Should Museveni and Besigye talk? Yes, and no. Here’s why

Daily Monitor reports that talks to craft some sort of political compact between President Museveni and Opposition FDC’s former election rival Kizza Besigye are in the works.
There have been a few doubts whether anything will come out of such talks.
However, more important, the question is why would Museveni accept to talk at all? He “won” the election, though be it controversially, and he holds power. One view says that Museveni is in “legacy mode”.
The image that he and his government have is not rosy. Mostly despite past achievements, they come across as an incompetent and cruel kleptocracy. A man who has an elevated sense of his place in Ugandan history like Museveni does, wouldn’t want that to be his legacy.
He realises, that whether he hangs onto power for five, 10, or more years it is nearly impossible to finish strongly unless he can shape things up and create a new exciting political dynamic. But most importantly, it is critical to shift the FDC narrative that, though out of power, has become extremely adept at deligitimising him, and is a huge distraction.
When Besigye even sneezes loudly, one gets the sense that alarm bells go off in State House. Museveni would benefit from turning that off.
So what is in it for Besigye? That is harder to see, unless Museveni is willing to form a genuine new government of national unity that allows FDC to have sufficient power in it to advance its agenda. And unless you have popped a lot of hallucinogenic pills, that scenario is difficult to see.
That said, a lowering of political temperatures could still benefit the country a lot. And to appreciate how that would happen, we need to look back.
There is virtually no significant reform in Uganda that has emerged from a narrowly partisan enterprise. Though a lot has gone wrong with it, the most important democratisation reform in Uganda of the last 35 years was decentralisation.
It was based on an almost painfully granular report by the Mamdani Commission that came out of 1987. There was a minimum political and intellectual consensus in Uganda then that some power needed to be devolved to the periphery, and the spirit of the age allowed the appointment of a broadly bi-partisan led by Mahmood Mamdani to look into how that might be done.
It was a complex subject, and the Mamdani Commission did quite a good job of it. Today, it would be seen as nothing more than a Museveni presidency-for-life ruse.
Also, as we have witnessed in recent times, FDC or DP people accepting a job in government is ostracised and accused of selling out and looking out for their stomachs and, again. The main reason why that happens is that the possibility of honest bi-partisanship has since died in the fury of political competition and corruption.
I think it is in the economy where a new deal would bring the most benefit. The most exciting – and also controversial – period for economic reform in Uganda was the late 1980s and early 1990s. After the 1995 constitution, and especially the 1996, we stagnated.
I think a key element that is often not fully appreciated in why those NRM reforms happened, was the role of the DP. A junior and long-suffering partner in Museveni’s early “broadbased” government, the DP provided a pragmatic pro-free market antidote to the socialist zeal of the NRM victors.
He died after less than a year on the job, but Museveni’s first Finance minister was staunch DP man Prof Ponsiano Mulema, a generally conservative economist.
He laid the foundation, and fortunately was succeeded by NRM centrist Dr Crispus Kiyonga, who was followed by the marvelous old school Mayanja Nkangi, and then we had DP man Gerald Ssendaula. In the background in Finance, for a long time, there were DP men like the late Kafumbe Mukasa.
Why is this DP factor important? DP was a party of southern medium scale farmers (an activity that tends to make you generally sensible and pragmatic) and the national Catholic petty bourgeoisie.
Locked out of power by the Protestant establishment from colonial times, they espoused the free market as an essentially survival strategy. The ability to sell the produce of their land and their labour outside the state was the surest way they could survive.
By opening its doors to so many DPs in the early years, the NRM also co-opted their platform. We need to be grateful for the result. Imagine if the mess Uganda is in today, the only schools, hospitals, shops, fuel stations, and housing available to us were the ones owned by the government. God forbid.
It is not just who is in State House, but also these kinds of policy re-arrangements, that makes political cohabitation worth the bother?
Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3