Tinyefuza, historicals challenge Museveni, then back down, leaving Besigye in the hot seat

Gen David Sejusa often challenged the NRM government but always retracted his statements. MONITOR PHOTO

What you need to know:

In part IV and final serialisation of extracts from a new book titled “Kizza Besigye and Uganda’s Unfinished Revolution” authored by Daniel Kalinaki, we detail how disagreements over what the NRM/Movement really was during the Constituent Assembly process push historicals to challenge Museveni. But as many back down, Besigye is left as the last man standing.

Besigye’s decision to press back against Museveni had been cemented during the Constituent Assembly, starting right from the elections. The NRM/Movement presented itself as an umbrella political system to which every Ugandan belonged.

During the transition period, candidates were to stand on “individual merit” and win or lose on the basis of their charisma and personal credentials.

The premise was that such an arrangement would be transitional, to give the country time to settle down from the chaos of war, prepare a new constitution, and then return to open political competition.
In theory, therefore, the Movement belonged to everyone and no one.

However, an election crack team was put together within the NRM Secretariat with the support of State House to fund and support preferred Movement candidates in the CA election. Committees were set up in every district to vet ‘Movement candidates’ – a form of party primary – to ensure the NRM did not split its vote and lose constituencies.

The process was subjective, lacked transparency, and in some cases saw committee members pick friends and relatives over more popular candidates. The candidates selected through this process received funding and support from state functionaries, tilting the race in their favour and making a mockery of the “individual merit” premise.

Besigye rejects NRM changes
On the day the debate was scheduled to start, Sserwanga Lwanga took Besigye aside and informed him that they had been to see the President at the weekend to agree on NRM positions.

Museveni had spent several hours with about 20 handpicked delegates, and a handful of non-delegates caucusing on which positions the Movement would adopt in the draft constitution. Those positions were then expected to be endorsed and supported by all Movement delegates.
“How were you chosen?” Besigye asked.

‘They just invited us,’ Sserwanga Lwanga said, almost apologetically.
“How can you represent us without our knowledge and agree on positions that we are then expected to simply endorse?”

Sserwanga Lwanga shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Besigye refused to go along and started mobilising the delegates that had not been to Rwakitura, Museveni’s country home, to reject the prefabricated positions.

“We cannot have a constitution made in Rwakitura and then brought to us,” Besigye told one after another. “We are here as delegates to make decisions and we should all be persuaded, not forced to rubber-stamp other people’s views.”

Sserwanga Lwanga and Tinyefuza authored documents critical of some of the positions the NRM was pushing to include in the new constitution, in particular its extension as a system of government. Lwanga, who was the Chief Political Commissar of the NRA, argued that the Odoki Commission Report, which had asked Ugandans about their views on multiparty politics five years earlier, was probably out-of-date.

In his paper, Tinyefuza was more critical of the plan to extend the Movement system of government for another five years. “NRM has been in power for 10 years,” he wrote. “It did influence events even between 1981 and 1985. That makes it 15 years. It is almost immoral to want another free extension of five years to make it 20.”

Before long, Museveni summoned a meeting of the Army Council and accused Besigye, Tinyefuza and Sserwanga Lwanga of indiscipline and undermining Movement positions in the House. Tinyefuza was forced to issue a humiliating apology retracting his statement and promising, “[H]enceforth before expressing any opinion on any constitutional or political matter, I shall seek the guidance and authority of the appropriate organs of the army”.

Following the meeting, the Army Council resolved – infamously – that its representatives to the CA were not to make any public contributions on controversial matters but were to simply act as “listening posts”.

Ironically, despite the order for Army delegates not to speak out on controversial issues, the proposal to entrench the Movement at the expense of other political parties was sponsored by Lieutenant Mayombo, who would later emerge as Museveni’s right-hand man and regime enforcer in his role as Chief of Military Intelligence.

Besigye had been the leading Movement ideologue in the early days of the regime but he now became one of the leading opponents of the attempt to entrench the political system in lieu of multiparty politics. This became the core issue at the parting of ways between him and Museveni.

“The NRM was a political organisation we formed. It had a chairman and a National Executive Committee but in the process of the CA this whole idea of the Movement System came up and sought to become a permanent feature,” Besigye says. “We had always understood that the role of the Movement was to manage the transition in which everybody participates; we would lay down the rules like the Constitution that would help us move into a fully democratic dispensation.

Instead of being a transitional system they put it in the Constitution as a permanent alternative to having different political parties. This was the height of ideological dishonesty.”

Besigye’s opposition to the Mayombo proposal was among the final parting points between him, the NRM, and Museveni. It left him with a bitter taste in the mouth and a visceral contempt for the sycophantic political class that had endorsed it. It was also the point at which the tensions that had been bubbling under the surface between him and Museveni started to emerge in the open.

When the CA ended, Besigye applied to retire from the Army. The request remained pending. Besigye refused to return to his office and stopped wearing his uniform. He stayed home sulking at the injustice of being forced to stay in an institution he no longer believed in or wanted to continue being part of.

Point of no return
Besigye found himself increasingly holding consultations with others who shared his concerns about the state of governance of the country. The more he spoke to people, the more he came to believe that Uganda’s political future could only be salvaged by changing leadership from Museveni to another person.

Frustrated, Besigye sat down and wrote the document that would light the torch paper. It was 1999. Tracing the origins of the NRM from its formative days in the anti-Amin struggle, its evolution into a guerrilla movement and then into power, Besigye critiqued what he saw as an opportunistic attempt to keep the NRM in power by concealing its true form as a political party, maintaining controls over other parties, and exercising power through a corrupt, patrimonial state.

Besigye expected the document to generate some controversy and, hopefully, a lot of debate. Museveni could hold his own in an intellectual discussion and Besigye believed the President would either write a counter dossier dismissing his arguments, or summon a meeting of senior regime officials and respond to the allegations and claims.

But Besigye had no idea how much trouble he had stirred up.
The document was almost immediately leaked to the press, which ran it in full. This generated plenty of debate in bars, homes and offices across the country – but none in Cabinet or Parliament.

President Museveni fired off a letter to Professor Gilbert Bukenya, who was head of the NRM Caucus in Parliament (and later Vice President), noting that Besigye was to face the Army General Court Martial over the document.

Museveni said Army rules forbade serving officers from participating in partisan politics and Besigye had, in addition, voiced his concerns in the wrong forum instead of raising them through the military command structures.

There were a few isolated voices of support, mainly defending Besigye’s right to express himself, but there was no formal debate within government on any of the issues he had raised in the dossier.

The quiet grumbling and run-ins between Museveni and Besigye had come out into the open. Besigye’s dossier served to bring to the public domain the grievances and concerns he and a few others had expressed for almost a decade, but especially since the time of the CA.

Run for president
One morning, as Besigye was driving into town from Luzira, a female friend in intelligence telephoned him and said she had information he was going to be arrested that day.

Besigye asked his driver to turn round and speed to Garuga Musinguzi’s home in Mbuya. Garuga was a prominent businessman who was close to Besigye and shared his critical views on the way the country was being run.

When Besigye arrived at Garuga’s home he found Patrick Mwondha, a veteran UPC politician, visiting. He shared the information he had received and presented the dilemma he was facing. How should he respond, he asked? The group huddled and weighed his options. One option was to flee into exile and avoid the impending arrest.

They chose, instead, to call Museveni’s bluff. Besigye would declare his candidature for the upcoming presidential elections. This would grant him some immunity from any impending threat or arrest and it would look damaging for Museveni to arrest someone who had just declared his intention to run against him in the election.

And since Besigye had failed to find a candidate among the Historicals willing to take on the incumbent, he may as well do it himself now that he was out of the Army and free to engage in politics without first having to seek permission.

A statement was quickly drafted at Musinguzi’s home while Besigye telephoned Winnie and briefed her about the developments. She agreed with the plan. In the Sixth Parliament Winnie had allied with a crop of new, and mostly younger, MPs who were critical of the NRM government to which they belonged.

Under the umbrella of the Young Parliamentarians Association, Winnie had played a leading role in organising the censure of ministers Jim Muhwezi and Sam Kutesa for abuse of office. Winnie had subsequently been sacked as a director in the Movement Secretariat.

When the statement was ready, they drove to Khana Khazana restaurant in Kololo and telephoned Conrad Nkutu at New Vision and Onyango-Obbo at Daily Monitor.

It was Saturday afternoon. Both newspapers produced a late afternoon edition of their Sunday editions on Saturday evening, which meant the news would be out within a couple of hours.

The reaction from some of the people Besigye had been consulting during his mobilisation was surprising. Initially there was silence, followed by a smattering of comments in the media but none of his fellow Historicals called to set up a meeting or offer support.

Eventually, more comments started trickling through. Some said the question of Besigye’s candidature should have been discussed further before his declaration. Others were more ambivalent, pointing out that it was his democratic right to run for president, but without offering overt support for Besigye’s candidature.

There was a good reason for the ambivalence. The day Besigye made his announcement, President Museveni had been hosting President Kagame of Rwanda at their alma mater, Ntare School, in Mbarara.

When news filtered through to him, President Museveni immediately went to work, trying to establish contact with those officials he believed or suspected had been talking to Besigye in his consultations.

Museveni reacts
Upon retiring to his quarters later that night, Museveni worked the telephone, rallying his troops among the Historicals and finding out who was with him, and who was likely to throw in their lot with Besigye.

Some of the people the President spoke to say he pointed out in his telephone call that Besigye’s candidature was an act of indiscipline and an attempt to cost the NRM the upcoming election.

“We enacted a new constitution under which I have served one term,” one of the Historicals telephoned recalled Museveni as having said. “I have a programme that I have been working on and which I now want to finish. This is just going to disrupt us and cause confusion.”

At least one conversation began with Museveni saying, half-jokingly: “I hear you are with Besigye”, to which the Historical on the other end of the telephone denied vehemently and pledged his loyalty to the President. On and on it went, telephone call after telephone call.

Soon the mood among key regime officials Besigye had been speaking to began to shift towards giving President Museveni the benefit of the doubt. Since the Constitution allowed him two terms in office and he had only served one, why didn’t they allow their leader a dignified exit by letting him run for his last term?, many asked Besigye.

A few days after Besigye declared his candidature, Museveni finally weighed in on the matter in a four-page letter to the newspapers. “It is very good news to hear that one other Ugandan, Colonel (Rtd) Besigye, intends to stand as a presidential candidate, in addition to others who have already expressed their intention to contest…” Museveni wrote.

“Yet again, however, Colonel Besigye has gone about his intentions in an indisciplined and disruptive way. He has, without consulting any organ of the Movement, launched himself as a Movement candidate although it is well-known that he is in close collaboration with multi-partyists. By unilaterally declaring himself a candidate, he creates a problem for the Movement.”
Besigye hit back the next day in a lengthy newspaper article himself.

In response to the accusation that he had imposed himself on the Movement, Besigye, citing the law and the manner of Museveni’s unendorsed candidature in the 1996 election, noted: “I have come out to present myself for the office of the President in the same lawful way. However, because I wish to contest the post he occupies presently, President Museveni wants to shift the goalposts.

“He says I need endorsement. He accuses me of being indisciplined, disruptive and causing problems for the Movement when I follow the same steps he did to declare my candidature. Why is it that when Kizza Besigye wants to stand on individual merit he creates problems for the Movement and when Yoweri Museveni wants to stand it is not a problem?”
The contest between Museveni and Besigye had formally kicked off.

Extract from Kizza Besigye and Uganda’s Unfinished Revolution © Daniel Kalinaki 2014. Published by Dominant Seven. To order a copy call 0781400484 or email [email protected].

EDITOR’S NOTE: Except where noted, direct quotes attributed to various personalities in these book extracts are to the best recollection of Dr Kizza Besigye, the interviewee, and/or Mr Daniel Kalinaki, the interviewer and author.