Where have all President Museveni’s men gone?

Abandoned? There was a time when the NRM government’s ideologues queued up to defend the state and the party. Today many have dropped out of the queue, leaving President Museveni and a few, young, recruits to try and defend them. Where have they all gone and what can we read from their silence, asks Charles Mwanguhya Mpagi

Where are Museveni’s colleagues? That is the question that has been whispered rather loudly over the last few weeks as the government has endured possibly its biggest PR disaster in nearly three decades since it came to power.

President Yoweri Museveni has found himself doing all the talking without enough sounding boards to help echo his message to a wider audience. Apart from the humiliation of Third Deputy Prime Minister, Lt. Gen. Moses Ali, who was not even allowed to read government’s condolence message at the burial of Cerinah Nebanda, the Butaleja woman MP, and a statement from Internal Affairs Minister Hillary Onek at the Government Media Centre, there has been a visible absence of credible voices to speak up for or back the President.

And yet, neither Gen. Ali nor Eng. Onek can be held up as people who can speak for the Movement or indeed Mr Museveni’s comrades. On Tuesday December 18, during the first special session of Parliament to mourn Nebanda, junior internal affairs Minister James Baba cried out in the House for the Prime Minister, Mr Amama Mbabazi, to come to his rescue, pleading he had been upcountry and therefore did not have answers to questions from MPs surrounding Nebanda’s death.

Mr Mbabazi, a Secretary General to the ruling party and a very and enduring ally of the President, remained glued to his seat through Mr Baba’s pleas as cameras zoomed in on him to see whether he would jump in to explain. No one else on the front bench rose to speak. At the requiem mass at Christ the King Church the next day, it was First Lady and Ruhama MP Janet Museveni who attempted a defence of government.

No defence at all
Whether in Parliament or the various media platforms, senior Movementists, especially those still in government, are seen to put up any major defence of government, raising the question why that task has been literary left to rookies in Cabinet like Presidency Minister Frank Tumwebaze, Richard Todwong of Political Mobilisation and Ronald Kibule who is in charge of Gender in a Cabinet of over 70 members.

“It’s perplexing,” says former information Minister James Nsaba Buturo, “The silence is very loud and one gets a feeling that really people are either tired or simply not interested in asserting the legitimacy of government. One gets a feeling something is not right.”
“What is very loud is the silence; the effectiveness of the young ministers makes it even worse,” he added.

Dr Frederick Golooba Mutebi, a well known commentator on political issues, says two schools of thought might exist in the response of people in President Museveni’s generation; both still in government or out of it.
“There are people who see the controversy as totally unnecessary, who think the government is a victim of its rushed action, who would not want to say it because they don’t want to criticise and then there are those who don’t want to be tainted. They are lying low to allow the storm to pass,” he says of the first group.

The second group, Dr Golooba adds, is comprised of those who are “fatigued by the recurrence of the crises in government and think the time for their generation to be around is long overdue and the only reason they are still in government is fear to be misunderstood and isolated.”
“They do not think they still have a stake in this government apart from peaceful retirement, the only person who really has a stake in this government is President Museveni and many of his colleagues would not tell you why he is still there, he is the only one who knows, so those are also remaining silent,” the former Makerere University don, now in private consultancy, says.

The loud silence has got people still serving in the Movement also noticing and commenting. Publicist Ofwono Opondo says the silence of, especially, members of Cabinet shows an institution that is “hamstrung through various forms of subterfuge, and rendered restless and ineffective”, a situation he says “is unacceptable to Ugandans watching the melodrama.”
Mr Opondo adds, “With their senior colleagues quiet, most ministers of state have been reduced to mere spectators.”

The opposition, which normally hijacks situations like this and unknowingly end up shifting focus from government as they try to outwit each other to make it into the media have opted to enjoy the drama as government has fumbled its response, a situation Public Relations professionals say has made a bad situation worse.

Dr Peter Mwesige, a media trainer and consultant, wonders whether this is actually the worst government crisis or is simply being over-hyped but as of PR management, he says government has been caught in some state of paranoia which is difficult to explain.
Vastly experienced as reporter, editor, and head of the mass communication department at Makerere and now at the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME), Dr Mwesige says the arrest and flogging of MPs and leaders in northern Uganda in the early 1990’s, the handling of the Kayiira murder and subsequent demands for the release of the report into his death, as well as the standoff between Mengo and the central government over Kabaka Mutebi’s visit to Kayunga in 2009 were possibly bigger crises than Nebanda’s death.

But there is more to the silence than meets the eye; sources within the party have told this writer. Some who have refused to go on the record to speak freely say since the last election where President Museveni relied heavily on the youth to win re-election, he has signaled to his comrades that the chances of ever succeeding him are close to zero as he has tried to encourage them to try prepare for that “young generation” to take over.

His recent appointments to Cabinet went further to stamp that thinking. A section is looking beyond the political re-alignment to recent promotions and appointments in the military, what is rumoured to be a quiet mobilsation of finances and image management of a team of the “young generation” he expects and is planning to hand power to.

This, sources say, he is doing while preparing his own platform to run again in 2016 without giving any of his generational and bush war colleagues even a chance to run a transitional term from him to his preferred choice of successor.

Two other key players in the recent melodrama have been Prime Minister Mbabazi and Speaker Kadaga. The two are believed to have demonstrated the most eagerness to either succeed the President or challenge him for the leadership of the NRM and government should an opportunity present itself.
The frosty relationship between Mr Mbabazi and his once close confidante, the President, has played out for some time now, at least people in close circles of the two leaders say.
A similar situation has existed at least for the last one-and-a-half years since Ms Kadaga took over as Speaker of Parliament.

Those close to Mr Museveni believe that Ms Kadaga’s ascendance to the Speakership and the acclaim she won for her handling of Parliament has built her confidence to believe she can contest for the presidency, a project they believe has grown so much in her mind to increase her stubbornness.
Therefore, according to this school of thought, two critical fights have emerged, one between Mr Mbabazi and Ms Kadaga because the former sees the latter as a spoiler who is intruding into his faint hopes of being in some succession queue and the other between the two and their party chairman.

To this end, Mr Mbabazi is believed to have been more than pleased to see the Speaker flex with the President and saw no reason to step in before sufficient punches are thrown either way.
A senior official in the NRM says individual baggage of some political leaders in Cabinet could have facilitated a silent pact between those individuals and the MPs that have pushed the government to the wall demanding even where the answers were only for political purposes.

“Some of the people who should have been speaking have skeletons in their cupboards and are afraid to come out because they fear they will be personally targeted, a situation they don’t want,” the highly-placed official said.

He said personal scandals that have been given apparent reprieve and shielded from focus by crises like the Nebanda death saga make them want them to play out longer.
“If you are a minister of local government, you know that should you speak now, someone might turn on you by rising the LC bicycle scandal and you don’t want that so you sign a quiet pact with those agitating a recall of Parliament to discuss Nebanda to say I won’t talk but you also shouldn’t raise anything about my issues,” this official said.

This official believes many other ministers fear to pull the curtain off their own troubles by weighing in on controversies like the recall of Parliament.
Others, he says, are those who have given up and are simply watching where the tide takes the boat but are afraid of a hard crash and think silence will offer them that opportunity.