The combination is Bobi Wine, a man young enough to be Mr. Museveni’s grandson. Still the fear returns. The reaction of Mr. Museveni remains the same as it was when he faced off against Obote and Besigye. The deeply fear that they will speak and win.

On 18 November 2020, the insecurities of the past welled up in a bloody bout of peacetime carnage that Kampala will not wish to remember. (Just in case we forget, at the end of 2016, scores were massacred in the West town of Kasese, the likely site of the coming pogrom should Uganda break down.)

Kiwaani

I have never taken the time to stream Bobi Wine’s music. After November 18 and 19, I wanted to find out just what it is that endears a country to him and so hurts the other man. As good a track to begin with is Kiwaani. Upbeat and sad, delightful and morose, it was Bobi Wine’s breakout hit in 2009-2010. You start to see that Bobi Wine, unbeknownst to us who did not pay closer attention at the beginning, but who was already sealing the love deal. Whilst Museveni basked in his 2006 triumph and prepared for another “Rap” in 2009-10, Bobi Wine was already placing the winning hand.

It remains perhaps his quintessential song, an address that spoke to Ugandans in ways we had not been spoken to since Philly Bongole Lutaaya and Okot P’Bitek before him (an inheritor then of poet laureate burdens). Dulcet, rising, in pathos, long-suffering, there was a song telling us what we were feeling. Back then, lines in it were quoted repeatedly to explain why things were unbearable. Kampala, it declared, was the place of failure.

A deceptively laid-back track, Kiwaani opens in classic Kadongo Kamu (one-man guitar) melody, seemingly to hark back to a bygone age. This is followed by rapid, brief strings. Then comes the rescuing poetry.

A melody taken off a slum kid’s chant of sowaani (the plate at feeding time), repurposed to say Kampala wears sheds, Bobi Wine put it to good effect. And there he is, in his element, seductive, laying it on thick, simplifying and pre-digesting inaccessible lyrics, a distillation of critical discourse – postcoloniality, duality, deconstruction, neoliberal philanthropy. It is all there. There is just enough straight Luganda to make you get it. For the rest, you just have to speak ghetto to get it.

His coming of age mood was dense, chewy, accessible, personable. He might have played nothing more beyond Kiwaani and stayed forever as the defining describer of Kampala. After you listened to that track, you could not take your eyes away from the dreadlocked lark.

A decade later, the melody is still haunting.

Mr. Money

Then there was the author of Mr. Money, at one time the undisputed anthem of Kampala. And you asked again, how did I not know how to put it into words what I see daily in this city? As if knowing what would become of him in later years, the young, twenty-something Bobi Wine had sung these lines:

Those who pursue me find me far ahead Rich and poor, let this music touch you

Before he was a political prisoner, he was a prisoner of conscience, and he quotes his tormentors:

‘Mr Bobi Wine I arrest you because you do this so many times I arrest you and take you to SPC and charge you with idle and disorderly”

Mr. Money is in many ways, the song that really tells it as it is. He is in his element. But it is still safe territory. He is belting out the Kadongo Kamu man’s craft, telling stories, not the mash and splash postmodernity of Kiwaani.

But the essential Bobi Wine is there, as he always had been, and would be in later years – rousing, exhilarating, musical, leading from the front.

I say man made money, money made man mad

He could have stopped at Mr. Money and been great. Carolyn

He could even have stopped at Carolyn, and still been great. One of those required evergreen melodies no songster must go out without, Carolyn is a happy song, a party staple, like What A Wonderful World, or Here Comes the Sun, or the tenderest, caressing ballard of Tabu Ley’s Mireille Mwana, He is not only happy, he is doing happiness. There is Bobi Wine, happy, letting it rip; he is enjoying it, letting the melody run, run, run. A love song. A recollection of high school sweetheart nostalgia. A celebration.

But is he not channeling the late Kafeero with his slim, scanty-bearded, straw hat-wearing mien? What is he doing with the adungu, harp and rattle troupe? 1997 was a wonderful year.

She used to call me Master Bio because I used to handle money-o.

This man made beautiful songs. They love him for it. Before he stood for them, he serenaded them.

Kyarenga

The earlier joie de vivre expressed in Carolyn is resurrected in perhaps the most ambitious of Bobi Wine’s songs, Kyarenga, the eponymous song of the album for which the notorious crackdown of the 2018 launch cemented what would be the position of government going forward. Kyarenga is set as a love song. The strapping youth who has the village belle’s heart is challenged by variegated powerful and moneyed suitors. But he has the belle’s heart. The belle has eyes only for him.

This man made beautiful songs. They love him for it. Before he stood for them, he serenaded them.

The song, and the video (by this point Ugandan music videographers had come into their own), is a thinly disguised allegory of the moment, of the songster who has a nation’s heartbeat but is attacked and harassed by the powerful who think their position and money entitles them to love. Why force the nation to love you when who they want is me?

But does that explain this unhinged violent fear of voters choosing someone who steals their hearts?

Paradiso

The heavier, Mtukuzi-sampling opening, but Kiswahili-lyrics Paradiso pays homage to a different Uganda, Uganda, the East African country. A track with a kick, perhaps the lowest depth of Bobi Wine pathos. It speaks to the generation disinherited by neoliberalism, scattered in the face of the earth to look for fortunes, and returning, in the words of T.S. Eliot, to find alien people clutching strange gods.

Situka

The politically overt Bobi Wine comes out clear in 2015/2016. He releases Situka and declares,

When leaders become misleaders And mentors become tormentors When freedom of expression becomes target of suppression Opposition becomes our position

If he was speaking to Mr. Museveni, he was also speaking to Mr. Obote, Idi Amin and the grandest of all Ugandan tyrants, Sir. Apollo Kagwa. And this is a point lost in the heat of the moment. The fight that has raised Bobi Wine was a century in the making. Mr. Museveni need not feel it is directed at him. When he is gone, that war will still rage on. The things we need Bobi Wine for are not the things we require Mr. Museveni for.

He is the Ugandan musician who broke through his art into the public consciousness. But also, in this era, he is music breaking beyond the point Bob Marley left it. We can hardly think of a musician, anywhere, in recent times, who has caused such a stir in an uncertain, frightened world.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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A Dictator's Guide: How Museveni Wins Elections and Reproduces Power in Uganda

By Michael Mutyaba Baluku Bismark was 14 years old when he sat for his school exams in early November 2016 with the goal of becoming a health worker in Kasese, western Uganda. A few weeks later, Baluku was among those killed by the Ugandan army during an attack on the region’s cultural institution, known as the Obusinga Bwa Rwenzururu (OBR).

By the end of a two-day assault on 26 and 27 November 2016 the military had killed 155 people using live ammunition and intentional fires; images of raging infernos and piles of bodies circulated on social media. Community members had killed at least 14 policemen. It was eight months after that year’s presidential and primary elections.

Baluku is one of many Ugandan citizens whose fate was sealed by state agents in the name of “restoring order”. In each instance, those agents “take orders from above” and are shielded from any accountability. Dig deeper and it is about power and votes.

Uganda is scheduled to hold elections on 14 January 2021. Ten opposition candidates, including former musician and member of parliament, Hon. Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine, are challenging President Museveni who has controlled nearly every aspect of government in Uganda since 1986.

As expected, the presidential campaign, which officially began on 9 November 2020, has been marred by partisan law enforcement. Already, but unsurprisingly, state violence is defining the campaigns. Like previous presidential rival Dr Kizza Besigye, prominent opposition candidates Kyagulanyi and Patrick Amuriat have faced harassment, beatings, and various criminal charges. On 18 November police arrested Kyagulanyi during a rally in Eastern Uganda; Amuriat was arrested in Gulu. The arrests sparked spontaneous demonstrations in several towns, with the youth demanding their release. News reports indicate that security forces shot at least 45 people and hundreds more were injured.

For people in Kasese, these events are occurring as they prepare to vote in the first election since the horrific bloodshed that took place exactly four years ago this week. Unpacking the power politics behind the Kasese massacres is critical to understanding Uganda’s elections and the President’s stranglehold on power. It also tells a dismal story of total impunity no matter the scale of the killing. Obusinga Bwa Rwenzururu and cultural institutions in Uganda

The Obusinga Bwa Rwenzururu is the cultural institution, or kingdom, of people that traditionally live in the western Rwenzori Mountains along Uganda’s border with Congo. The institution itself is headquartered in Kasese district.

Political recognition of cultural institutions in Uganda is part of the complex path that led to President Museveni’s ascension to power in 1986. For example, as a way of soliciting the support of the predominantly Baganda people of the central region, Museveni agreed to restore the region’s Buganda Kingdom which had been abolished in 1966 under the first post-colonial government.

But President Museveni, a master of political compromise, understood the delicate balance required. Buganda’s cultural leader was permitted to formally exist but he wasn’t allowed any actual political power. Over the years, as a form of bargaining for allegiance, Museveni has slowly accepted the restoration of other cultural institutions, such as the Bunyoro-Kitara in the west, and the Busoga and Tooro Kingdoms in the east and southwest, respectively. In a country as ethnically and linguistically diverse as post-colonial Uganda, these cultural institutions and their leaders can command significant loyalty and community support.

Such devotion was on full display in September 2009 when Museveni, seeking to curtail the influence of the Buganda Kingdom, sought to limit the freedom of movement of the kingdom’s leadership. Loyalists quickly took to the streets in protest. By the end of two days, security forces had killed at least 45 people to quell the uprising and the Luganda-speaking radios had been taken off the air.

Shortly thereafter, and despite criticism from those who deemed it unconstitutional, Uganda passed a law barring cultural leaders from participating in partisan politics or providing a platform for any politician. However, most cultural institutions have often remained influential, if constrained, despite efforts to rein in their influence using this law or attempts to co-opt them into the ruling party.

In 2006, Uganda held the first multiparty elections since Museveni first came to power through a military takeover. Already in power for 20 years, Museveni suffered what some felt was a humiliating political defeat in Kasese, with the opposition presidential candidate Dr Besigye garnering 56 per cent of the total votes to Museveni’s 45 per cent.

Some pundits interpreted the result as a rebuke to Museveni for ignoring the grievances of the Rwenzururu cultural institution in its plea for official recognition. In an attempt at political expediency, Museveni finally acquiesced in October 2009 – a few weeks after the violent suppression of the Buganda kingdom supporters. The Omusinga, or King in the Bakonzo language, was coronated and the Rwenzururu cultural institution was restored just in time for the campaign for the February 2011 elections. Museveni won the area vote and secured two seats for his party in parliament. But the recognition wasn’t without its critics, and clashes between pro- and anti-Obusinga forces escalated. Intercommunal fighting led to the displacement of both the ethnic Bakonzo and the Bamba, another ethnic group in the region. The government stepped in but was increasingly perceived to be siding with those opposed to the King.

Five years later, the opposition Forum for Democratic Change fared well in the Rwenzori region. All parliamentary and local posts in Kasese went to the opposition. National Resistance Movement (NRM) strongmen, such as Defense Minister Crispus Kiyonga, lost their parliamentary posts.

The relationship between the President and the King had been rocky for a few years prior to the election but the election results clearly indicated that the ruling party was losing traction in the region. Ruling party mobilisers started working harder to co-opt the king’s support base, sowing the seeds of instability.

Kasese in November 2016

Four years later, the full story of the horrific killings that took place in Kasese in November 2016 remains shrouded in secrecy. The government has never published the names of those killed or allowed independent investigations into why its army massacred almost 150 of its own citizens over two days. Spokespeople have only indicated that those who died were “terrorists” who sought to “take over Uganda”. Despite arresting and imprisoning over 180 people, the government has never presented any evidence in court and never proceeded to trial. The people arrested in November 2016 languish in prison to this day

Sporadic conflicts between communities, at times involving security forces, flared up after the 2016 elections. In one incident, the Police Flying Squad shot and killed a suspected Omusinga loyalist in a market as he bought food. A government soldier was later killed by machete, allegedly for spying on the King near the palace compound.

Rumours began to spread in Kasese at this time that the government would be handing over a demobilisation fee to the Omusinga’s “royal guards” – volunteers who are loyal to the Kingdom and work on its behalf. In a very low-income part of the country, such enticements inflated the ranks of the royal guards as people waited for handouts to support their families.

Eventually, word spread that the payout was imminent. But as people gathered in the palace compound on November 25, the military arrived and Kasese was brought to a standstill. Under the command of General Peter Elwelu, Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) soldiers, encircled the palace and told the people inside that they could not leave. Tensions escalated and, eventually, soldiers shot and killed eight royal guards at the kingdom’s office in town. The rumour that the kingdom was under attack spread into the outlying sub-counties. Community members attacked some police posts and 14 police officers and 32 civilians were killed in the conflicts. The next day, the UPDF made its biggest move, allegedly ordering royal guards to disband or face attack.

At 1 p.m. the UDPF launched an assault on the palace, shooting live ammunition and setting thatched roofing alight. The king was removed by force and transferred to Kampala. Photos of piles of bodies, some with their arms tied behind their backs, circulated on social media. Some of the dead were buried in a mass grave near a military barrack. Some people were never found. At least 15 children last seen inside the palace are missing to this day; 180 people were charged with murder, terrorism and treason. Those who managed to escape went into hiding and to this day, the palace remains closed.

Two months after the attack General Elwelu told a local newspaper that the “place had lost its legitimacy. It was no longer a palace. It became a legitimate military target because it had become a command post for all that was happening in Rwenzori.”

There is no doubt that the events of November 2016 ended any pretense that the right to freedom of expression existed in the region. Many believe that Museveni would most likely have tolerated the Rwenzururu king had he not shown open support for the opposition. No one could seriously believe the government’s line that the king posed any meaningful security threat to the country or that he would be able to orchestrate any secession. But, clearly, cultural leaders needed to be shown that they could not behave like the Rwenzururu king. What if other kingdoms followed suit? Since 2016, the Omusinga’s movements have been largely restricted to his house in Kampala. He was barred from travelling to the Rwenzoris, even after seeking the court’s permission to attend the June 2019 burial of his mother. Security officials say that since the attack on the palace in 2016, the region is now peaceful. The region nurses its wounds and struggles to care for an estimated 300 widows and 600 orphans left behind by the massacre.

Despite some condemnatory statements from foreign embassies and civil society, the government has not been pressured to show any real evidence of why that scale of bloodshed was lawful or proportionate. In a classic case of co-option, President Museveni appointed the king’s brother as a minister in his government.

What happened in November 2016 in Kasese can only be viewed as a stark reminder to all cultural leaders – and frankly to any critic of the regime – that they should stay away from candid engagement in politics or consider supporting Uganda’s political opposition.

Those arrested were left to rot in jail, far from their families. But as the 2021 elections approach, perhaps they are suddenly again useful to the electoral landscape?

Uganda’s upcoming elections

As Bobi Wine ignites imaginations about new approaches to governance in Uganda, the government’s paranoia is at an all-time high and one can only imagine that there is significant work being done to ensure that the Rwenzori votes go to the ruling party. Word is already trickling out that the government is going to release those who have spent four years in prison without trial. But they will never be exonerated. It is likely that they are under significant pressure to admit some wrongdoing, to grovel and seek forgiveness from Museveni despite no clear evidence of their crimes having been presented. When Museveni releases the detainees just in time for the anniversary (and the voting,) he will demand blind loyalty. Even though his soldiers killed their families.

The patterns of state violence in Uganda are sadly repetitive; the ruling party obstructs burgeoning criticism to Museveni’s long stay in power. Organised dissent – Uganda’s cultural institutions, opposition members, civic groups, or just an outspoken citizen – is met with co-option, pressure and intimidation. A bank account is frozen, a cultural leader is coronated, a brown envelop of cash arrives. But at times, these efforts fail to silence the critics. Defiant voices rise up.

In that flashpoint, the state unleashes overwhelming violence against its own citizens and people like Baluku and many others die under the bullets of the state security agents. No previous military or police training supported by Uganda’s Western “partners in democracy” like the United States or United Kingdom prevents the blatant drive for political expediency.

In each incident – the Kayunga demonstration in 2009, the Walk to Work protests of 2011, the Kasese killings of 2016, the Free Bobi Wine demonstrations in November 2020, and countless other similar events – citizens, often innocent bystanders, or youth demonstrating against state actions are killed or arrested. Each time, the pro-government pundits quickly go on the attack, demonising those killed as terrorists or hooligans and then calling for peace.

Behind the scenes, those in jail will continue to suffer without being brought to trial, and with no credible evidence of their wrongdoing being produced. But no member of the security forces will face any questions to justify the bloodshed. International donors to Uganda’s ample security sector will momentarily issue condemnations and then return to the humdrum of diplomatic life in Kampala’s leafy suburbs. The graves of the dead, of people like Baluku from Kasese, are quickly forgotten. If the government’s explanation of the reasons behind these horrific episodes is ever to be believed, it will need to hold both sides to account and be willing to allow for criticism, dissent and, most importantly, electoral loss. Military commanders, including generals like Elwelu, who allowed the killings of unarmed civilians, who allowed the bullets to fly, will need to be brought to open court, to answer tough questions from lawyers who don’t fear reprisals. As long as men like General Elwelu are promoted for killing civilians, as he was, the unabashed reliance on state violence as a political weapon in Uganda will continue. And horrific images of bloodied bodies – like those of November 2020 and November 2016 – will increase.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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