Is Mao Uganda’s Daniel arap Moi?

This week, Justine Ssanyu Nakajumba, mother of incarcerated Kawempe North Member of Parliament Muhammad Ssegirinya, met with Justice and Constitutional Affairs minister Norbert Mao and appealed to him to grant her son freedom.

According to Mao, who revealed the details of the encounter, he reassured the teary-eyed mother that Ssegirinya would get a fair trial.

“Today (August 9) I met Hon Muhammad Ssegirinya’s mother at my office at the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs. We were joined by the chairperson of the Uganda Human Rights Commission, Mariam Wangadya, who was visiting. I assured her that the right to a fair trial is paramount!” Mao said.

It has been a year and a half since Ssegirinya was arrested, along with his colleague Allan Ssewanyana, the Makindye East legislator. The two are accused of wire-pulling the activities of machete-wielding thugs who killed several residents of Masaka last year.

Mao may have his work cut out, but it will help the NRM government immensely if he gets restitution for Ssegirinya and Ssewanyana.

That’s because it will elevate his profile in the eyes of the public and also turn him                     into an honest broker between Opposition and government.

With his name thus cemented in concrete achievement, Mao will no longer be like a hen in a foxhole.

Instead, his association with NRM may grow into the one which characterised Daniel arap Moi’s relationship with Jomo Kenyatta’s “Gatundu group” in the late 1970s.

Moi succeeded Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, in 1978.

On joining the ruling party, Kenya African National Union, in 1964, he became a loyalist of the then president Jomo Kenyatta. This loyalty, together with his position as the preeminent Kalenjin politician, explains Kenyatta’s decision to appoint Moi as his vice president in 1967.

To Kenyatta and his kitchen cabinet, the so-called “Gatundu group”, Moi wasn’t a threatening figure and this helped him rise to the acme of Kenyan politics.

Mao finds himself in a similar position. He is not seen as a threat because he is not an army man, has no official political constituency and is from a region found mostly at the fringes of national politics.

His otherwise threadbare political credentials are what shall give Mao the last laugh, however.

First, though, he must make strategic use of the levers of patronage the NRM wields by offering sanctions to some, while undermining those who stand in his way.

He has already shown exemplary flexibility by entering his own party into an alliance with its official foe, NRM.

This flexibility must be tempered by a broader vision towards transition for it to become the dynamism necessary for him to stay ahead of the curve.

Anybody with a keen eye on the rear-view mirror of Uganda’s historical locomotive will notice that composed majorities are what achieve power. Such majorities defined the Uganda Peoples Congress and Kabaka Yekka’s coalition, Idi Amin’s populism when expelling the Asians and Yoweri Museveni’s broad-based government in 1986.

Even before this, when Lt Gen Basilio Olara-Okello and Gen Tito Okello Lutwa overthrew Milton Obote, a December 1985 agreement signed by Gen Okello, National Resistance Army (NRA) leader Museveni and president Moi spawned a stillborn coalition. Under the Nairobi agreement, a 17-member military council would govern the country.

It was to comprise seven members of Uganda National Liberation Army, seven members of NRA, and representatives of smaller factions opportunistically in league with the Okellos.

Mao has thus read history correctly, but before he can step into the shoes of a Ugandan Moi; we must ask the million-dollar question: Is Museveni willing to become Uganda’s Jomo Kenyatta?

Mr Matogo is a professional copywriter 

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