Prime
Without electoral reforms, it’s Deja coup for Uganda
Raymond Mujuni
What you need to know:
Many people, tired of incompetent governments, long reigns, and breakdown of institutions often welcome coups because they provide a semblance of success, they represent the quick dopamine win but the data around their success in entrenching civilian rule and guaranteeing progress is still heavily contested
It’s never a good sign to wake up, particularly in this nook of the world, to an address on TV by military officers.
Any address, of important nature, done by military officers of rank and file is always symbolic of an overthrow of constitutional order, a break from traditional civilian politics, and the next few months, in any country with a coup d’état are a struggle between returning civilian government or entrenching autocratic rule.
Many people, tired of incompetent governments, long reigns, and breakdown of institutions often welcome coups because they provide a semblance of success, they represent the quick dopamine win but the data around their success in entrenching civilian rule and guaranteeing progress is still heavily contested.
Between 1950 and 2023, Africa accounted for 214 of 486 coups in the world. 106 of those coups have succeeded and 108 have failed. Gabon, the latest coup coming on the heels of Niger and Burkina Faso, has provided yet more ground to study this phenomenon. In Africa, Sudan is top up there with 17 attempted coups 6 of which have been successful.
Uganda has had five attempted coups in its short history and 3 of those have been successful. They have also led to the highest calamities in economic ruin and civil liberties. In 1971, Uganda slow-walked into an economic catastrophe that killed institutions, and businesses, pushed an irrevocable culture of corruption into our civil service, and created the grounds for the 1985 coup which was terminated by the 1986 civil war. Since then, however, civilian authority has yet to return to the helm of governing Ugandan affairs.
This is why, the governing structure for political competition needs to be reformed to avoid armed interventions.
One of the most clamored-for electoral reforms in Uganda is a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power from one leader to another. The 1995 constitution had envisaged that to happen with term limits, which were lifted, another in-built system stop was the age limit which, too, has been lifted.
If the democratic contest is deemed to be – and remains visibly – unfairly steeped against the political opposition, it can be hard to sustain the argument that the ruling party has the best ideas – or that only its chairman can be the vehicle for them. But also, if the army continues to see itself as the stop-buck for Uganda’s political contestation, interfering with the upper hand of the ruling party, it won’t be long before members of the same army develop irredeemable ideological differences that cannot be mediated by political contestation.
So, for those who want to avoid a coup d’état in Uganda, the best viable option is to pursue electoral reforms to create a constitutional and democratic culture amongst institutions and individuals – anything short of this is delaying the very inevitable outcome of guns suspending civilian rule in Uganda.
