Both NRM and FDC have a common rival – the State

Last week in “Besigye, Wine, and Uganda in 2021: what Museveni fears – and doesn’t” we left ourselves with three issues to answer: The first was why, if the Opposition parties which entered into the Inter-Party Organisations Dialogue (Ipod) with the ruling NRM, are doing President Yoweri Museveni’s work for him by attacking FDC and long-term rival Kizza Besigye, who boycotted it, he wasn’t rewarding them but instead hammering them down.
Our argument was that the youthful uprisings in Algeria, which ousted strongmen Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan (in less than a fortnight of each other in April), were likely cause for concern in Uganda’s State House. That Bouteflika’s fall after 20 years, rather than Bashir’s, who ruled for 30, must particularly be troubling to Uganda’s rulers.

That is because Bouteflika, unlike Bashir, had actually saved Algeria, coming to power in 1999 to end a near-civil war, and he engineered a dramatic economic turnaround and stabilisation of the country. Though unemployment was rampant, Algeria’s economy was doing relatively well. It isn’t a basket case like Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, or Sudan under Bashir.

Algeria’s economy is pretty much like Uganda’s, with dynamism in some parts, but with high unemployment and hobbled by corruption, nepotism, and a leadership out of touch with a very youthful country. Those Algerians are North African “Bazukulu” Museveni speaks of.
Politicians are very binary. When they think they are scoring some success, they expect to be rewarded with a continued stay in power. But if they are despised even with that modest success, they panic big time, because that leaves them with no tools of persuasion except, in Uganda, violence and repression – even in circumstances where the Opposition is being “reasonable”.

Which brings us to the second issue - why the very early endorsements of Museveni as “sole candidate” for the 2021 by both the NRM politburo, and Parliamentary Caucus.
It can be expected, as we argued, that in this new and uncertain environment, the ruling party will not hold a primary, and elections might not be held in 2021, and will be postponed – if they are held at all.

In that case, the endorsements of Museveni earlier in the year could be used as indicative of a wish for him to continue. In other words, the 2021 elections could already have taken place.
Can he get away with it? Yes, he can; which goes to the third issue we raised last week; what is power in the present Uganda context, and who really holds what?
The Opposition in Uganda, it has been argued, is organisationally weak. There is an enduring belief that if they united, they would give Museveni and the NRM a run for their money.

We noted previously that, historically, irrespective of how few or many people run against Museveni, he and the next rival (Paul Ssemogerere in 1996, and Besigye since 2001) get nearly 97 per cent of the vote cast (or shall we say “announced”). I would argue that calls for Opposition unity in Uganda are a useless expenditure of political effort.
All this leads us, as some have argued before, to the reality that NRM’s victories come from its control of the State, not the strength of the party. The NRM is surprisingly similar, especially to FDC.
We need to look at two parties’ ability to effectively represent at polling stations, not just to field candidates, during elections.

In the 2016 election, there were 28,010 polling stations. For now, we shall not ask what presence other Opposition parties, beside FDC, had.
An FDC insider admitted confidentially that they didn’t have agents or effective representation in 19,000 polling stations – i.e. they had no ability to control their vote in 67 per cent of the polling stations. However, NRM – while it had candidates everywhere – didn’t have agents and effective presence in all polling stations either. Some estimates say it was essentially absent in between 5,000 to 7,500 polling stations.

What happens, though, is that the election and government officials, and security agents, at these polling stations then function as agents for President Museveni, first, and as a by the way, for NRM. I have spoken to several foreign election observers in the 2016 election, who told me of several instances where the vote was tilted for Museveni and the NRM parliamentary candidate, without its agent in sight.
In a fair electoral contest, NRM and FDC would battle to a goalless draw. It is the State that does it for NRM and Museveni. And that is where the power is.

The NRM as a party will be accommodating. The State won’t. Towards 2021, we will likely see a more visible iron fist, as the NRM continues to wither and the things with which governments pacify citizens – groceries and social services – stop to have effect, as we saw in Algeria.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data.
visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site. Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3