Democracy and the struggle for Social Justice in Uganda
Many commentators have sought to explain Museveni’s continuing life-and-death hold onto power in terms of a desire to protect his family and cronies’ ill-gotten wealth and property. While that may be partly true, his greater motivation is to continue to control and protect classified information about tactical and strategic campaigns they employed during the guerrilla war in Luwero, as well as counter insurgency strategies used in northern Uganda. The perpetuation of the official versions told by the NRM/A is key to the NRM project of re-writing Ugandan social and political history, particularly around Luwero and northern Uganda. No doubt, there is the official, popular, filtered and controlled versions the public has been fed; and there is the classified version which only the fighters and senior political ideologues are privy to.
Witness the swift and decisive action to stop in its tracks, the bush war stories series in the Daily Monitor in 2004, when some bush war “heroes” unguardedly began to brag about events that apparently should not have been in the public domain. It is for the same reason that Museveni , the movement and the NRA High Command, continue to court Eriya Kategaya and other high profile dissidents, hoping to lure them back into the fold, not because of any other consideration than that they carry potentially damaging and subversive information and knowledge that could irreparably undermine Museveni and his NRM/A colleagues’ standing over Luwero and northern Uganda. No price is too high in trying to retain, coddle and contain the historical inside the movement, where they can be controlled and censored by bribe and collegial caveat of the “right” or “wrong” forum, and authority of the high command or army council, whose efficacies are dulled by defection and flight beyond the personal control of Museveni within the movement.
One for all, all for one
Kizza Besigye and David Tinyefunza’s late 1990s confrontation with Museveni and the movement came tantalisingly close to a point where such revelation was possible. Unfortunately for nationalist Ugandans, but luckily for Museveni, all the NRM/A historical and “heroes” know that, their hero and celebrity status depends on the eternal comradeship and secrecy on the truth on the Luwero struggle. Therefore, none of them is going to politically harm Museveni any more than walking out of the movement and opposing term limit does-marginally. Even if they wanted to thrust into the open, skeletons from the Luwero war and try to hang them on Museveni’s neck, they are afraid to do so because such action is a double-edged sword. In tripping down Museveni with anything classified on Luwero or northern Uganda, these former NRM luminaries and ideologues simultaneously wound their own standing in politics and history. Their own credibility would suffer a terrible negative knock, and no reasonable person would take them too seriously, because they waited until they started jostling for position at the head of the queue, before they began to speak out, and only after Museveni had refused to yield his position at the head of the line at the trough.
The plausibility of this line of argument lies in the comparable differences and deference with which disaffected NRM heavyweights have been treated in their dissention, conflicts and tribulations with Museveni. Those who were on the political periphery of the bush war and counter insurgency in northern Uganda, and therefore, less privy to top secret tactical, strategic planning and execution of clandestine missions in the struggle, capture and expansion and consolidation of NRM/A political power and control, have been demonised and dismissed with a wave of the hand. Those who were intimately involved, are courted, cajoled and coerced by legal burdens and potential criminal and treasonable indictments, for contravention of army statutes, abuse of office, dereliction of duty or rebellion against the state. Others are bought out with greater role and responsibility in the NRM/A, thereby conflating their personal interests with that of the state, giving them a stake for loyalty and comradeship. We are yet to see the all-guns-blazing attacks and abuses on Bidandi Ssali, directed at former NRM/A stalwarts like Kategaya, Muntu and Mushega. This is because the Kategayas are insider- insiders, which Bidandi is not. This underscores the degree of potential damage to Museveni personally, and to the legacies of the NRM revolutionary heresy, each dissident carries. It also explains why Museveni worked very hard to dissuade Tinyefunza from leaving the army, and the extent to which he went to try to prevent Kizza Beisgye retiring from the army and leaving the country in 2001. Such obsessive and controlling behaviour is bred of the mortal fear and desire to keep a lid on what these high profile dissidents and NRM/A historical know, which have the potential to radically alter the public perception of the NRM/A; reveal the missing puzzle pieces of the debacles in Luwero and the enigma of northern Uganda, with inevitable revision of the place of NRM/A and its leaders in our social and political history.
Accordingly, dissidents such as Kizza Besigye, Eriya Kategaya, Mugisha Muntu, Henry Tumukunde and other high profile NRM/A defectors (including President Paul Kagame) know that they can potentially damage Museveni and the NRM/A politically with what they know about the insurrection in Luwero and counter insurgency in northern Uganda. One would think that given the flare-ups these people have had with Museveni, they would have exposed and humiliated him. But in this messy scheme of political blackmail, it is a stalemate in which Museveni has the upper hand; he can call their bluff, bringing their credibility into question, that it is motivated by ambition and self-interest, coming twenty years after the fact. Why would they choose to speak out at this time, when they glorified their record for this long, until they fell out with Museveni?
It would be considered convenient and opportunistic. They know this and so does Museveni. Therefore, Kategaya, Muntu and others are weak as opponents to Museveni and as allies to the traditional political parties that have historically opposed Museveni from day one of his rule, and are aspiring for a better post-Museveni society. The need and struggle for such a nation and constitutional democracy in Uganda demands honest accountability for the Luwero debacle as well as the fiasco in northern Uganda. Until the NRM dissidents in the ranks of the opposition are willing to go beyond mere opposition to Museveni’s third term and so-called digression from the original NRM/A (which was worse than the present NRM/A & O), and begin to set the record straight on Luwero and northern Uganda, they neither bring any value to the struggle for constitutional democracy, the building of a heterogeneous and tolerant society, nor move us any closer to national understanding, reconciliation and re-integration.
The FDC, populated by NRM/A defectors, and as popularised standard bearer for the opposition against Museveni and the NRM/A & O, has no credibility on these issues, because its leaders cannot divest themselves of the sectarian comradeship and oath of secrecy on the NRM/A war in Luwero, as demonstrated by Mugisha Muntu in consistently defending Museveni and the NRM/A on Luwero and northern Uganda.
Class, national or ethnic struggle?
When General Museveni came to power in 1986, after a five-year, bloody and destructive, sectarian, anti-nationalist and ethnically motivated insurgency, there was euphoria in southern and southwestern Uganda. The NRM/A advent was touted as a radical new era in political, ideological and organisational terms, surpassing all previous regime adulation. This went on despite gruesome tales and images of repression, human rights violations, including extra-judicial killings in eastern and northern Uganda, for which the executive leaders of the regime openly gloated in terms of valour and heroism in pacifying “ primitive” and “backward” sections of its society. The troubling question is: why would an army that emerged out of a five-year struggle in Luwero without as much as hurting even a fly in that part, all of a sudden begin to kill unarmed citizens in Buu-Cooro, Kona Kilak, and Mukura? And this after they had seized political power and in control of the instruments of state, compared to when they were an insurgent and non-state force in Luwero and harmlessly “protected” the Luwero civilians in their areas of control. Is there not more to Luwero and northern Uganda than have been told by the victors and “national heroes”? Are Beisgye, Kategaya, Muntu and Mushega willing to speak on this beyond the twenty-five year official scripts of the NRM/A?
The presentation and celebration of the NRM/A regime as liberating and momentous in fostering a new era of fundamental change and renewed and greater prospects and hopes for democratic and constitutional reforms, even when the same regime was violating the cardinal principles of a constitutional and democratic order, can be explained by two factors.
First, the NRM/A resistance was not waged as a nationalist struggle, and any appearance that it was thus, was inadvertent, expedient and convenient, because the insurgency was primarily motivated by the desire to dislodge “northerners” from power and end assumed northern domination since independence in 1962. Invariably, it was a coalescence of primarily Bantu-speaking elite around Yoweri Museveni’s Popular Resistance Army (PRA), Yusufu Lule’s Uganda Freedom Fighters (UFF), Lutakome Kayiira’s Uganda Freedom Movement (UFM) and Federal Democratic Movement (FEDEMU) of Serwanga Lwanga, against the nationalist coalition and elected government of Milton Obote and the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). Stripped of its rhetoric and initial leftist revolutionary cant, the NRM/A struggle was neither democratic nor nationalist and liberating, but a tribal war of a Bantu alliance against an assumed northern and self-conscious Nilotic enemies, falsely symbolised by Milton Obote, the UPC, Acholi and Langi. Moreover, the movement’s ethnic ideology, aspirations and rhetoric had defined out of and alienated the non-Bantu parts of Uganda as “Anyanyas”, and therefore, non-citizens and savages undeserving constitutional protection and humane treatment, and not entitled to the rights and freedom the new order sought to establish by force of arms.
This assertion draws credibility from Museveni’s otherwise incredulous open gloating in the national media in 1987, of massacring hundreds and thousands of people in northern Uganda, with scant regard to the resume of rights and freedoms supposed by national and constitutional democracy for which he claimed to have fought. This should not have come as a surprise to those who paid attention to the politics and rhetoric of the Luwero war; Museveni and the NRM/A’s triumph over its opponents, was in that respect not a liberation struggle, but a tribal duel and war of conquest. And as with all rapacious wars of conquests, the vanquished seldom are perceived to have neither rights nor are they completely human entitled to moral equality; deserving whatever punishment the victors deemed proportionate and justifiable for their alleged crimes. And that is the tragedy of northern Uganda.
The second explanation is that the greater northern Uganda, the areas and demographics north and east of the Nile (excluding Busoga and Bunyoro) were assumed UPC strongholds and political base of Milton Obote. The various competing interests Yoweri Museveni managed to cobble together, besides their tribal and linguistic commonalities, were united by their political impotence and irrational fear and hatred of Milton Obote , UPC and “northerners”. Therefore, to ensure that Milton Obote and the UPC never again pose any national threats to the emergent, narrow, non-national southern ethnic alliance, UPC leadership and its national organisational structures had to be dismantled. These goals were achieved through outlawing political parties, aimed more at restraining and immobilising the UPC than any other party. To ensure that this was effective, political leaders from these areas were hounded out of the country, arrested, tortured and others murdered. In Acholi, Lango and Teso, the northern and eastern rebellions of the Uganda Democratic Movement / Army (UPDM/A) and the Uganda People’s Movement/Army (UPM/A) respectively, provided the pretext and cover for the regime to accomplish such heinous deeds without raising any rights alarms. However, in Bukedi, Bugisu and Busoga, which were free of insurgency, the new regime had to devise fictitious clandestine dissident movement, Force Obote Back Again (FOBA) to give the regime the excuse and cover to pre-emptively, ruthlessly and permanently eliminate any suspected and assumed opposition.
Objectively, a natural opposition to the NRM/A was strengthened in these regions by the regime’s strong-armed strategy in extending and consolidating its political control over these areas. The brutal and intolerant nature and character of the regime, exposed by its response to the northern and eastern insurgencies, surprisingly were not the exception to the rule, but its true essence. Despite such exposition, its junior partners in the alliance, continued to delude themselves in the thought of playing a part in building a new society, replete with constitutional democratic principles rested on political parties and plural politics with liberty to freely organise and compete for political power. Were they so wrong; no sooner had Museveni and the NRM/A felt strong enough and legitimised by those they had co-opted from the DP, UFM and FEDEMU, than he moved to dispense with those who sought to organise and act independently without deference to him and the NRM/A. This first phase of ridding the NRM/A of internal dissent and leadership and ideological challenges to Museveni, saw the departure of political stars such as Kawanga Ssemwogerere and the DP, as well as the arrest and detention of scores of Baganda and DP leaders, including Evaristo Nyanzi, Serwanga Lwanga and the mysterious assassination of Lutakombe Kayiira.
It was becoming clear that Yoweri Museveni’s preoccupation was neither with institutional reforms nor the establishment of a new order of constitutional democracy, but the acquisition and holding of power for himself and his close relatives and tribal confidants. Such awakening helped stir up the second phase of unease and political unrest within the NRM/A. While criticisms from those considered outside the core of the NRM/A could be dismissed, as petulant ingratitude, and the dismissal of their proponent countenanced without much trepidation, recalcitrance and insubordination from the inner circle and historical members of the NRM/A, especially those with active link to the military wing of the movement, were simply unimaginably exasperating. Caught off-guard by stinging and candid criticisms of corruption, nepotism, incompetence and dictatorial tendencies from Kizza Besigye, a former state minister and political commissar of the NRM/A regime, and David Tinyefunza, a senior army commander and NRM/A ideologue, the undressing, implosion and crumbling of the NRM/A façade had began in earnest.
Like a house of cards, the once formidable revolutionary orthodoxy and assumed “apotheosis” of Ugandan democratic and constitutional metamorphosis began to fracture and fall apart. The impact of sudden internal deviance and defiance to Museveni was apoplectic, equalled only by the manic anger and high-handed response to Besigye and Tinyefunza. Both were publicly humiliated and politically ostracised, while their freedom restricted and their wish to retire from the NRA rejected. On the surface, one would have thought that Museveni was better off by letting them go without a farce, since this would eliminate the emergent challenge for political and ideological predominance within the NRM/A. This would make sense, only if we limited ourselves to the moment and only considered the struggle for political power as the factor at play here. But if we took a panoramic view, surveying both the past, the present and the future and tried to understand the interests of the protagonists in this drama, more so Museveni’s, then we should find that political power alone was not the prize at stake. It was credibility, hero-worship and role and place of Museveni and the NRM/A in our history, collective memory and posterity.
In conclusion, Ugandan democratic forces should welcome the defection of former NRM/A ideologues and generals to their ranks in the struggle for a peaceful, just and equitable society. But the collective desire and aspiration to build a constitutional democracy and come to terms with the country’s past and chart a way forward cannot be achieved only by opposing third term and merely walking out of the movement, while continuing to speak from the NRM/A twenty-five year script sheets on Luwero and northern Uganda. For the way forward, the political cast must be accountable and candid on their roles in the drama past, in order to allay suspicion and perception that peace and constitutional democracy hopes and money are riding on Trojan horses, and that genuine democratic forces and perennial opposition to the NRM/A are better off with their dark horses that have been in this race from the start.
Witness the swift and decisive action to stop in its tracks, the bush war stories series in the Daily Monitor in 2004, when some bush war “heroes” unguardedly began to brag about events that apparently should not have been in the public domain. It is for the same reason that Museveni , the movement and the NRA High Command, continue to court Eriya Kategaya and other high profile dissidents, hoping to lure them back into the fold, not because of any other consideration than that they carry potentially damaging and subversive information and knowledge that could irreparably undermine Museveni and his NRM/A colleagues’ standing over Luwero and northern Uganda. No price is too high in trying to retain, coddle and contain the historical inside the movement, where they can be controlled and censored by bribe and collegial caveat of the “right” or “wrong” forum, and authority of the high command or army council, whose efficacies are dulled by defection and flight beyond the personal control of Museveni within the movement.
One for all, all for one
Kizza Besigye and David Tinyefunza’s late 1990s confrontation with Museveni and the movement came tantalisingly close to a point where such revelation was possible. Unfortunately for nationalist Ugandans, but luckily for Museveni, all the NRM/A historical and “heroes” know that, their hero and celebrity status depends on the eternal comradeship and secrecy on the truth on the Luwero struggle. Therefore, none of them is going to politically harm Museveni any more than walking out of the movement and opposing term limit does-marginally. Even if they wanted to thrust into the open, skeletons from the Luwero war and try to hang them on Museveni’s neck, they are afraid to do so because such action is a double-edged sword. In tripping down Museveni with anything classified on Luwero or northern Uganda, these former NRM luminaries and ideologues simultaneously wound their own standing in politics and history. Their own credibility would suffer a terrible negative knock, and no reasonable person would take them too seriously, because they waited until they started jostling for position at the head of the queue, before they began to speak out, and only after Museveni had refused to yield his position at the head of the line at the trough.
The plausibility of this line of argument lies in the comparable differences and deference with which disaffected NRM heavyweights have been treated in their dissention, conflicts and tribulations with Museveni. Those who were on the political periphery of the bush war and counter insurgency in northern Uganda, and therefore, less privy to top secret tactical, strategic planning and execution of clandestine missions in the struggle, capture and expansion and consolidation of NRM/A political power and control, have been demonised and dismissed with a wave of the hand. Those who were intimately involved, are courted, cajoled and coerced by legal burdens and potential criminal and treasonable indictments, for contravention of army statutes, abuse of office, dereliction of duty or rebellion against the state. Others are bought out with greater role and responsibility in the NRM/A, thereby conflating their personal interests with that of the state, giving them a stake for loyalty and comradeship. We are yet to see the all-guns-blazing attacks and abuses on Bidandi Ssali, directed at former NRM/A stalwarts like Kategaya, Muntu and Mushega. This is because the Kategayas are insider- insiders, which Bidandi is not. This underscores the degree of potential damage to Museveni personally, and to the legacies of the NRM revolutionary heresy, each dissident carries. It also explains why Museveni worked very hard to dissuade Tinyefunza from leaving the army, and the extent to which he went to try to prevent Kizza Beisgye retiring from the army and leaving the country in 2001. Such obsessive and controlling behaviour is bred of the mortal fear and desire to keep a lid on what these high profile dissidents and NRM/A historical know, which have the potential to radically alter the public perception of the NRM/A; reveal the missing puzzle pieces of the debacles in Luwero and the enigma of northern Uganda, with inevitable revision of the place of NRM/A and its leaders in our social and political history.
Accordingly, dissidents such as Kizza Besigye, Eriya Kategaya, Mugisha Muntu, Henry Tumukunde and other high profile NRM/A defectors (including President Paul Kagame) know that they can potentially damage Museveni and the NRM/A politically with what they know about the insurrection in Luwero and counter insurgency in northern Uganda. One would think that given the flare-ups these people have had with Museveni, they would have exposed and humiliated him. But in this messy scheme of political blackmail, it is a stalemate in which Museveni has the upper hand; he can call their bluff, bringing their credibility into question, that it is motivated by ambition and self-interest, coming twenty years after the fact. Why would they choose to speak out at this time, when they glorified their record for this long, until they fell out with Museveni?
It would be considered convenient and opportunistic. They know this and so does Museveni. Therefore, Kategaya, Muntu and others are weak as opponents to Museveni and as allies to the traditional political parties that have historically opposed Museveni from day one of his rule, and are aspiring for a better post-Museveni society. The need and struggle for such a nation and constitutional democracy in Uganda demands honest accountability for the Luwero debacle as well as the fiasco in northern Uganda. Until the NRM dissidents in the ranks of the opposition are willing to go beyond mere opposition to Museveni’s third term and so-called digression from the original NRM/A (which was worse than the present NRM/A & O), and begin to set the record straight on Luwero and northern Uganda, they neither bring any value to the struggle for constitutional democracy, the building of a heterogeneous and tolerant society, nor move us any closer to national understanding, reconciliation and re-integration.
The FDC, populated by NRM/A defectors, and as popularised standard bearer for the opposition against Museveni and the NRM/A & O, has no credibility on these issues, because its leaders cannot divest themselves of the sectarian comradeship and oath of secrecy on the NRM/A war in Luwero, as demonstrated by Mugisha Muntu in consistently defending Museveni and the NRM/A on Luwero and northern Uganda.
Class, national or ethnic struggle?
When General Museveni came to power in 1986, after a five-year, bloody and destructive, sectarian, anti-nationalist and ethnically motivated insurgency, there was euphoria in southern and southwestern Uganda. The NRM/A advent was touted as a radical new era in political, ideological and organisational terms, surpassing all previous regime adulation. This went on despite gruesome tales and images of repression, human rights violations, including extra-judicial killings in eastern and northern Uganda, for which the executive leaders of the regime openly gloated in terms of valour and heroism in pacifying “ primitive” and “backward” sections of its society. The troubling question is: why would an army that emerged out of a five-year struggle in Luwero without as much as hurting even a fly in that part, all of a sudden begin to kill unarmed citizens in Buu-Cooro, Kona Kilak, and Mukura? And this after they had seized political power and in control of the instruments of state, compared to when they were an insurgent and non-state force in Luwero and harmlessly “protected” the Luwero civilians in their areas of control. Is there not more to Luwero and northern Uganda than have been told by the victors and “national heroes”? Are Beisgye, Kategaya, Muntu and Mushega willing to speak on this beyond the twenty-five year official scripts of the NRM/A?
The presentation and celebration of the NRM/A regime as liberating and momentous in fostering a new era of fundamental change and renewed and greater prospects and hopes for democratic and constitutional reforms, even when the same regime was violating the cardinal principles of a constitutional and democratic order, can be explained by two factors.
First, the NRM/A resistance was not waged as a nationalist struggle, and any appearance that it was thus, was inadvertent, expedient and convenient, because the insurgency was primarily motivated by the desire to dislodge “northerners” from power and end assumed northern domination since independence in 1962. Invariably, it was a coalescence of primarily Bantu-speaking elite around Yoweri Museveni’s Popular Resistance Army (PRA), Yusufu Lule’s Uganda Freedom Fighters (UFF), Lutakome Kayiira’s Uganda Freedom Movement (UFM) and Federal Democratic Movement (FEDEMU) of Serwanga Lwanga, against the nationalist coalition and elected government of Milton Obote and the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). Stripped of its rhetoric and initial leftist revolutionary cant, the NRM/A struggle was neither democratic nor nationalist and liberating, but a tribal war of a Bantu alliance against an assumed northern and self-conscious Nilotic enemies, falsely symbolised by Milton Obote, the UPC, Acholi and Langi. Moreover, the movement’s ethnic ideology, aspirations and rhetoric had defined out of and alienated the non-Bantu parts of Uganda as “Anyanyas”, and therefore, non-citizens and savages undeserving constitutional protection and humane treatment, and not entitled to the rights and freedom the new order sought to establish by force of arms.
This assertion draws credibility from Museveni’s otherwise incredulous open gloating in the national media in 1987, of massacring hundreds and thousands of people in northern Uganda, with scant regard to the resume of rights and freedoms supposed by national and constitutional democracy for which he claimed to have fought. This should not have come as a surprise to those who paid attention to the politics and rhetoric of the Luwero war; Museveni and the NRM/A’s triumph over its opponents, was in that respect not a liberation struggle, but a tribal duel and war of conquest. And as with all rapacious wars of conquests, the vanquished seldom are perceived to have neither rights nor are they completely human entitled to moral equality; deserving whatever punishment the victors deemed proportionate and justifiable for their alleged crimes. And that is the tragedy of northern Uganda.
The second explanation is that the greater northern Uganda, the areas and demographics north and east of the Nile (excluding Busoga and Bunyoro) were assumed UPC strongholds and political base of Milton Obote. The various competing interests Yoweri Museveni managed to cobble together, besides their tribal and linguistic commonalities, were united by their political impotence and irrational fear and hatred of Milton Obote , UPC and “northerners”. Therefore, to ensure that Milton Obote and the UPC never again pose any national threats to the emergent, narrow, non-national southern ethnic alliance, UPC leadership and its national organisational structures had to be dismantled. These goals were achieved through outlawing political parties, aimed more at restraining and immobilising the UPC than any other party. To ensure that this was effective, political leaders from these areas were hounded out of the country, arrested, tortured and others murdered. In Acholi, Lango and Teso, the northern and eastern rebellions of the Uganda Democratic Movement / Army (UPDM/A) and the Uganda People’s Movement/Army (UPM/A) respectively, provided the pretext and cover for the regime to accomplish such heinous deeds without raising any rights alarms. However, in Bukedi, Bugisu and Busoga, which were free of insurgency, the new regime had to devise fictitious clandestine dissident movement, Force Obote Back Again (FOBA) to give the regime the excuse and cover to pre-emptively, ruthlessly and permanently eliminate any suspected and assumed opposition.
Objectively, a natural opposition to the NRM/A was strengthened in these regions by the regime’s strong-armed strategy in extending and consolidating its political control over these areas. The brutal and intolerant nature and character of the regime, exposed by its response to the northern and eastern insurgencies, surprisingly were not the exception to the rule, but its true essence. Despite such exposition, its junior partners in the alliance, continued to delude themselves in the thought of playing a part in building a new society, replete with constitutional democratic principles rested on political parties and plural politics with liberty to freely organise and compete for political power. Were they so wrong; no sooner had Museveni and the NRM/A felt strong enough and legitimised by those they had co-opted from the DP, UFM and FEDEMU, than he moved to dispense with those who sought to organise and act independently without deference to him and the NRM/A. This first phase of ridding the NRM/A of internal dissent and leadership and ideological challenges to Museveni, saw the departure of political stars such as Kawanga Ssemwogerere and the DP, as well as the arrest and detention of scores of Baganda and DP leaders, including Evaristo Nyanzi, Serwanga Lwanga and the mysterious assassination of Lutakombe Kayiira.
It was becoming clear that Yoweri Museveni’s preoccupation was neither with institutional reforms nor the establishment of a new order of constitutional democracy, but the acquisition and holding of power for himself and his close relatives and tribal confidants. Such awakening helped stir up the second phase of unease and political unrest within the NRM/A. While criticisms from those considered outside the core of the NRM/A could be dismissed, as petulant ingratitude, and the dismissal of their proponent countenanced without much trepidation, recalcitrance and insubordination from the inner circle and historical members of the NRM/A, especially those with active link to the military wing of the movement, were simply unimaginably exasperating. Caught off-guard by stinging and candid criticisms of corruption, nepotism, incompetence and dictatorial tendencies from Kizza Besigye, a former state minister and political commissar of the NRM/A regime, and David Tinyefunza, a senior army commander and NRM/A ideologue, the undressing, implosion and crumbling of the NRM/A façade had began in earnest.
Like a house of cards, the once formidable revolutionary orthodoxy and assumed “apotheosis” of Ugandan democratic and constitutional metamorphosis began to fracture and fall apart. The impact of sudden internal deviance and defiance to Museveni was apoplectic, equalled only by the manic anger and high-handed response to Besigye and Tinyefunza. Both were publicly humiliated and politically ostracised, while their freedom restricted and their wish to retire from the NRA rejected. On the surface, one would have thought that Museveni was better off by letting them go without a farce, since this would eliminate the emergent challenge for political and ideological predominance within the NRM/A. This would make sense, only if we limited ourselves to the moment and only considered the struggle for political power as the factor at play here. But if we took a panoramic view, surveying both the past, the present and the future and tried to understand the interests of the protagonists in this drama, more so Museveni’s, then we should find that political power alone was not the prize at stake. It was credibility, hero-worship and role and place of Museveni and the NRM/A in our history, collective memory and posterity.
In conclusion, Ugandan democratic forces should welcome the defection of former NRM/A ideologues and generals to their ranks in the struggle for a peaceful, just and equitable society. But the collective desire and aspiration to build a constitutional democracy and come to terms with the country’s past and chart a way forward cannot be achieved only by opposing third term and merely walking out of the movement, while continuing to speak from the NRM/A twenty-five year script sheets on Luwero and northern Uganda. For the way forward, the political cast must be accountable and candid on their roles in the drama past, in order to allay suspicion and perception that peace and constitutional democracy hopes and money are riding on Trojan horses, and that genuine democratic forces and perennial opposition to the NRM/A are better off with their dark horses that have been in this race from the start.
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