THE CORRECT LINE? Chapter 4: All Ugandans Are in the Movement

Henry Tumukunde, Gilbert Bukenya and Miria Matembe 

(email the author)

In the third instalment of the serialization of the book, The Correct Line? Uganda under Museveni, the author, Olive Kobusingye writes about how a system of government can take advantage of the people’s ignorance to claim the existence of freedom in society.

“A system can appear to be free, but you find that in essence, it is not so. For instance, you can manipulate the ignorance of the people and make them make decisions that will militate against their interests. Can this be called freedom? Can freedom include manipulation? Should there be freedom to manipulate, misinform, and take advantage of people’s ignorance? Is that democracy? I personally do not think it is.’ - Yoweri Museveni (‘Political Substance and Political Form,’ What is Africa’s Problem?)”

The 2001 presidential campaign was conducted under very unusual circumstances. Political parties were still banned, and candidates were supposed to be nominated on the basis of ‘individual merit.’ All candidates, and indeed all citizens, were by legal compulsion members of the Movement, which was said not to be a political party. When Dr Kizza Besigye declared his intentions to run for president, that should have been perfectly in order - but it was not.

To cut him off from any support that he could have counted on from the Movement, Museveni declared that Besigye had deserted the Movement. To make that point, Museveni surrounded himself with his cabinet in a clear bid to demonstrate that only he enjoyed their unwavering support.

At times as many as six cabinet ministers would appear with Museveni on a television programme, prompting the joke that the President was moving around with a cabinet choir to sing his praises. But if there had been subtle cracks in the Movement fabric before, the campaign drove deep pegs into those cracks, and the chances of healing receded with every passing week.

On November 25, 2000, Museveni was declared the ‘only candidate’ for the Movement by the Parliamentary Caucus. In the Movement Caucus the members resolved:

- That we welcome the recent announcement by President Museveni that he will offer himself again for election
- That we endorse the candidature of Y. K. Museveni as the torch bearer of the Movement in the said presidential elections
- That we bind ourselves to fully support and advance the candidature of Y. K. Museveni to victory by mobilising all people in our constituencies to give unconditional support to him.

This resolution, formally penned on December 9, 2000, was duly signed by the Parliamentary Caucus Chairman, Professor Gilbert Bukenya. At the time, contradictions were mounting rapidly. The Movement was an all-inclusive ‘no party’, yet it was fielding a presidential candidate and implying that only that candidate was eligible to stand on its ticket.

If all Ugandans were indeed in the Movement, this meant that no other Ugandan was expected to run for the presidency. In addition, it had not been possible for the (banned) political parties to send their representatives to Parliament. This was because all those in Parliament were by compulsion members of the all-inclusive Movement and had been elected on the basis of their individual (personal) merit, not as flag bearers of any party.

After Dr Besigye launched his campaign, however, an NRM caucus was formed. This apparent injustice was not lost on the various groups and parties that were opposed to the Movement. For those who advocated the lifting of the ban on political parties, the battle lines were clear. However, there was inertia and confusion among those who had been strong supporters of the Movement but were now feeling disenfranchised. Museveni was not unaware of these sentiments. Long before serious and overt rifts occurred in the Movement structures, he had sought to distinguish Uganda’s political arrangement from a ruling one-party system.

While addressing the African Caribbean and Pacific nations/European Economic Community joint Assembly in Kampala in February 1991, Museveni had tried to distinguish the two: There is also another distortion in politics by those who run one-party systems. If I express an opinion that you do not like and you expel me from the party but do not allow me to form another one, then I am effectively disenfranchised.

This practice has created a lot of problems in Africa.... We do not expel members from the Movement: if you must expel people, logically, you must allow them to form another party.
In 1991 nobody was publicly contesting for the leadership of the mass movement that Museveni had founded, so there was no need to ‘expel’ anyone. In 2000, however, these assurances evaporated with Besigye’s challenge for the presidency. Anne Mugisha described how  the mirage of the all-inclusive Movement started to vanish:

After Besigye got locked out of the Movement’s National Executive Conference, it became clear that there was no internal democracy, that this was a one-party state, and that what we had mistaken for national structures were actually party structures. So we were orphaned. It was like a carpet being pulled from under our feet. We had built structures thinking they were national, but one party now owned them.
David Mpanga, an Oxford University-trained barrister who had just returned to Uganda, and whose mother was a Member of Parliament, thought the whole system was a fraud:

I had a problem with the idea that everybody was in the Movement, but someone could cross to the Movement. Then where were they before? If you determine that everything that exists — all matter — is in the universe, then how can anybody be outside the Universe? If you have now come into the Universe, where were you before? I was of the view that the lie about the all-inclusive nature of the Movement, even if it might have been necessary at one point, was responsible for a number of the problems coming up at the time. They were propagating one lie which required that they then tell many other lies to cover up. My problem at the time was the fusion of the state with the party.

In some ways Mpanga was a rather unlikely source of sharp criticism for the Movement. His mother was very involved with the formation of the NRM and, before that, had been one of the promoters of Museveni’s Uganda Patriotic Movement in the 1980 elections.

My mother served in clandestine roles in Kampala during the bush war, so we were all very sensitised about governance issues. Right through Idi Amin and Obote, we were told, and could see for ourselves, that these were bad regimes. We were also told the NRA/NRM stood for the forces of good.

During the [bush] war many people that I now know to have been involved in the war effort came through our home - Sam Katabarwa, my uncle Kanyerezi, I later came to understand about their involvement in these activities - such as fund raising, and helping to smuggle people who were involved in the struggle.
On the same day that the Movement Caucus bound itself ‘unconditionally’ to Museveni’s presidential bid, Brig. Henry Tumukunde and his wife arrived in Rukungiri in style — aboard a military helicopter, no doubt fuelled and paid for by the people’s taxes, to attend a private marriage ceremony - at which he was reported to have said that he would not salute any other head of state but Museveni. At another meeting in Bushenyi, then Minister Miria Matembe likened all those challenging Museveni in the election to frogs wallowing in the mud.

As the campaign picked momentum, so too did the acrimony between the candidates, and the suffering and persecution of those in the de facto opposition. The Movement seemed to be afflicted by the same malady that had bothered the UPC three decades earlier, as Museveni so aptly noted: ‘Incapable of practicing democracy within itself, the UPC could hardly have expected to nurture it in the country at large.’
(‘A Brief Historical Review’, Sowing the Mustard Seed, 1997)
cap: Henry Tumukunde, Gilbert Bukenya and Miria Matembe

Source: Daily Monitor, Posted Wednesday, October 20 2010 at 21:12