The test of democratic change continues to elude Uganda. Alone in the East African Community, Uganda has never known a peaceful or democratic handing over of political power since independence in 1962.
The just-ended election was a turning point where the story of Uganda once again failed to turn. If the man declared the winner won, the victory was pyrrhic.
It had all the hallmarks of bad electoral practice. There was bullying, threats, intimidation and unnecessary display of armed state might. It bordered on gross abuse of office.
In January 1986, 40-year old Yoweri Museveni powered his way into Kampala and on to State House Entebbe. He arrived ahead of a guerilla army largely made up of child soldiers, commonly referred to as kadogo.
Those who were of age will recall media images of these gun-totting striplings who had been robbed of their childhood. Some looked as young as 10.
They blasted rocket and mortar into Kampala and kept surveillance as Museveni took his oath of office in the streets of Kampala, on January 29, 1986.
Making his maiden speech, the new President assured Uganda and the world that the country had just witnessed fundamental change. All previous changes, he said, had only been changes of guard.
For his predecessors had only perfected the same old bad habits. They had been looters and plunderers. They had excelled in misrule, murder and mayhem. Now Museveni vowed to restore Uganda to order.
He would make Kampala live up to the sobriquet of the pearl of Africa, after Winston Churchill’s fascination with the city on seven hills, when he visited in 1908.
It is instructive that the pathway to Museveni’s ‘fundamental change’ was bloody. There was nothing new about this, apart from the scale of violence and the attrition.
In May 1966, Prime Minister Apollo Milton Obote, set the tradition of taking power by force. He overthrew the first President, Sir Edward Luwangula Walugembe Mutesa II.
Obote conspired with Parliament to abolish the arrangement under which Uganda went to independence, with the Kingdom of Buganda enjoying a semi-independent status within the larger Uganda.
COZENAGE, CALUMNY AND CHICANERY
Ironically, the Kabaka – the head of the semi-autonomous Buganda – was also the President of Uganda. It is not surprising that the relationship between the President and his Prime Minister was one of cozenage, calumny and chicanery.
Obote brought all this to a halt by storming the Kabaka’s palace with gunfire. He ran roughshod through sacred places and laid the palace to ugly waste. He declared an end to the traditional kingdoms. He announced that he was now the President.
It has been said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Those of us who were old enough recall the pomp and circumstance that greeted the bloody arrival of Idi Amin Dada on January 25, 1971.
The joke of it was that the semi-literate and bucolic Amin had been Obote’s most trusted military man. He had bypassed more deserving soldiers to be the head of the country’s military. His lack of education was a good credential. Then there had been his endless capacity to feign loyalty.
A little told story is that the first President, Sir Edward Mutesa II, was himself easily East Africa’s best-trained soldier in his day and therefore one who understood the need for competence in the military. However, the soldiers belonged to Obote, the Prime Minister.
Edward Mutesa was already the Kabaka of Buganda when he left his country for Magdalene College, Cambridge. Used to his kingdom being reigned over by regents since his coronation at age 15, Edward left for the Officer Training Corps at Cambridge.
He was commissioned as a captain and went on to become a major-general in the British Army, perhaps the only African – indeed the only Black – to attain that rank at the time.
In May 1966, the Major General-turned President-turned-knight, would be smuggled out of his country to escape from Obote’s bloodhounds.
The coup against him took place while he was in faraway Singapore, attending the Commonwealth Head of Governments jamboree that was quite in vogue those days. But Idi Amin’s bloody machine would soon swing into action.
The successive images of the execution of Makerere University student leader Sebastian Namirundu in the pages of The Daily Nation in the aftermath of the Amin takeover have lived in the minds of even those of us who were only in primary school.
The young man is seen in one photo clad only in a shirt. A loose cloth is suspended from the waist. He is firmly tied on a tree. His eyes are popped out. They speak of fear. He is staring at his executioners, perhaps in incredulity.
He cannot believe what is about to happen to him. Adjacent to him are two former officials of the Obote government, undergoing the same ritual.
Then comes the last image. The firing squad has done its thing. The three are now dead. Their limp bodies are bent forwards at the waist. Uganda had entered the Amin reign of terror. It would last nine years.
Over the period, the husband of five known wives and father to close to 50 had killed nearly half a million people. He declared himself to be “His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Alhaji Dr Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE.”
At the end of what looked like an unending season of blood, rape and untold mayhem, the field marshal was outsmarted by a combined army of Ugandan exiles and Tanzanian soldiers.
Suffice it to observe that Amin brought Uganda to its knees. At his defeat in April 1979 the economy was in tatters, the state had long collapsed. Anarchy was the order of the day.
He had killed university professors, journalists, doctors, lawyers, common crooks, prostitutes, clergymen, his own friends — virtually someone from every rank and file.
He had killed foreigners, too. Kenya’s Esther Chesire, a student at Makerere, simply disappeared into thin air. So, too, did Israel’s Dora Block. Yomi Netanyahu was killed in an operation in Entebbe. Bishop Janani Luwum was killed in a sham car accident. He also killed Chief Justice Bendicto Kiwanuka, Makerere Vice-Chancellor Prof Frank Kalimuzo — and many others.
His undoing was an apparent attempt on his vice-president Mustafa Idris’s life. A part of his army rebelled. The soldiers fled to Tanzania. They became part of the effort that deposed him a few months later.
Amin’s successor, Prof Yusuf Lule, was stopgap man. After ruling for only 68 days, Lule was deposed by the quasi-military National Consultative Commission. He paved the way for the colourless but very brilliant Godfrey Binaisa.
Binaisa crossed the line when, after 11 months, he sacked the military chief of staff, Brigadier Oyite Ojok. The military commission headed by Paul Muwanga, with Yoweri Museveni as his deputy, was not amused. They overthrew Binaisa.
Muwanga and Museveni installed themselves and two others in a strange and troubled arrangement called the Presidential Commission of Uganda. The other two on the commission were military men, Oyite Ojok and Tito Okello.
The commission would reign this way up to the chaotic elections of December 1980 when Milton Obote was rigged into power, giving him the opportunity to feed his nine-year thirst for power and vengeance. He avenged both real and imagined sins with rare and drunken vindictiveness.
Meanwhile, Museveni and Lule were in the bush, jointly fighting for the overthrow of Obote. However, it was the illiterate Bazilio Olara Okello and Tito Okello who would overthrow Obote in July 1985.
Bazilio was head of state for a few days before Tito took over in a palace coup. This was the man Museveni ran out of Kampala in January 1986 after the farce that was the Nairobi Accord of November 1985 between Museveni and Okello. Ever since, it has been Museveni and more Museveni.
Give it to the man, Museveni. He returned Uganda to order. The country was a pariah republic, the cesspit of the world, when Museveni came to power.
Ugandans were scattered in destitution to the four corners of the world. Many lived here in Kenya, where ordinary citizen despised and scorned them. Professionals took up poorly paying teaching jobs in Kenyan schools. Women worked in all manner of quasi-professional arrangements.
Kenyan women regularly engaged them in media wars about taking away their men. Slowly, they returned to their ragtag country and began the painful assignment of rebuilding it.
It was not clear that anyone would touch them. I recall President Museveni pleading with the world to give Uganda a chance. “We welcome anyone who wants to work with us on the basis of what we have. If you can take our bananas and our beans and give us oil, you are our friend.”
Slowly, painfully, Uganda has been restored. The big question is: how far can this go? Is Uganda’s stability under-filled with tragedy in waiting?
In typical African fashion, reminiscent of Mirambo of Nyamwezi in the 19th century, Museveni has built an empire. However, it is a personal empire. Museveni has not built institutions that can outlast him and take Uganda into a stable, prosperous future.
It would appear that Uganda will remain steady as long as Museveni is on the scene. Unfortunately, nobody remains on the scene forever. For there is such a thing as natural attrition. And it is sneaking in. The Museveni I see today is a far cry from the young man with physical and mental celerity that I saw 30 years ago.
Of more concern is the fact that Uganda has not developed a convincing democratic tradition. The show of might and bullying of the Opposition in the just ended election was mind-boggling.
It was Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi who told Museveni that revolutionaries don’t give away power. Unfortunately, Gaddafi’s own exit after 37 years serves to remind us of the ugly alternative to democratic change.
In the end, people get tired of even the finest leaders. They resort to desperate and atrocious alternatives. And Africa’s leaders are not famous for any measure of fineness. They tease us with the thought that we could try other methods.
President Museveni has his job cut out for him. He will do well to begin planning his democratic exit. The palpable frustration and impatience seen in a huge swathe of Ugandan youth cannot be wished away.
If Museveni has returned Uganda to order, he will do well to now build and strengthen institutions and prepare to leave at the end of this new term. He must not cause his compatriots to return to the bush. Africa and the world will remember him well if he succeeds.
If he doesn’t, then he has surely booked a place in the annals of history beside Uganda’s leaders who went before him, with the exception that he reigned for long.
