The three-horse Museveni, Besigye and Mbabazi race

The 2016 election campaigns have officially started. The Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) held its presidential elections, Jimmy Akena was the victor but his victory is still being bitterly contested by fellow UPC members.
The Democratic Party (DP) is also preparing to elect its officials for the 2016 election.
The Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) now has two party presidential candidates, Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu, the incumbent, and Dr Kizza Besigye, the twice-former president of the party.

The ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party is still a few months away from its delegates’ conference but from the current upheaval within the party, it would be easy to think there is about to be a military coup in Uganda.
Other parties like Jeema, the Uganda Federal Alliance and the Conservative Party will soon follow suit.
However, the perception at the moment is that the 2016 presidential election is or will eventually be a three-horse race between the incumbent Yoweri Museveni, the three-time presidential candidate Kizza Besigye and former prime minister Amama Mbabazi.

Besigye and Mbabazi have officially declared their intentions and barring the most unexpected of events, Museveni will declare his bid as well in the foreseeable future.
This perception is not scientifically proven yet, since there has not been a large-scale and credible opinion poll to sample public opinion, but the weight of the evidence points in that direction for several reasons.
A profile of the three candidates will explain why this is so.

Kizza Besigye
Besigye remains a very popular political figure in terms of the popular one man, one vote criterion. Many people believe he won the 2006 presidential election but was rigged out of his victory, one of them being an army officer who should know, Gen David Sejusa.
Besigye is the one Opposition leader around whom there is the least suspicion in a country where it is believed many Opposition parties and leaders are secretly funded by or even are the creations of State House.

Through his public trials and struggle, his four-year exile in South Africa, his time in prison in 2005, Besigye won nationwide sympathy and admirations. If there is anyone who is the “people’s politician”, that is Besigye.
The only drawback for Besigye is that he so far has proved to be a Raila Odinga – popular with a large following that cuts across the country and all social and economic classes but who cannot seem to deliver the knockout blow or work out the formula to actually translate that popularity into an election victory.

In hindsight, this is where Besigye – a former personal doctor of Museveni, former minister of State for Internal Affairs and former National Political Commissar – appears to have failed to put into effect his understanding of the NRM government.
The way the NRM state is structured, like most in Africa, is one of power over popularity. It is not the most popular political leader who wins elections but the most powerful.
Right from the start of his 2001 campaign, Besigye appealed directly to the voters and the wider Ugandan public. In campaign rally after rally and radio talk show after talk show, Besigye narrated how the NRM and President Museveni had departed from the original goals of the NRM revolution.

He explained the poor service delivery, the corruption and other ills. And so, Besigye would conclude, the decision was now in the hands of the voters to turn out in large numbers, cast their ballots, and change the direction the country was taking.
What Besigye did not pay attention to was the obvious fact or possibility that the very NRM corruption and abuse of power he was pointing out to his listeners would be brought to bear on election day through rigging.

Elections came and went in 2001, 2006 and 2011 and each time Besigye was left to denounce the rigging he should have anticipated and put measures in place to prevent.
Before the 2011 elections, Besigye pledged to his supporters that this time, the FDC and his campaign team, had learnt from the past. They had recruited 19 polling agents to watch over the ballot boxes at each polling station and so the voters should be confident that their ballot papers would not be tampered with.
The 2011 elections came by and once again, Besigye complained about rigging and the FDC said, rather lamely, that their polling agents had been bribed. If a serious party’s agents, who should be among the most committed of its members, can be bribed, some asked, did that not reflect some kind of organisational weakness on the part of the party?

It is hard to visualise what Besigye can do in 2016 that three prior attempts between 2001 and 2011 failed to achieve.
One sensed this realisation dawning on many voters in the 2011 election campaigns and it is much more noticeable in 2015.
Nevertheless, despite some of these lapses in his campaign and election machinery, Besigye’s popularity across the country remains largely intact.

Yoweri Museveni
Every general election since 1996 has begun with the rule of thumb assumption that President Museveni is the favourite or front runner.
He starts off as a favourite or at the very least one of the two top contenders because of the benefit of incumbency, his national and international name recognition and the immense power he wields within the security, military and State machinery.

In Africa where the head of state is both the most powerful man and a celebrity of sorts, it is simply inconceivable that a general election could approach and the incumbent is not factored in as one of the favourite candidates.
This is what Museveni starts every election off with. It is usually taken as a given that he will win by a wide margin in western Uganda, his home area and many parts of rural Buganda, where there is still some residual sentimental attachment to the NRM dating back to the early 1980s guerrilla war.

From a more cynical point of view, Museveni also starts off with the advantage that the Electoral Commissions since 1996 have been appointed by him, the commissioners were handpicked for their perceived loyalty to him and thus could do only what was expected of them, which was to secure him victory by whatever means they could.
The third advantage is the intelligence network that spans the country, down to the village level.
Although the State security service ISO is officially an agency of the Ugandan State, expected to monitor the country’s internal security, the belief is widespread that ISO intelligence officers double as campaign and electoral agents for Museveni, either by intimidating Opposition supporters into voting the President or into staying away from the ballot box, or ticking ballot papers in favour of the incumbent.

In 2011, a new advantage came into the campaign, that of an open use of money to coerce or entice voters to cast their ballots for the President.
All these factors, some genuine support, some illegal like rigging or at the very least proof that the field was slanted in his favour, have combined to make Museveni a front runner as soon as the campaigns start.
The main complication Museveni faces this time, though, is not from without, among the Opposition parties, but from within.

Ever since Amama Mbabazi declared his intention of seeking both the NRM party and the country’s leadership, many NRM operatives and officials have taken to the media to openly express their support for Mbabazi.
The fact that NRM members can sit on TV or radio studios and debate each other from the point of view of belonging to different factions of the party, itself signals the extent of the rift within the party.
It is a development few Ugandans had ever expected to live to see.
Museveni, a former guerrilla leader, who triumphed in 1986 and has dominated the country’s political landscape for nearly 30 years, no longer seems as absolutely in control as he once did. The aura of invincibility has been torn away.
This is where an intriguing new prospect comes into the picture.

Amama Mbabazi
Nobody has quite rattled the NRM since it came to power in 1986 as Mbabazi. Besigye’s declaration of a presidential bid in 2001 caused a storm and panic within the Museveni camp, but it was not to the degree of what Mbabazi has caused.

The first difference is the well-known fact that Mbabazi was and is still part of the NRM’s state security apparatus, unlike Besigye. He knows most of the secrets there are to know about the NRM not only from 1986 and onward but the first five years from 1981 to 1985, and FRONASA before that from 1973 to 1979.
Simply knowing the NRM-FRONASA history alone would make Mbabazi just another historian or political analyst. But Mbabazi went ahead and built or started building a system within the NRM government loyal and reporting to him.

How long ago he started building his own power base within the NRM is not clear, but it is now definite that he viewed his official positions as platforms on which to build his own system and network.
This is one reason he insists on running as an NRM presidential candidate in 2016. The confidence with which he states that goal shows that he knows he has a system at his beck and call within the NRM.
More crucially, it shows that he has a clear grasp of the strengths, weaknesses, structures and popularity of the NRM’s present chairman, Yoweri Museveni and knows or believes that Museveni can not only be challenged nationwide as Besigye has shown, but can also be taken on within the NRM, something few dared believe was possible.

Mbabazi’s approach is much like the approach Museveni used as a guerrilla leader in the 1980s. Museveni did not hold out much hope for attaining state power on the one man, one vote basis. His defeat in the 1980 elections as UPM party leader and the UPM’s very weak showing had been clear evidence that something else is required to gain power than simply stating one’s political plans and manifesto for the country.
One has to build blocs of power. One such bloc was the formation of an army, the other a network of intelligence informants in the NRA-controlled areas of Luweero.

On the foreign front, it was engaging and eventually winning the support of the international powers that matter – the Western media, key Western governments and a cross-section of wealthy Ugandans and influential intellectuals.
In other words, while Besigye and other challengers to Museveni ran on the basis of popular support, Mbabazi like Museveni, is planning to run on the basis of electoral college-type support: building solid support among important sections of the society.

It is not how appealing one is to the ordinary voter that counts in countries like Uganda but how many centres of power one establishes, how loyal they are to one, and how close these power centres and players can get to the levers of authority and institutional power to determine the outcome of a general election.
This is the logic of the Mbabazi campaign and so far it is what has made him in real, practical terms, the top contender to challenge Museveni in 2016.
Mbabazi, who first seemed unsure of himself in 2014 and gave the impression that his wife Jacqueline and her sisters and daughter Nina were the hands urging him to reluctantly seek the presidency, showed from his announcement in mid June that all along he was making all the right moves.

The 2016 election, then, hinges on Museveni as the incumbent and presumed top contender, followed by Mbabazi in second place based on the reality of how power is wielded in Uganda and the popular Besigye in third place, based on his inability so far to translate his wide appeal into measures to take power.
To retain power, Museveni would either have to resort to a brutal use of military and state power regardless of the consequences, or form an alliance with an influential Opposition leader from northern or eastern Uganda, or reconcile with every important section of society he has either antagonised (Buganda, the Catholic Church, rebel MPs) or neglected (northern and eastern Uganda).

To wrest power from Museveni, Mbabazi would have to use his insider intelligence information to keep a step ahead of Museveni’s moves, or cause a split of the NRM into two openly and mutually hostile factions, team up with Besigye in the way in 2002 Mwai Kibaki formed an alliance with the popular Raila Odinga, and possibly get diplomatic and intelligence support from powerful Western nations.
To hope this time to get into power, Besigye would have to form an alliance with Mbabazi to bring in Mbabazi’s cunning mind, better organisational skills and experience in the intrigue of state power and apply the operational measures to secure an election victory.