What next for NRM after 27 years at the helm?

Man with a different approach. The National Resistance Movement is one of the longest-serving political parties not only in Uganda but across the continent. From the first bullet shot by then NRA guerillas to the most recent ballot cast in the General Election, so much water has gone under the bridge. However, scholars, activists and politicians think differently about NRM’s future. Sunday Monitor’s Eriasa Mukiibi Sserunjogi, attempts to answer the question; which way forward for NRM?

What will have become of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) 27 years from today? This seems like a legitimate question to ponder as NRM marks 27 years at the helm, having first shot to power in January 1986.
But to Makerere University law don Prof Jean-John Barya, to ask about the fate of NRM is to give the party undue importance.

“The party doesn’t matter,” Prof. Barya says, “It is just a formalistic arrangement to drive (President Yoweri) Museveni’s rule.”

To Prof Barya, in short, “the future of NRM means the future of Museveni” and, by implication, the party’s long stay in power is a tribute to Museveni’s political skill.
Why does Barya say so?

Functional parties, Prof. Barya says, have rules, structures and a constitution which they follow and everybody is subject to it.

He cites Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) in Tanzania and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa as examples of parties in which rules apply to everyone.
But with NRM, the professor says, “organs are only called when it is convenient for Mr Museveni and they are supposed to work on behalf of and for Museveni.”

The other problem with NRM, Prof. Barya says, is that the public service, the police and army “have all been fused with the party”. This, according to Moses Khisa, a PhD candidate of political science at Northwestern University in the US, creates a problem of institutionalisation.

Mr Khisa makes a distinction between a political organisation and a political institution. For a political organisation to be institutionalised, he says, it has to evolve a set of routine activities instead of waiting for the five-year election cycle for the party organs to spring into action.

Drawing from the idea popularised by the American political scientist Samuel Huntington in a 1968 book, Political Order in Changing Societies, Mr Khisa and Mwambutsya Ndebesa, a history don at Makerere University, say NRM still has to pass two more tests. It has to experience a change of power, not just from one leader to another, but also across generations.

The second test NRM must pass before it is confirmed as an institutionalised party, they say, is to lose power and survive in opposition.

But surviving outside power in Africa is a tall order, Mr Mwambutsya reckons. He says that virtually all independence parties in Africa died the moment they lost power.

Mr Mwambutsya cites an example next door of the Kenya African National Union, which held power for four decades but is almost no more since being defeated in 2002.
Ghana’s independence party, Conventional Peoples Party of Kwame Nkrumah, Khisa adds, is a shell of its former self, led by Nkrumah’s daughter Samia Nkrumah.

NRM is not Uganda’s independence party (it is Uganda Peoples’ Congress which is also ailing) but the duo sees tendencies, especially being built and run around an individual, that make NRM look like the parties elsewhere in Africa that have fizzled out after losing power.

On this basis, the two argue, NRM is unlikely to survive as a viable party the moment it loses power. “You hardly get a sense that there is anything that binds NRM together,” Mr Mwambutsya argues, pointing to what he calls the absence of the “software factors (values, ideology) that bind organisations together.”

“Multi-ideological organisation”
But the NRM Buganda Caucus Chairman, Mr Godfrey Kiwanda, says very few understand what NRM really is. To him, it is not a political party but a political organisation. So what is the difference?

Parties, Mr Kiwanda says, are built on a single ideology while political organisations, which he says NRM is, are “multi-ideological”.