2015: Politically charged year

A major part of the news reporting in the year that has just begun will centre around political jostling ahead of the 2016 general elections. 2014 was dominated by the question of who would succeed President Museveni.

A faction within the ruling NRM camp believed it had the answer: Amama Mbabazi, the party’s secretary-general and Uganda’s prime minister.

The faction of the NRM loyal to and directed by President Museveni spent the first nine months of 2014 trying to clamp down on any such idea by the pro-Mbabazi camp.
Eventually Mbabazi was stripped of both his offices as prime minister and NRM secretary-general.

After the NRM delegates’ conference in Kampala in mid-December, Mbabazi went quiet, as did his vocal wife Jacqueline Mbabazi. Into that silence stepped a one Gen David Sejusa, the embodiment of the renegade.

Out of the blue, Sejusa flew back to Uganda from self-imposed exile in London on the night of December 13, 2014, and arrived at Entebbe International Airport in the early morning of December 14. Sejusa’s return left many confused and many more irritated.

What had sent him into exile, if he was now returning? Was it even exile or had he been sent to London to infiltrate the anti-Museveni groups there? That seemed unlikely.

There is no major Opposition figure or large anti-NRM Ugandan community in the UK influential enough to warrant the coordinator of the intelligence services to go in person and infiltrate them. Gen Sejusa’s exile seemed to be based on something real.

2015 began with Museveni trying to meet for talks with Sejusa. Sensing a trap being laid to discredit him, Sejusa refused to take Museveni’s call. The President does not take kindly to his calls being rejected, as he so publicly lamented following the 2009 Buganda riots in reference to Kabaka Mutebi declining to take Museveni’s calls.

So in anger, Museveni ordered the house arrest of Sejusa. The atmosphere must have been made threatening enough for Sejusa to relent and agree to meet Museveni.

The meeting was designed to weaken Sejusa by portraying him as a Museveni loyalist after all and by that create mistrust of him among his supporters and the group of which he was a part in London, the Free Uganda Movement.
But it was also for Museveni to be seen to be lenient to Sejusa because of the many voices that are in agreement with the General. Sejusa comes from among the Bahima, a group vital to Museveni’s hold on power.
It annoyed many of them to see Brig Henry Tumukunde held under house arrest for eight years and despite Sejusa’s unpredictable ways, annoyed many of them too at his exiling.
Speaking of Nasser Sebaggala, it finally had to happen. He had been wooed into the NRM from the Liberal party he founded after falling out with the Democratic Party, only to find he was not getting much face-to-face time with President Museveni or being the influential force in the NRM he had assumed he would be.

Unlike Henry Banyenzaki, Ruranga Rubaramira, Peter Mayega, Badru Wegulo and others, Sebaggala is too proud and calculating to tolerate political irrelevance indefinitely. So in the first week of an already politically charmed January 2015, Sebaggala announced he was quitting the Museveni kraal and returning to the Opposition.

The question now on many minds is what to make of this. Is this yet another ploy by Museveni to have Sebaggala return to the Opposition and infiltrate it or was it real?

2015 will be dominated by this kind of suspicion, in which nobody is sure where anybody stands. Even the silence by Mbabazi since the Namboole delegates’ conference has a few people wondering if huge sums of money have been paid to him to buy his silence and exit from the presidential bid that many had hoped he would make.

This uncertainty on the political scene leaves one man in an enviable position. Dr Kizza Besigye, former president of the main Opposition party the FDC and three time presidential candidate, has been tried and tested as no other Opposition politician since the NRM came to power in 1986, but has remained steadfast and consistent.

His consistency in a country where few Opposition politicians stand by their word makes Besigye once again as a favourite to contest against Museveni in the 2016 elections. Besigye will have to be a man to watch in 2015.

The recent series of terror attacks by Islamists on Western targets in prominent Western cities, from the shooting dead of two policemen in New York City in the United States, to the siege at a café in Sydney Australia and now the mass shooting dead of journalists and cartoonists in the French capital Paris will preoccupy Western governments through 2015.

They will step up counterterrorism operations and long-term plans. Their allies in places like Africa are watching this and will take advantage of it.
Following the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, a “war on terror” was declared by the US in conjunction with their European allies.
A number of African governments then shrewdly exploited this heightened sense of alert against terrorism by starting to repress political dissent and criticism at home by branding political demonstrations, political criticism and rallies as terrorism.
Political activists were arrested and routinely charged with terrorism, knowing that once the word “terrorism” was labelled on a political activist, Western embassies would not bring pressure to bear on the African government.
In 2015, we can expect that any effort to clamp down on challengers to the Museveni presidency will be framed as part of Uganda’s counterterrorism. Leading political opponents of the President will have terrorism charges brought against them in court.

Universities across Uganda will continue graduating students in more numbers than the economy can at present find jobs for. An increasing number of university graduates are seated at home unable to find work for which they studied. Uganda’s youth unemployment rate remains at about 83 per cent.

It is unlikely that 2015 will bring with it a solution to this nagging and very real problem. The few companies being started or opening further branches of their operations are too few and employ too few new workers to have any effect on unemployment.

This is increasingly putting pressure on families or the few with jobs. Many white collar workers, even with good jobs are having to foot the university fees for younger siblings, which siblings then complete their degrees and then have nowhere to work.

The other pressure on the few with jobs is the upkeep of elderly parents, their medical bills and other interventions in a country where the idea of pension makes no sense.

With Uganda’s social safety next broken, with siblings forced to assume parental roles for younger brothers, sisters and cousins, the professional Ugandan class will continue to face the same pressure that Members of Parliament do, which is endless demands on their salaries by relatives.

KCCA demolitions around the city

KCCA, the body that runs the day to day activities of Kampala, will continue with its demolition of unsafe business premises and other irregular buildings in the city. Many Ugandans are starting to appreciate the results of the determined effort by the KCCA executive director and her advisors to bring a semblance of order to the city.

This effort inevitably angers many whose livelihood was derived from the illegal or unsafe premises. In 2015 KCCA will have to decide for how much longer it can continue to do the right thing but get negative publicity and stir up resentment over its actions.

This is where a presiding Lord Mayor becomes important. As the popularly-elected political head of the city, Erias Lukwago was best suited to soften the public attitude toward KCCA and smoothen the way for its re-development and upgrading of the city.

There were suggestions late last year that Lukwago might resume his mayoral duties in February 2015. If that were to happen, it would bring celebrations to the city among his many followers, ease the tensions within KCCA, and close that chapter marked by a standoff between President Museveni and Lukwago.

OIL PRICES

World oil prices have been dropping steadily for the last two months. However, the price of petrol and diesel at the pump in Uganda has not been lowered to reflect the drop in oil prices.

Producers in other countries are now enjoying the benefit of lower prices which in economic activity makes up a significant part of the final retail price.
In the medium term, it means that Ugandan manufacturers, farmers and other producers of industrial goods and agricultural produce will find it increasingly difficult to compete on in regional and world markets.