What next after Museveni, Amama fallout?

National Resistance Movement chairman Yoweri Museveni. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

Struggle for NRM. The crisis between President Museveni and Amama Mbabazi in the NRM has reached a head because of the way they structured the state on coming to power. The question is: what were the characteristics of this Museveni-Mbabazi-FRONASA-NRM state after 1986?

A nation-state and government that runs is founded on trust or the implicit assumption of authority. The president’s signature establishes treaties between Uganda and other countries and international bodies. It formalises official appointments and public notices.
The assumption of the authority of the head of state and the armed services, law-enforcement agencies, courts of law and the departments and ministries of government is what keeps a state running from day to day.
When that assumption of authority is challenged or breaks down, a political crisis results.
When the challenge persists and seeps into the various institutions of state and government, the crisis becomes severe and a government can collapse, the state can become ungovernable or a state of emergency can be declared to contain the unravelling situation.

Basic assumptions
In the East-Central African region over the last two years, the collapse of these basic assumptions have seen South Sudan descend into civil war and Burundi in a slowly-unfolding crisis heading in the direction of a state of emergency.
Kenya after the December 2007 general elections came dangerously close to the situation in South Sudan.
Uganda as of June 2015 is not in the position of South Sudan, Burundi or Kenya in 2007 and early 2008; but seems not to be in the comfortable state it was up to the end of 2013.
The crisis between President Museveni and Amama Mbabazi in the NRM has reached a head because of the way they structured the state on coming to power.
The question is: what were the characteristics of this Museveni-Mbabazi-FRONASA-NRM state after 1986?
First, the NRM state doctrine was always steeped in military counterintelligence. It started from the standpoint that it was under siege and needed to put its resources to fending off real or perceived attacks, sabotage and attempts to overthrow it.
Heavy investment was made in the two intelligence agencies, the Internal Security Organisation and the External Security Organisation, the latter headed by Mbabazi for the first eight years of the NRM rule.
The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s Milton Obote and Idi Amin governments assumed or hoped they were popular and worked toward developing or reconstructing the economy and state.
By contrast right from the start, the NRM government brought a cynical min-set to power. It assumed itself unpopular and maintained an article of belief that sooner or later one’s friends will betray or abandon one.
They had used deception and double-dealers to rise to power and knew all too well that the same double-faced ways could be used against them.
This cynical attitude was best summed up in that famous October 1993 interview with the Daily Monitor’s then Editor-in-Chief Wafula Oguttu in which President Museveni, when asked whom his friends were, declared that he had no friends, only colleagues.
The NRA-NRM state enthusiastically embroiled itself in regional conflicts, from the RPF invasion of Rwanda in 1990, to the invasion of Zaire in 1996, the involvement in Burundi, Sudan, Central African Republic and Somalia.
Secondly on taking power, the NRM was not just interested in capturing and holding onto state power. It was not just interested in the winner-take-all of democracy. It was actually keen on crippling its opponents.
The Opposition was outlawed in 1986 and even after a multi-party system was restored in 2005, the very idea of being in or of the Opposition was more or less criminalised.
People or businesses regarded as of the Opposition or sympathetic to it were denied tenders, contracts, licences or freedom to operate and flourish.
The business community started to realise in the 2000s that if they were to hope to win any government tender or even stand a chance of running their businesses unmolested, they had to tow the NRM line and avoid being perceived as sympathetic to the Opposition.
Radio stations upcountry that hosted Opposition leaders were threatened with closure and sometimes taken off air.
Almost all levers of economic power and control were put into the NRM state’s hands, starting with government-owned companies that were privatised in the early 1990s.
Eventually, although nominally a free-market economy, Uganda over the last 20 years gradually returned to being a state-run, state-controlled economy.
Education scholarships that in previous governments were the possession of the Ministry of Education were transferred to State House to be granted to selected students.
State House itself, once a department under the Ministry of Works in the colonial government right up to Gen Tito Okello’s military government became almost a government ministry in its own right and over the last 15 years, almost the government itself.

‘Museveni the person’
The third element was that of President Museveni the person. Complicated history lay behind him right from his early school days. That history shaped his outlook – the paranoia over certain diseases, over being overthrown in a military coup or mass uprising, over free and fair elections that he has no direct control over, and over poverty.
Museveni’s vulnerabilities as a child and right up to his teens shaped his outlook. As we all do, Museveni when he finally broke free of his childhood and youthful circumstances started to compensate for them.
Most of us, when we grow up in poverty, over-compensate by buying cars, houses, furniture, electronic gadgets, more shoes and handbags than we need, all this to drown out the haunting memories of our deprived childhood.
Power over people, military power, control of people, dominance, these became a characteristic of Museveni’s personality. The ultimate power was to be president of Uganda, a dream he started forming while at Ntare School in Mbarara.
In his near-obsession with political and military power, Museveni was unconsciously fighting the echoes of his deprived childhood.
He both resented and secretly admired the wealthy and arrogant Ankole royalty of the 1950s and 1960s and that sense of trying to live with the largesse of a royal would become a hallmark of his presidency, even though he started out during his inaugural address as President on January 29, 1986, denouncing the extravagance of Africa’s leaders.
That is why the very thought of no longer being President frightens Museveni. It would revive all the unpleasant memories of childhood to no longer be in control.
The current crisis created by Amama Mbabazi stems from the over-compensation that power provides to Museveni. He sees in Mbabazi, even more than in Kizza Besigye or Andrew Kayiira before him, a mortal threat.
Mbabazi, like Museveni, is from a covert intelligence background. He has been in intelligence for most of his adult life and as director general of ESO, received training from Israel’s foreign intelligence agency Mossad.
That calculating, manipulative, patient mind that is Mbabazi’s; his ability to maintain his calm and cool all through the last one and a half years since the humiliation he was subjected to at Kyankwanzi and the current political storm he has raised, is typical Mossad training.
Mbabazi launched his presidential bid on the Google-owned video-sharing website YouTube, gave an interview to the BBC World Service, made a presentation on Uganda at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (also known as Chatham House) in London and appeared on the Voice of America.
The fact that in a succession of media campaigns Mbabazi targeted influential Western media outlets gives credence to the speculation the Sunday Monitor has published from last year, which is that Mbabazi is either being backed by the West or knows the West will be crucial in deciding what happens in Uganda before and after the 2016 general election.
As an intelligence officer, he was content to work in the shadows in pursuit of the Museveni/NRM agenda, at the heart of the schemes and intrigue of the NRM, which is why even to this day Museveni is reluctant to personally attack Mbabazi or use the kind of undiplomatic language he usually uses on his critics and opponents.
It had been rumoured within certain media circles since at least 2008 that Mbabazi harboured presidential ambitions.
That became public last year when at the Kyankwanzi NRM retreat Mbabazi was denounced for harbouring these ambitions, and on June 15, it became official that Mbabazi would seek not only the presidency but, incredibly, the chairmanship of the NRM.

Fundamental questions
The announcement raised fundamental questions that have never fully been faced until now.
What is the NRM? Is it a political organisation built around the personal ambitions of Yoweri Museveni or is it an organisation intended to lead to or attempt a genuine transformation of Uganda?
As of last week, it was clear that the NRM had no real answer to this question. Various NRM cadres and politicians defended Museveni by attacking Mbabazi rather than defend the NRM’s philosophy against Mbabazi.
The fact that the announcement by Mbabazi has triggered off such serious fallout within the NRM demonstrates that the NRM failed to define what it is, whether it is an enduring organisation or is the handiwork of Museveni.
First, because Museveni is going to fight back using every instrument and institution of state. He is already doing so, first using the police to curb Mbabazi’s campaign tours and the Electoral Commission to sound legalistic on what is obviously a political matter.
Secondly, because Mbabazi has issued veiled threats to fight back if all this must come down to a fight.
From the information we have, this will most likely be an intelligence fight, the kind of covert power struggle many have been dreading, with each camp sabotaging the other.
In the next few weeks and months, Uganda could be taken to the brink of disaster to the point where it might have to involve international powers to ease the tensions or broker a kind of power-sharing deal as they did when Kenya was about to go up in flames in early 2008.