From poetry at Makerere in 1980, NRM now governs in prose, hangs on in patois

There is a grainy black-and-white picture taken at a campaign rally in Katwe, near Kampala, a few months before the controversial elections of December 1980. In it, the UPM candidate, Yoweri Museveni, is on a makeshift stage, standing next to Kirunda Kivejinja.

It was a relatively small rally, nowhere as big as the rival rallies called by the UPC and DP candidates. The UPM candidate knew he stood no chance of winning, but the new party offered a third way or force, for the country’s polarised politics after more than a decade of war and political instability.

Many of the people at the rally had come out of curiosity to see the lithe man who spoke clever words and a lot of English, but those who turned out at a similar rally at Makerere University, only a few kilometres away, mostly came out of conviction – conviction that Uganda could do and deserved better.

Milton Obote, who, never short on confidence, considered himself an intellectual, had hobnobbed with the Student Guild at Makerere, turning them into targets in the eight murderous anti-intellectual years of Idi Amin that followed.

Uganda had attempted, through the transitional UNLA government, to return sober civilian heads to political affairs, but the conduct of the 1980 elections put paid to this idea. Still, the UPM did enough to present itself, genuinely or not, as a progressive force that appealed to new entrants to the political arena.

Not surprisingly therefore, it would find many of its young early ‘elite’ recruits, once it took up arms, from within the ranks of the university students or recent graduates: David ‘Sejusa’ Tinyefuza, Jim Muhwezi, John Kazoora, Kizza Besigye, Amanya Mushega as well as later converts like Specioza Wandira, Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile and others.

As fate would have it, President Museveni was campaigning in Kibuye, near Katwe, this week, as violence raged at Makerere University. The government has blamed the violence on some unnamed external influence seeking to “corrupt” the morals and pockets of the students, and on students refusing to subject themselves to authority.

Yet, instead of prayer warriors, the government sent in heavily armed military police in a series of punitive expeditions. The brutality towards students appears to have been arbitrary and premeditated.

On at least two occasions, the military police waited for darkness to fall, locked the gates and, away from prying eyes of journalists, kicked in doors, beat up students and destroyed property. Some students are still in hospital. A few remain unaccounted for.

Officially, the students are protesting against a 15 per cent annual fee increment. They say it will put degrees out of reach for smart, but indigent kids. There’s a bigger argument here, dating back to the 1990s, about the priority and cost of higher education and how to pay for it, but that is an argument for another day.

Some have drawn parallels between events at Makerere this week and those in August 1976 when Idi Amin’s soldiers raided the university and did some of the same things, and a lot worse. There is something to be said about history repeating itself, or rather people never learning from history.

But there is also something more profound in the transformation of the NRM itself. The appeal to intellectualism and some form of higher ideal seen in its formative years has, once the realities of being in power and attempting to manage dissent kicked in, fallen by the wayside, replaced by a the-end-justifies-the-means pragmatism and populism.

While claims of external influences at Makerere and elsewhere sound like conspiracy theories to the reasonable man on the street, they are disturbing reminders for anyone with even passing knowledge of how to fomenting urban disorder or discord towards the regime of the day. We have been here before, four decades ago.

Whether due to a failure to renew or what some might regard favourably as institutional memory, Hon. Kivejinja is still in government serving with Mr Museveni so many years after that rally.
But he would be booed today if he attempted to address a rally at Makerere.

In fact, the most startling thing is how dramatically tables have been turned over the last 40 years. Were he alive today, it is unlikely that Prof Foster Byarugaba would be standing on a campaign platform for the NRM; the hop-step-and-jump of political gymnastics is now more likely to feature titans with names like Buchaman, Master Parrot or Bad Man, a Rasta or same such.

The kids born in the ghettos are now at Makerere while those who campaigned amongst intellectuals at Makerere in 1980 are campaigning with the riff-raff in the ghettos. UPM/NRM campaigned in poetry and governed in prose, now it is hanging on in patois. You see the gunshot? When that fire it hot!

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s freedom fighter.
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Twitter: @Kalinaki