Prime
Bobi Wine’s NUP can win power in 2039 – or 2081
Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
What you need to know:
- Where the politics are corrupt and nepotism is rife, as in Uganda, these Trojan politicians help redirect patronage from a grateful ruling party to their marginalised constituencies.
With Uganda’s ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) and President Yoweri Museveni entering an unprecedented 38th anniversary in power, in “Come, pray in the beautiful new Ugandan church”, last week we look at some non-political changes in Ugandan society that have enabled that longevity.
Today we look at the purely political, to answer the question, “How long will it take the constitutional opposition in Uganda to win power?” Such a change hasn’t happened in Uganda since independence in October 1962, however, the history of President Yoweri Museveni, gives us a crude guide of the optimistic case.
Museveni has written and said a thousand times that he was a freedom fighter from as early as 1964. He used a katogo of approaches – the gun and grassroots politics – to finally take state power in 1986 – i.e. 22 years to win the crown. (We will exclude traditional military coups, which take a shorter period).
If we take Bobi Wine’s journey, and his People Power (later NUP) as starting in 2017 when he was elected Kyadondo County East MP in that dramatic bye-election, then the best case scenario if he followed Museveni’s path is 2039. For the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), founded on December 16, 2004, their time would be 2026 and after. If both parties followed the Democratic Party’s purist political post-independence path - it is still waiting to enter State House - then NUP will likely have a chance from the 2081 election. FDC would look at the 2066 election.
But first, they must survive in some form. Which brings us to the question of party unity vs division. In Uganda, as in many other places, we tend to see party disunity as a weakness. But is it?
Except in the DP, which has remained broadly liberal-democratic-centrist in its factionalism over the decades, party splits have generally been good for Uganda, though less profitable for the politicians. The Uganda Peoples’ Congress (UPC) split of the 1960s, allowed its progressive tendency to grow and ally with other movements. The birth of the Uganda Patriotic Movement in 1980, was a result of a further fracture in both the UPC and DP. A less public split in the DP in the early 1980s fed the ranks of the NRA/NRM in the bush.
The first split in the NRM gave us the Reform Agenda, and later the FDC. This split was critical for the last leg of the dynamics that led to a return to multiparty politics in Uganda in 2005. Most important, though hardly ever remarked upon, it enabled the FDC to reintegrate war-ravaged northern region into mainstream Ugandan politics.
They continued a process that started in 1995 when Paul Ssemogerere exited the “broad-based” NRM government, dealing a serious blow to the “no-party” system. Legislators from the north were thus primarily DP – and UPC (NRM has since stolen that mantle from them now). Grassroots disaffection with DP, NRM, FDC, and the withering of the Conservative Party, were the seeds from which Bobi Wine’s NUP was born. Mugisha Muntu’s Alliance for National Transformation (ANT) was a moderate splinter from FDC.
Because they run in elections to take power, these groups can be considered to have failed in democratically defeating Museveni, even when we factor in the massive rigging machine that is always reliably deployed on NRM’s side.
But collectively, they have achieved an important long-term goal. They killed NRM as a mass movement and cornered it into being a narrow state party that can only keep power through the levers of the state and partisan use of violence by security forces.
As a result, there is no scenario in which an NRM Museveni successor wins an honest election without the use of extreme violence. The opposition has won the long game of dismantling the NRM at the structural level.
The other issue has to do with this idea of “moles” in parties, usually alleged to be opposition politicians who function as a 5th column in their parties, and spies for the government.
“Trojan politicians” have been around longer than Uganda has been independent. And even during the times of military rule, there have always been Trojan officers. Like their political counterparts, they have been important in undermining the ruling regimes, even as they seem to weaken the parties they are decamping from.
Where the politics are corrupt and nepotism is rife, as in Uganda, these Trojan politicians help redirect patronage from a grateful ruling party to their marginalised constituencies. Secondly, and most important, they cause division within the ruling party, with the “originals” and “historicals” resenting them as opportunist Johnny-Come-Latelys looking to reap where they didn’t sow.
Together these factors have ensured that Uganda couldn’t have a Chama Cha Mapunduzi (CCM) which has ruled Tanzania alone consecutively for 60 years and counting. That’s a good thing.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.
Twitter: @cobbo3
