How NRM under Museveni has become an autocracy

This personalisation of power has become so acute that Museveni’s son and until recently Commander of the Ugandan army’s land forces, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has, since March 2022, taken to Twitter to openly muse about succeeding his father, declaring in March 2023 that ‘I will stand for the Presidency in 2026!’

This was not, however, the originally stated NRM plan. The Movement formed in 1981 under Museveni’s leadership—committed itself to a political programme which placed the ‘restoration of democracy’at its heart.

Although it won power through military might, its struggle was premised not simply on seizing the reins of government but on removing a dictator—Milton Obote— and replacing him and his regime with a progressive, inclusive and democratic successor.

Famously, Museveni declared on coming to power that the NRM’s ascendancy would herald a ‘fundamental change to the politics of our country’, arguing that ‘the problem of ... Uganda in particular, is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power’.

Seven years later, almost to the day, the Ugandan president warned those celebrating the NRM’s longevity about the rise of ‘professional politicians’, noting that ‘we should not have [them], people should pursue their professions and then [enter politics] to help the people’.

Bush War memorialised

Much important work has been published—including within this book it-self—on the factors and circumstances that have led to Museveni and the NRM ultimately constructing a personalist
autocracy rather than an inclusive democracy.

This chapter’s concern is less focused on explaining this trajectory, however, and more on exploring how it has been justified and articulated in the context of memorialising the liberation struggle, which brought the NRM, and Museveni, to power.

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For while Uganda’s autocratic turn under Museveni has been opposed to varying degrees, by Opposition figures, disaffected citizens and (on occasion) Western development ‘partners’, the greatest moments of peril for the Ugandan leadership have often come from within the NRM elite itself, with struggle-era cadres openly mobilising against Museveni in the name of reasserting liberation struggle principles.

This chapter, therefore, explores how the Ugandan liberation struggle- sometimes referred to as the ‘Bush War’—has been memorialised since its conclusion in January 1986.

What we ask; can developments in this space tell us about the evolution of thinking within the NRM itself around the political direction of travel under Museveni?

To what extent has the progression of struggle memorialisation reflected—or sought to neutralise contemporary elite political debates around the personalisation of power and ‘betrayal’ of the struggle agenda, and with what implications?

In taking this approach, we follow a range of scholars, who view the liberation struggle as a critical, but ambiguous, political resource in contemporary Uganda.

Driving out a violent and abusive dictatorship gave the NRM, and Museveni, almost unparalleled legitimacy on coming to power – not least given the punishing and prolonged character of the military campaign and the near absence of international support provided to the Movement.

Museveni himself has often referred to his role, and that of the NRM, in the struggle as the moral and political foundation of his right to rule, although other senior NRM struggle veterans—some of whom have since come to found or join Opposition parties—have also taken on the same mantle to condemn what they have perceived as corruption and authoritarian creep under his presidency

Justifying authoritarian turn
Although the struggle itself is increasingly becoming a distant memory for even those Ugandans who lived through it—the average Ugandan was born in 2006—struggle memorialisation and political pageantry have become more, not less, pronounced in recent years.

We believe, then, that examining how the struggle has been presented and memorialised by the NRM political establishment reveals an important and evolving commentary on the regime’s perceived authority, and a ‘real-time’ edification of current thinking on how present-day political developments are justified through the lens of the past.

We do not suggest, in this regard, that State and NRM approaches to struggle memorialisation have followed a strategic ‘masterplan’ since 1986. Nor do we propose that those who have overseen this work have (necessarily) done so with an explicit intention to promote or contradict a particular narrative.

As the chapter details, these approaches have evolved and have involved multiple institutions and actors although the military leadership and Office of the President have generally been pre-eminent.

Instead, we argue that the memorialisation sites, debates and processes analysed reflect how ruling elites have, over time, come to justify and represent the Ugandan government’s authoritarian trajectory.

Chapter synopsis
In developing this argument, the chapter is organised into four parts. Section 2, immediately below, places the analysis within the wider context of scholarship on ‘post-liberation’ governance in Africa, and the centrality of struggle discourse and memorialisation to elite justifications of establishing personalised, autocratic (or, in the cases of South Africa and Namibia, hegemonic single party-based) systems of government.

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Section 3 outlines the data on which this study draws—principally elite interviews and archival research undertaken in Uganda during four periods of fieldwork between January 2018 and October 2019.

Section 4 provides an overview of struggle memorialisation under the NRM, explaining how an initially localised approach has increasingly come under the direction of the military and presidency, and how an early focus on local burial sites has evolved into a series of much grander projects centred on the military and Museveni himself.

Section 5 presents the main analysis of the chapter, highlighting two keyways in which struggle memorialisation has developed to reflect emerging elite rationalisation of Uganda’s autocratic turn—
focusing on several key memorialisation sites, occasions and processes.

The first of these two themes is the growing ‘Movementisation’of struggle memorialisation. Initially, the NRM sought to incorporate recognition of a wide range of actors and organisations into struggle memorialisation, including those not directly associated with the NRM’s insurgency.

Overtime, however, these perspectives have been crowded out in favour of a narrative which presents the NRM as the sole deliverer of Uganda’s liberation from tyranny.

The second trend we analyse is the growing placement of Museveni at the heart of struggle memorialisation spaces, projects and ceremonies and a move from celebrating the NRM—or Movement—as a liberating force to hailing Museveni alone as the country’s saviour and
sole author of the struggle’s success.

Rationale of the study
Before we outline the scope of this study and the data upon which our analysis draws, it is first necessary to explain our rationale for focusing on the liberation struggle—and its memorialisation—as
a lens into elite justifications for Uganda’s authoritarian trajectory under the NRM.

This requires us to place the Museveni polity in the broader context of African ‘post-liberation regimes’ and
scholarly debates on the longevity and resilience of these political settlements.

The NRM—sometimes referred to in the pre-1986 era by the name of its military wing, the National Resistance Army (NRA)—became, in 1986, the first movement in East Africa to gain power
through insurgency, as opposed to military coup or civilian oppositional politics. Perhaps even more significantly, though, it was also one of the first such movements on the continent to seize
power in this manner from a black, African, postcolonial government and to do so as a self-styled national liberation movement.

Indeed,it is this combination of characteristics—a liberation movement which gained power through violent struggle against a dictatorial African predecessor—which has arguably imprinted itself most profoundly on the political identity of Museveni and many struggle veterans, sometimes called ‘Historicals’.

Seven of the 14 chapters in Museveni’s 1997 autobiography are titled either ‘Fighting Amin’ or ‘
Fighting Obote’ while the founding document of the NRM— the Ten Point Programme—outlines an
explicitly political programme of national independence and liberation.

Many of the most damaging internal NRM debates during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s focused, as mentioned above, not only on questions of governance and creeping authoritarianism but also on whether these developments constituted a betrayal of the NRM’s founding political and ideological covenant, with its members and with the Ugandan people.

This political context, together with the movement’s ‘organisational personality’, has led a range of scholars to classify the NRM government as a ‘post-liberation regime’—a government which emerged
out of an insurgency that fought not only, in the words of Sara Dorman,‘ just to seize
power, but also to re-shape the state’. 

Similar African states

For Dorman and others, this places the contemporary Ugandan polity in the same category as a range of others in the region—notably Eritrea since 1991, Rwanda since 1994, and Ethiopia between 1991 and 2019.

Other African states in this group, it has been suggested, would be Mozambique and Angola since 1975, Zimbabwe since 1980, Namibia since 1990 and South Africa.