Prime
What Kenya demos mean for Uganda
Author: Phillip Matogo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- ‘‘Museveni must cede power to someone else or the post-Museveni era will be so much worse than 1966”
There were several media reports during the week that Ugandan security forces had been put on high alert to forestall any spillovers from opposition-led protests in neighbouring Kenya.
Kenya opposition leader Raila Odinga, who lost last year’s presidential election by a hairsbreadth to President William Ruto, organised the protests that brought business to a standstill in the capital Nairobi.
Odinga says the protests, codenamed #Maandamano, will now happen every Monday until Ruto’s government finds a solution to the high cost of living and reverses what Odinga calls a stolen election.
Ugandan security forces may relax, however. For the days of their running street battles with the Ugandan Opposition are over.
Dr Kizza Besigye, the only Opposition leader, in my opinion, with the Rambo-type temperament to cross swords with the security forces, has gone AWOL.
After the Tito Okello government and the National Resistance Movement/Army signed the Nairobi Peace Accords on December 17, 1985, Mr Museveni claimed that Tito Okello said he had removed the teeth from the salambwa (poisonous snake/Museveni) on pain of the said accords.
It is easy to imagine Mr Museveni saying this of Dr Besigye, who seems to be toothless these days.
Needless to say, this bodes ill for the country as it points towards how firmly in the saddle Mr Museveni is.
In fact, Mr Museveni’s seemingly boundless power may accurately be compared to the power the colonial government had in Uganda.
The colonial government was so powerful that when Milton Obote took the reins of office at independence, he inherited power from the colonial governor but not authority.
This will be the bane of post-Museveni Uganda; his successor will have the power but not the authority.
That’s because Mr Museveni has atomised any form of power outside of his own to the extent that our next leader will be a leader of leaders.
This is the reality that confronted Obote at independence.
His party, the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC), was formed in March 1960 as an anti-Buganda party.
Furthermore, at independence, national politics was defined by local issues.
So there were no political parties which had purely nationalist aims or national leaders.
Now, since the UPC had parochial objectives and was dominated by sectional interests, Obote had no advantage over fellow party leaders.
Men such as Cuthbert Obwangor (Teso), George Magezi (Bunyoro), William Nadiope (Busoga) and several others did not need UPC or Obote to get elected in their respective constituencies.
The party was essentially a coalition of powerful leaders.
This turned Obote into a first among equals and so when he tried to have other party bigwigs shorn of their power in order to consolidate his own; the 1966 constitutional crisis occurred.
This dichotomy between power and authority is sure to ensure that any immediate post-Museveni presidency will be beset by the same issues which left Obote beleaguered.
Our post-Museveni leader, of necessity, will then have to appeal to sections of the armed forces in order to gain suzerainty over his or her rivals.
And this will lead to dire consequences.
Thus, by being firmly in the saddle, Museveni is likely to saddle the country with the sort of chaos our past was all too familiar with.
This is why Museveni must urgently establish other centres of institutional authority outside his own person.
In accordance with the Peter Principle, Mr Museveni has indeed risen to the level of his incompetence in the context of nation building.
Now he must cede power to someone else or the post-Museveni era will be so much worse than 1966 that we shall envy the dead.
Mr Matogo is a professional copywriter
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