The revolutionary who turned into an ATM

The sight of a young man struggling under the weight of a sack full of money while President Museveni looks on is the latest highlight in our school of political scandal and certainly not the last.

The follow-up explanation from State House, which attempted, with predictable futility, to explain it away as a normal poverty-eradication exercise, has done little to inspire confidence in the running of our public affairs.

In criticising Museveni, many people have missed the point. The President knew exactly what he was doing. It was all well thought out and the unofficial launch of his campaign for the 2016 election.
Few people understand political symbolism better than Museveni. Even fewer know that in his early days in power, while trying to carve out a political identity for himself and his Marxist ideology, he often wore a ‘revolutionary’ Kaunda suit, sometimes under the formal western suits.

The Kaunda suit was soon discarded when Marxism was thrown out of the window of political pragmatism and replaced by ultra-liberal capitalism but Museveni continued to understand and develop symbols to resonate with his target audience; the poor peasant voters.
A very clever young Ugandan lady called Sheila Kulubya researched this political symbolism for her master’s thesis at the London School of Economics. It was surprising, insightful and a real eye-opener, and not because she is my partner!

Thus in 1996 he temporarily discarded his military fatigues and adopted olubengo, a grinding stone many peasants are familiar with, as his de facto campaign symbol. The large stone represented the problems people were facing and the message from Museveni was “let me take care of your burdens”.

In 2001, when Besigye declared himself the hammer, Museveni turned into the cotter pin, a small but vital part of most bicycles, which is very hard to remove. Again the symbol was a clever choice of an everyday item that many are familiar with.

In 2006, as Museveni engineered a political Houdini act in changing the Constitution, the symbolism turned into dry banana leaves whose local name, essanja, is a homonym for another term in office.
That was replaced in 2011 by the rap skit as Museveni courted younger voters, and auto-calls that had peasants excited about “speaking personally” with the recorded voice. But that election also required large doses of money, not just gimmickry and symbolism.

The latest choice of sacks of money is a powerful metaphor for peasant voters. It says, simply and powerfully, that those who support the President and his party will receive so much money they will need sacks to carry it away.

With so much poverty around tempered by the promise of vast oil riches Museveni’s sack of money offers insights into the kind of campaign he intends to run in 2016: He intends to throw money at the problem and to clearly own the patronage delivery systems.

For the record, these handouts never seem to leave their beneficiaries any better off. A couple of years ago, the President accused your columnist of sacrilege after he publicly opposed a decision by the Uganda Journalists Association to beg Museveni for money.

Those protestations were swept aside and within weeks there was a photograph of the association leaders next to a beaming Amelia Kyambadde, then the principal private secretary to the President, counting a bag of currency notes.

I hear but cannot confirm that some of the money was shared in the State House parking lot but what is clear is that the association has never been the same again. The office for which the money was requested has never been seen and the behind-the-scenes fight over whatever was left of the money has brought the association to its knees.

In the recent supplementary budget request, State House asked for Shs40 billion for presidential donations. The Shs250 million is probably part of the money and an attempt to offer some form of accountability but it is all patronage and politics.

Unless the handouts are taken away, Museveni will continue to use taxpayer money to reward his supporters and buy political support. So in effect Museveni will be giving you back some of your money so that you can keep him in office. You can disagree all you want but you can never accuse him of not being a smart politician.

Others, however, will wonder how a revolutionary turned into an automated teller machine. This life!