Mbabazi ‘finally’ speaks out on 2016 bid

He had remained ambivalent for nearly a year and a half, much to the irritation of many of his supporters and the waiting media.

Ever since the dramatic NRM party retreat at the National Leadership Institute at Kyankwanzi in February 2014 when he was booed and denounced, Amama Mbabazi had mostly kept his cool and continued to pledge his loyalty to President Museveni and the cause of the NRM.

Further heckling and criticism followed through most of the year, including being dropped first as prime minister (in September) and as NRM secretary-general (in December), but Mbabazi remained calm and courteous amid these developments.

His wife Jacqueline became the face of the rumoured Mbabazi presidential bid, with some frustrated political analysts and supporters speculating that Mbabazi lacked the ambition but was being urged on by his wife.

After he was dropped as secretary-general with barely a word of protest or reaction, many started to conclude that the whole Mbabazi presidential story had been cooked up by the media desperate to find the next exciting political story or Opposition hero.

Some in the media, though (this writer among them) persisted with reporting on an impending Mbabazi bid largely because it was a true story, despite Mbabazi’s evasiveness.

Last week, the issue that has been reported on and speculated about for more than a year and even longer, finally and publicly began to fall into place.

Statements at wedding
At the wedding of the “rebel” NRM MP Barnabas Tinkasiimire of Buyaga West in Kibaale District, Amama Mbabazi made significant statements about government, the delivery of public services and the political direction the country ought to be taking.

The government-owned New Vision paper sort of reported Mbabazi’s presence as chief guest at the wedding, but also sort of dodged the part of reporting what Mbabazi had said.

It fell to the Sunday Monitor to report the revealing details.

“If you teachers decided to let the struggle go, it is upon you because the increment was every financial year to channel a percentage,” Mbabazi is quoted to have said, starting off with this comment on the ongoing national teachers’ strike.
Mbabazi was targeting popular sentiment with that statement on the teachers.

Doing what the NRM government and the police usually term “inciting the people”, Mbabazi referring to the dilapidated Kigumba-Kyenjojo road said: “I am really surprised that you continue to support leaders who have not met the demands made. It’s a caution for you to take lessons whenever voting.”

“Roads in Bunyoro should have been tarmacked yesterday since it’s the rich region blessed with natural endowments like oil, but because you ‘vote well’ here compared to Kabale and Kanungu where I come from, such leaders think all things are okay,” Mbabazi added.

His tongue-in-cheek reference to “voting well” was clearly aimed at President Museveni who a decade ago had remarked that it did not matter what Members of Parliament did on the floor of the national assembly as long as they voted “wisely”, meaning voted to support Bills or political moves that favoured Museveni.

The actual bombshell, at least in the sequence of the Sunday Monitor story, came toward the end of the speech Mbabazi made. No words could have been more plain than these in describing Mbabazi’s plans:
“I have kept many people guessing on my next step, but now I tell you confidently that in not more than a month I will be declaring my intentions or ambitions,” to which the crowd, understanding what this meant, cheered wildly.

There at last, in Kibaale, the long suspense was broken. Mbabazi had finally gone public about his presidential ambitions and this time stated in straightforward words that even the folk in Kibaale were able to understand.

For the first time since January 1986, Amama Mbabazi – the man who was one of a handful of powerful figures at the very heart of the NRA/NRM military and intelligence state – was now distancing himself from the Museveni legacy and administration.

He was doing what the long-suffering Ugandan media, often dismissed as “bitter” or “anti-government” by the NRM, had been doing for more than 20 years: declaring that in terms of the delivery of public infrastructure and social services, the Museveni administration had let down the country.

Support to “rebel” MPs
However, Mbabazi did not altogether disassociate himself from the NRM. He went on to pledge his support to Tinkasiimire and the other three “rebel” MPs Wilfred Niwagaba, Theodore Ssekikubo and Muhammad Nsereko, saying he would stand by them in their court appeal to have their expulsion from the NRM overturned.

“It is true when I was [NRM] secretary general, we did not agree with all the four outspoken MPs but I can confidently say I am with them in all endeavours,” said Mbabazi at the wedding, glossing over that part of the NRM’s expulsion of the MPs and his role in it.

Just for Mbabazi to be the main guest at Tinkasiimire’s wedding, itself was testimony to how much has changed within the NRM in two years.

Mbabazi as secretary-general had been one of those most adamant that the four young MPs who were increasingly and publicly protesting at the excesses of their own party and defying their party leadership. That is what led to their expulsion from the party.

In fact, one almost wonders whether all along these four had really been rebelling against the NRM or might have quietly been pro-Mbabazi agents within the NRM used to further weaken Museveni’s standing within the party.

Mbabazi’s statements at Tinkasiimire’s wedding can be summed up thus:
1) He is, it’s now certain, preparing to announce his presidential bid. He has now stated something to that effect and these statements leave no doubt what he meant.

2) He now regards his political career as separate from that of President Museveni and in his remarks at the wedding, sought to distance himself from the failures in the delivery of basic public services, hinting that someone else, if elected, could perform much better.

Poor delivery
By urging teachers to insist on their claim to a pay rise, Mbabazi seemed to suggest that even while in government, it frustrated him that Ugandans could not see that it was their right to get proper medical facilities, roads and schools.

If he was not being sincere in those statements about poor delivery of public services and was simply posturing at the wedding in order to strike a chord with his audience, it still comes to the same thing: he is trying to secure himself a national political constituency.

3) He still views himself as an NRM cadre, suggesting that if he were to run, it would be to seek to create or head a reformed NRM, not a new party.

In this sense, he is from a similar school of thought to that of FDC leaders such as Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu, Col Kizza Besigye and Maj John Kazoora, whose position has consistently been that what took place between February 1981 and January 1986 was a genuine revolution, was based on an actual rigging of the 1980 general election, a revolution that meant well for Uganda but which gradually under the leadership of Museveni departed from its ideals and descended into personal, then family rule.

4) Regarding the “rebel” NRM MPs, it is one thing for one’s enemy’s enemy (Mbabazi) to become one’s friend or ally when the practical calculations of politics require it. But for this enemy’s enemy, who was once one’s own enemy to not only become a friend by virtue of being one’s enemy’s enemy, but actually one’s guest of honour, not at a political fundraising but at one’s wedding, raises a number of questions.

Was Mbabazi all along in a secret alliance with the rebel MPs as they challenged President Museveni’s authority in the NRM, officially blasting them over their insubordination but privately working with them?

Considering the information that the media has been airing and printing, about Mbabazi having aides, supporters and operatives in many sections of the State, media, church, civil society and diplomatic services, this certainly seems plausible.

At Tinkasiimire’s wedding, Mbabazi admits that he and the rebel MPs were until recently antagonists but that’s now behind them. He does not explain what transpired that turned him from critic of the MPs to fervent supporter of their right to remain in the NRM and what’s in that for him.

And if it is plausible that all along Mbabazi was actually on good terms with the rebel MPs, judging by the pride of place they gave him at Tinkasiimire’s wedding (Ssekikubo was the best man, Niwagaba the chairman of the organising committee), it raises the spectre that embedded within the NRM party and State apparatus there might yet be many more supporters of Mbabazi.

Many of these secret supporters might appear to publicly disagree with Mbabazi, but it could all be part of Mbabazi’s political game, the same kind of secretive game played expertly by political operatives such as the late early 1980s vice president Paulo Muwanga, the 1960s director of the GSU intelligence agency Akena Adoko, or even Museveni himself while he was still in the UNLF as defence minister – building a power base within the organisation you intend to overthrow or replace by placing your aides and supporters within that organisation as sleeper cells.

All this said, we now know that the media speculation about a Mbabazi presidential bid were not speculation. The long-awaited (and for many, long-dreaded) fight for control of the NRM between President Museveni and Amama Mbabazi is now about to become official.

Mbabazi’s comment on various issues

On roads: “Roads in Bunyoro should have been tarmacked yesterday since it’s the rich region blessed with natural endowments like oil, but because you ‘vote well’ here compared to Kabale and Kanungu where I come from, such leaders think all things are okay,”

On silence: “I have kept many people guessing on my next step, but now I tell you confidently that in not more than a month I will be declaring my intentions or ambitions”

On teachers’ strike: “If you teachers decided to let the struggle go, it is upon you because the increment was every financial year to channel a percentage,”