Is this the beginning of end or ‘fresh’ start for Gen Museveni?

Heavily bruised after years of fierce political fights, many opposition politicians now say challenging President Museveni in an election is useless, arguing that the elections are rigged and the incumbent will always win.

After reaching this conclusion, the opposition had resorted to protests as an alternative strategy but tear gas seems to have sorted out the situation. The President told a meeting of regional police chiefs recently that police boss Gen Kale Kayihura had contained the protesters. He said the protesters are sprayed with tear gas and “after they have swallowed enough they go home.”

On the military front, it is now seven years since the last vestiges of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) were forced off Ugandan soil. The LRA are said to still exist in the Central African Republic and the Allied Democratic Forces in the jungles of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. But for the first time during Mr Museveni’s rule, no rebel group is known to operate on Ugandan soil.

As Mr Museveni marks 28 years in power today, therefore, he does not appear to be facing any immediate political or military threat. But do appearances lie? Or has Mr Museveni established unchallenged control over Uganda, paving the way for many more years of his rule?

Recoiling opposition
Dr Kizza Besigye, the face of the opposition for the last 14 years or so, seems to be nearing breaking point after years of frustration and physically bruising battles. Ordinarily, Dr Besigye is endowed with immeasurable guts and courage.
When, for example, UPC party president Olara Otunnu called for a boycott of the 2011 elections, saying they would not be free and fair, Dr Besigye insisted on participating, at least for one more time, arguing that “it is possible to win in an election which is not free and fair.” Dr Besigye had lost two previous elections, which he said had been rigged and had filed two election petitions which only stopped short of annulling the elections.

But Dr Besigye has now said Mr Museveni cannot be removed from power through the ballot and that he will never again participate in any election organised under the current circumstances. Some other opposition politicians say the same.
Mr Mwambutsya Ndebesa, a political historian at Makerere University, sees in this declaration a “danger” that the voters will be further discouraged. The opposition already faces a serious challenge of motivating the voters to participate in elections, especially since 42 per cent of the registered voters, according to Electoral Commission records, did not turn up in the last election.

New FDC president Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu set as one of his priorities to target those who did not vote in the last election, for it is assumed that most of those who stayed away from the polling stations would have voted for the opposition. It is assumed that they didn’t vote because whereas they wanted change, they were not sure whether their votes would matter.

Mr Ndebesa says by declaring that elections cannot remove Mr Museveni, the opposition is falling into Mr Museveni’s trap.
“Strongmen are always looking to project a larger-than-life image; incapable of being removed from power,” Mr Ndebesa says, “it is a mistake for the opposition to help Mr Museveni’s cause by planting doubt in people’s minds on whether he can be removed.”

But Gen Muntu says Mr Museveni’s government will collapse, “probably sooner than you think”, and that what matters for the change-minded Ugandans now is to organise for a post-Museveni Uganda. “Ugandans are sufficiently tired of President Museveni but the question should be whether they are ready for change,” Gen Muntu says, adding, “For them to be ready to change leadership, they have to be convinced that whoever comes in will be able to manage power, change things for the better and drive the country forward.”

Beyond votes
Gen Muntu would rather the change comes through the ballot because then the people would have expressed their will on who they would like to govern them and how. And whereas Dr Besigye and some other opposition politicians say voting under Mr Museveni no longer makes sense, there are emerging players who seem interested in trying it out.

Gen Muntu is probably one of them. Former vice president Prof. Gilbert Bukenya is another, and there has been a lot of talk about Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga and Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi plotting offensives of their own to challenge Mr Museveni.

Time will tell whether Mr Museveni’s new challengers will also boycott the next election or will contest and lose and eventually blame the system. What many observers agree on is that Mr Museveni is unlikely to lose the next election if he stands.

Whatever way it turns out, according to Mr Moses Byamugisha, one of the youth leaders in FDC, protests are likely to continue. Mr Byamugisha and others have in recent months been traversing the country mobilising FDC youths to, among other things, take a more active part in protests.

New means
“We are working on a mechanism to transfer leadership of protests from individuals to units,” Mr Byamugisha says in reference to the leading role Dr Besigye has played in protests since April 2011. “When individuals lead protests,” Mr Byamugisha says, “they are targeted and crippled. Their defeat results in the crushing of the protests. We want to rely on young people who cannot easily be identified and surrounded.”

Mr Byamugisha’s revelations show that the opposition are evaluating the conduct of protests and are thinking of how to make them more effective. But Mr Ramathan Ggoobi, a political commentator and lecturer at Makerere University Business School, says that Ugandans may well be tired of protests.

“Ugandans would like to see Mr Museveni removed from power whether forcefully or through elections,” Mr Ggoobi says, “but many of them are getting tired of the means being employed and now doubt the capacity of Museveni’s challengers.”
“It seems to me that many Ugandans would not mind someone taking decisive action, even use of force, so long as the whole thing is finished within a short period and the people return to living their lives,” Mr Ggoobi added.

Danger of military action?
One man who talked up possibilities of shooting Mr Museveni out of power in recent times is the renegade Gen David Sejusa, currently exiled in the United Kingdom. Gen Sejusa recently launched a political force and he has maintained his view that Mr Museveni cannot be removed from power through elections, claiming that he participated in a process that robbed Dr Besigye of victory in the 2006 presidential election.

In a press conference on Thursday, Dr Besigye also talked up the possibility of using force “if the regime does not stop urinating on us.” Dr Besigye talked a lot about using force when he first challenged Mr Museveni in 2001 but he had gradually dropped that line, saying they “deliberately” pursued a peaceful policy to break the vicious cycle of violence in the country.

Mr Ndebesa says Mr Museveni, who he says “loves” war, must have been watching his opponents closely. Mr Ndebesa compares the military “expeditions” in which Mr Museveni is involved to the Napoleonic wars of the 19th Century, aimed at “ensuring that the soldiers are not redundant.”

The Uganda Peoples Defence Forces are currently active in South Sudan, Somalia and the DRC.
Recently, the army invited soldiers who had been laid off from the force to report back for redeployment in Somalia.
Mr Ndebesa reckons that apart from ensuring that the soldiers are constantly busy and stopping them from thinking about rebellion, these moves also “achieve the objective of keeping the UPDF combat-ready” just in case an enemy emerges in Uganda.

In the end it seems to go back to where it started, with the opponents back to the drawing board and Mr Museveni’s rule looking as if it is just starting.