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How Museveni’s coalition grasps change, continuity

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President Museveni. His Cabinet appointments depend, at least in part, on the ruling party’s electoral performance,
 both presidential and in parliamentary races, and Museveni’s own power calculus at the national and sub-national levels. PHOTO | FILE

President Museveni was sworn-in for a sixth (elected) term in May 2021, putting him on course to rule Uganda for 40 uninterrupted years by 2026.

According to a keen analyst with close connections to State House, the new Cabinet, named in June 2021, was the most shocking line-up of ministers in Museveni’s three-and-a-half decade-long rule.

Shocking for the personnel both picked and dropped. A female vice president, a female prime minister and many relatively young unknowns. Only a few members of the old guard from the National Resistance Army (NRA) cradle were drafted into the new line-up, which sits at the apex of the Executive branch.

Before this much-anticipated and long-awaited Cabinet announcement, Museveni had successfully wrested the position of Speaker of Parliament, Uganda’s third most powerful job, from long-standing ruling party cadre Rebecca Kadaga. Instead of Kadaga—who spiritedly fought to keep the job—Museveni went for a relatively recent convert to the ruling party, Jacob Oulanyah, former member of the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC)—Uganda’s Independence political party—who unfortunately died less than a year into the job.

After coming second best in an acrimonious race to head the Legislature, Kadaga was defeated, deflated and at the mercy of Museveni, who in turn drafted her back into Cabinet where she previously served during the 1990s.

As head of the Legislature, Kadaga held the Number Three position in government for a decade, and was equally Number Three in the hierarchy of the ruling NRM as second national vice chairperson, only to be demoted to the lowly portfolio of Minister for East African Affairs.

Both the calibre of the Cabinet line-up and the booting of Kadaga for Oulanyah reflected broader reassignments in Museveni’s ruling coalition in the wake of the January 2021 General Elections with parallels to previous electoral cycles.
Museveni’s Cabinet appointments depend, at least in part, on the ruling party’s electoral performance, both presidential and in parliamentary races, and Museveni’s own power calculus at the national and subnational levels.

Thus, going by official presidential results—rejected by the Opposition—Museveni and the NRM substantially underperformed not just in the heretofore-traditional bastion of Buganda but also in Kadaga’s backyard of Busoga. By contrast, in northern Uganda, where Oulanyah had emerged the biggest political name and power broker, the region gradually came around to electorally be in Museveni’s corner after decades of war and voting against him in successive elections in 1996, 2001 and 2006.

Balance of power
In line with the electoral outlook and overall political support for the incumbent, since 1986, the vice president was always either from Buganda or Busoga. In fact, at one point, individuals from Buganda and Busoga held the top four positions after the President, that is, the vice president, Speaker, Deputy Speaker and prime minister. By contrast, following the 2021 elections, individuals from regions other than Buganda and Busoga took those four top positions. The vice president from Teso, a northeast sub-region which, much like the north, for long rebelled violently and voted vigorously against Museveni.

Likewise, the Speaker is from the same region as the vice president; Deputy Speaker and Prime Minister both from the west. In addition, the Chief Justice is from northern Uganda. Hence, of the top four positions in the government apparatus, individuals from the north and northeast of the country occupy three, a rather dramatic change and a reflection of the shift in regional political balance of power.
The above snapshot is instructive for several reasons. First, the Cabinet represents the core and most prized layer of Uganda’s civilian state power or, at a minimum, carries high symbolic value in the realm of power sharing. Second, the way Museveni constitutes his Cabinet is representative of regional and religious balancing, demographic, generational and gendered considerations. Third, this balancing tends to track with electoral dynamics, which are shaped by both national and subnational political imperatives.

How has Uganda’s ruling coalition changed overtime in line with Museveni’s power calculations and survival strategies? Specifically, how has the nature of the ruling coalition affected electoral fortunes of Museveni and the NRM during successive election cycles, and in turn how do election-results shape coalition realignments? This chapter takes a close look at the evolution of Museveni’s ruling coalition as it intersects particularly with the country’s electoral landscape.

The concept of a ruling coalition as used in this chapter refers to the structure and make-up, or the line-up and distribution of key positions in the governing apparatus, primarily in the two core branches of government that are vested with everyday authority and power, that is, the Executive and the legislative branches. Museveni has built his rule on two primary and crucial pillars: force and finance, i.e. coercive power and material spoils.

In this schema, the armed forces are the repository of the former and the latter is reflected in the distribution of patronage through public sector positions, educational scholarships at home and abroad, handouts and even outright bribery. The ruling coalition combines management of elites through distribution of patronage chiefly by way of appointments to political offices, on the one hand, and ensuring proper management and the tight guarding of military might, on the other.

Coalition dynamics
As a necessity, authoritarian regimes have to rule through a coalition of one form or the other. This is a widely shared conclusion in the comparative politics literature on authoritarianism. The size, structure and composition of ruling coalitions vary considerably and may include a range of actors, but the principle is for the most part the same—authoritarian rule is unsustainable without allies and alliances to shore it up, credible partners to pump up legitimacy and power brokers to assuage possible popular discontent. This is especially necessary where autocrats can be credibly threatened with removal from office by either internal or external forces, from within the governing core or from outside the ruling establishment.

Threats to the incumbent can either be by the popular force of the masses or the narrow conspiracy of elites. The latter looms large with military elites as the primary source of threat, thus requiring measures to ‘coup-proof ’ to guard against coups. Yet successful coup-proofing can in turn trigger civil war.

Coalition dynamics under authoritarian rule are obviously different from coalition-governments in parliamentary democracies, as has long been the case in many European countries. In the latter, governments form at least in part through bargains and negotiations by different parties in situations where no one party has significant majority-support to govern on its own. In authoritarian settings, by contrast, an altogether different set of imperatives and motivations inform coalitions, largely centred on regime survival and legitimation.

At issue is the fact that unlike in democracies, authoritarian regimes inherently face severe legitimacy problems, thus an overarching need to reach different constituencies, interest groups and power brokers to buy legitimacy and mitigate credible threats and keep a hold on power.
Authoritarian ruling coalitions are a reflection of the overall structure of politics in a country and the competing interests the incumbent party and president have to contend with.

That is, the ruling coalition mirrors the ensemble of social forces, interest groups and political alignments. Ruling coalitions strive to match up to and meet the balance of power between the incumbent, on the one hand, and the challengers, on the other. Also, coalitions speak to the terrain of power contestations, whether built on specific ideological contests or driven by a fluid and flirting environment of particularistic pulls and pushes for access to the spoils of power.

For example, in a political system and social milieu characterised by fragmentation and the fracturing of political actors and social constituencies, of intense centrifugal forces, there is likely to be a ruling coalition that is fragile, unstable and precarious. By contrast, where there is more social cohesion, issue-based contests and more unified political groups, a stronger ideological predisposition and a more appealing governing agenda, the ruling coalition will likely be stable, better structured and predictable for the long-term.