10 years after return of multiparty democracy

The ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) faces a serious test of its character as its founding chairman, President Museveni, tussles it out with former secretary general Amama Mbabazi for the party’s soul.
The ruling party, according to Makerere University law don, Prof John Jean Barya, is “just a conduit for holding power by President Museveni (and) if it becomes clear to him that it can no longer meet the purpose, he would leave it and pursue other interests.”

Mr Museveni, particularly as regards political parties, has a number of critics. When Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu first challenged then Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) president Kizza Besigye for the party’s presidency in 2009, he had an interesting response to those who wondered why he was running against the party’s first president, who was deemed to be very popular.

“It is tactics,” Gen Muntu said at the party’s delegates conference at Namboole. “In the military, you beat the enemy with something he cannot fight.”
The “enemy” in this case was NRM, which Gen Muntu said would “under no circumstances” experience a contest for the top job between President Museveni and anyone else because, Gen Muntu said, Gen Museveni would simply not allow it. How the fight between President Museveni and Mr Mbabazi will end will go a long way to test out Gen Muntu’s theory.

In the other parties, particularly the older ones, the situation is at least as dire as it is in the ruling parties. Mr Norbert Mao just retained the presidency of the Democratic Party amidst a boycott of the party elections by a group led by Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago
In UPC, Lira Municipality MP Jimmy Akena recently carried out a “coup”, taking over the party electoral process before the results were concluded and eventually declaring himself winner of the district conference elections, holding what he eventually called a delegates conference and having himself declared party president.

There are similar fights in the smaller parties, particularly Jeema and the Conservative Party. Within FDC, however, the sharp disagreements that greeted the election of Gen Muntu in 2012 have since subsided, although the potential for disagreements seems to be alive.
All this happens as Uganda prepares for the third consecutive multi-party elections since political parties were reinstated ten years ago after the referendum of July 28, 2005.

This is the longest spell for which parties have been allowed to exist legally since independence, and there are some 29 registered political parties to show for it. The first experiment with multiparty politics lasted from 1962 to 1969, when then president Milton Obote banned political parties.
The parties would only be allowed to operate again in 1979, following the ouster of Idi Amin, but again only until 1985 when Obote was again overthrown by the military. President Museveni would ban the operation of parties, first administratively in 1986 and later by law, the Movement Act 1997, until they were again allowed to operate in 2005.

The referendums
The re-introduction of parties in 2005 was preceded by an intricate range of power play and arguments, with the dominant Opposition forces of the time insisting that under no circumstances would a referendum be conducted to herald a return to multi-party politics.

Two referendums, one in 2000 and the other in 2005, were however, conducted with regard to whether parties should be re-introduced. And the sudden shift in the results of the two referendums which happened between five years of each other is intriguing.
In 2000, 90.7 per cent of the voters rejected political parties in favour of what was called the Movement system of governance. Five years later, in 2005, 92 per cent of the same voters voted this time in favour of a return to multi-party politics.

In both instances, the mainstream Opposition boycotted the referendums, saying the right to associate through political parties was fundamental and could not be subjected to a vote. Voter turnout was low in both cases – 51 per cent in 2000 and 47 per cent in 2005 – leading the boycotters to claim moral victory.
The side that campaigned for lifting the ban on parties was led by a hitherto little known Nelson Ocheger, who the Opposition accused of being a front for the ruling party to ensure that the boycott did not hold. Mr Ocheger would later be appointed into the diplomatic service by President Museveni. He is deputy ambassador to Russia.

In both referendums, President Museveni was the main campaigner, in the first place campaigning against parties and then in favour of a return to political parties in 2005.
Whereas the Opposition parties were eager to return to multi-party politics in 2005 – as they had been earlier – and were this time sure to win since Mr Museveni now favoured the transition, they still insisted on doing it without first going through a referendum.

Why the change of heart?
To understand the sudden “change of heart” among voters, one needs to go back to the events of 2003. As opposition against attempts to have Mr Museveni stay on as president picked up pace within the ruling establishment, led by, among others, then Local Government minister Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, Mr Museveni changed his message about political parties.

Since taking over power in 1986, the president had accused parties of dividing the people and leading to the chaotic politics of the earlier years. He said then that the one-party structure under what was called the Movement system, under which all Ugandans were deemed to belong under one umbrella, was the solution. This was the main message in the campaigns during the 2000 referendum.

Starting 2003, however, Mr Museveni started to argue that political parties would be allowed to register and operate anyway, but chiefly to relieve the ruling party of dissenters.
President Museveni and Mr Bidandi had disagreed openly during a meeting of the leaders of the Movement, with Mr Bidandi challenging developments within the establishment, which he saw as attempts to enable Mr Museveni to rule beyond 2006.

“You are just a spoke (in the wheel that is the Movement),” Mr Museveni told Mr Bidandi, affirming that even if minister decamped from the ruling establishment, business would proceed normally. Mr Bidandi had been the deputy head of Mr Museveni’s re-election campaign in 2001, as he had been in 1996, but was one of those who were eager to have a transfer of power to another leader in 2006.
In rallying his base against Mr Bidandi and those who thought like him, Mr Museveni argued for a return to political parties so that the dissenters would have a political home away from the ruling establishment.
“Tubeggyeko (let us get rid of them),” Mr Museveni said of the Bidandis. This became the key catchphrase in the campaign to free political parties that culminated in the July 28, 2005 referendum.

The motive
One man who probably gave away the motive of the ruling establishment’s change of heart about political parties was James Wapakhabulo, a senior minister who had presided over the writing of the 1995 Constitution.
In a November 19, 2003 letter, Wapakhabulo offered legal advice to Mr Museveni on how the president could continue in office after 2006 even without holding a referendum to delete the two-term limit for the presidency.

Wapakhabulo wrote: “My proposal was this: let us first concern ourselves with the establishment of the party. Let us carry out elections in the party, applying rules of internal democracy, from the grassroots to the top. After the organs and structures of the Party are in place, we would then address the question of who should be our flag bearer in the Presidential elections of 2006.”
“It is my submission that with proper guidance, the various organs of the party shall come to the conclusion that it is not in the interest of the country to seek to undergo two transitions at the same time, namely change from the Movement to multiparty and also change at the top of management of the country. At that stage, we would make a strategic decision to address one transition at a time, namely from Movement to multiparty.”

“As a party united, we would then say, let us present our most successful and winning card, i.e. the incumbent President. It is at this point that we would be faced with the impediment arising from the provisions of Article 105 (2) of the Constitution [the article that restricted presidential terms to a maximum of two but was in 2005 deleted from the constitution].”

“Given our dominant position in Parliament and our unity achieved through discussions and internal democracy, I personally see no difficulty in maintaining that Parliament repeal or amend as required, Article 105(2) of the Constitution. There will be some dissenters but that is the time to apply party discipline.”
These arguments seem to support the view advanced by the Opposition, among whom former DP president Kawanga Ssemogerere was a key player, that the return to parties was some form of bargaining chip for Mr Museveni to continue beyond 2006.

Mr Ssemogerere has continued to argue that Mr Museveni “ideologically hates parties”, accusing his government of being responsible for the mess in the other parties by infiltrating them. This is an accusation that different party leaders and other observers level against the ruling party; with UPC former party president Olara Otunnu claiming that his adversary within UPC, Mr Akena, is a front of the ruling party.
Ruling party adherents may argue that the cause of the mayhem within the different parties is different. Whatever the case, however, the state of multi-partyism in Uganda after 10 years of re-introduction of parties is not very appealing.

Ssemogerere on NRM “structural dominance”

When the NRM/NRA captured state power in January 1986, they overthrew the military and replaced it with their command and, to a big extent, they suppressed political activities of the traditional political parties. Uganda was then officially described as a no-party system but the NRM played a dominant political role under that system and it was virtually indistinguishable from government.
It had an organisational secretariat, staffed by public officials headed by a political commissar. Government paid the salaries of the party officials and provided the necessary facilities for the functioning of the organisation in terms of office and fieldwork, transportation facilities, mobilisation, etc.

In addition, public officials, notably Resident District Commissioners (RDCs), were duty-bound to play an active part in NRM’s activities and in boosting its support base and image.
In 1997 a law, the Movement Act (1997), was made and, under it, the Movement’s principal features were preserved intact and government continued paying for its structures, with the secretariat at the head, up to the day of the general election, 23 February 2006, even though the Political Parties and Organisations Act, which ushered multiparty politics in the country, had already been enacted in 2005.
When the Political Parties and Organisations Act (2005) was enacted, it contained a provision which was aimed at drawing a clear boundary, so as to avoid confusion, even mere perception, between a government institution and a political party.

Thus, for a party to be eligible to be registered under the Act, it had to distance itself, in reality and/or in perception, with respect to name, slogan, symbol from government or anybody in which government had a proprietary interest in order to avoid “(confusing) members of the general public”.
Nevertheless, when the Movement leadership decided to register as a political party under the Act, they insisted on and succeeded in retaining the name NRM, which for 20 years, had been funded by government and had, to all intents and purposes, been understood, not only by the general public but generally by public officials as well, to be part and parcel of government.

The cumulative impact of the historical status of the NRM/NRM-O and its special relationship with government institutions, notably the presidency, local government and security agencies, versus the rest of the political parties, is structural inequality, and hence injustice, towards the latter... There is, therefore, a need for some corrective action which can be achieved through civic education, dialogue, and constructive engagement in order to remove the false residual perception of the NRM as an integral part of the state and level the playing field by eliminating from the NRM activities the role of public officials, for instance that of RDCs, and de-linking it from the state security institutions.
(Extracted from a book by former DP president Dr Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere, titled Political Party Financing in Uganda: A Critical Analysis in Reference to Other Countries [2013].

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