Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) troops are seen on the Mbau-Kamango road in the Beni district on December 8, 2021. PHOTO/AFP
In 1988, I was in the lobby of Fairway Hotel with my late father, Ben Matogo. He was revved up for his posting to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, after two years as Ugandan High Commissioner to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We were thus in Uganda for a few weeks.
As we moved to the outdoor section of the hotel, Sserwanga Lwanga materialised like a bolt from the blue. He was walking at speed. This was in keeping with his martial character. During the Bush War, he was nicknamed “Horse” because, as a dispatch runner, he was faster than DHL.
At Makerere University, Sserwanga showed his spine as a young activist steeped in student and national politics. It was at Makerere that he met several of his future National Resistance Army (NRA) confederates, who later came to be known as the “intellectual core” of the NRA.
This explains why, as soon as he saw him, my father clenched his fist to indicate their solidarity and determination to do battle with the Janus-faces of imperialism and dictatorship, wherever and whenever. My father shouted, “The revolution will continue!”
Political education
After unclenching his fist, the enthusiasm with which my father shook Sserwanga’s open hand was not reciprocated. Sserwanga appeared distracted, as though the realities of the revolution had extinguished the inferno in his belly.
His perfunctory handshake belied something deeper, though. After all, both were passionate men who personified Uganda’s budding revolutionary consciousness.
“Political education proved very valuable to us in the long run, although some of us initially rejected it,” wrote Pecos Kutesa in his 2006 book, Uganda’s Revolution 1979–1986: How I Saw It.
“It was during those political lessons that we learned of a new phenomenon called the people’s protracted war.
This was very different from what we had been introduced to in our recruitment and the military academies we had attended. This was a war with no beginning and no end—it was a war with no defined duration.”
These lessons were gleaned from Mao Zedong's major literary work On Protracted War. It is a book comprising a series of speeches by Mao given from May 26, 1938, to June 3, 1938.
Later, even President Museveni would collect his own speeches into a 2000 book titled What is Africa's Problem? Mao, in On Protracted War, argued that a weaker revolutionary force can defeat a stronger reactionary force through prolonged conflict, relying on the support of the population and employing guerrilla tactics.
Mao’s three stages of war
In his book, Mao laid down the phases a revolutionary army at war should go through in order to be victorious. These stood on the three legs of the stool of his military strategy:
Strategic defensive: The weaker force initially retreats, avoiding decisive battles and focusing on guerrilla warfare to wear down the enemy.
Strategic stalemate: As the enemy's strength diminishes and the revolutionary force grows, the conflict enters a phase of positional warfare, with both sides engaging in larger-scale battles.
Strategic counter-offensive: In the final stage, the revolutionary force, now stronger, transitions to mobile warfare, launching a decisive offensive to defeat the enemy.
Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) troops are seen on the Mbau-Kamango road in the Beni district on December 8, 2021. PHOTO/AFP
However, it is telling that Mao saw an end in sight to every conflict. That is why the third stage of war was heralded as the “final stage.”
Pecos Kutesa, on the other hand, was taught that war is permanent. This squares with Karl Marx’s theory of permanent revolution.
Here, the revolutionary class (the proletariat) continuously goes up against opposing, reactionary classes. This presupposes a revolutionary process that goes on interminably. Well, until a socialist society has been established after the initial overthrow of the existing order.
But with the Chief of Defence Forces, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, writing in his 2010 book Battles of the Ugandan Resistance: A Tradition of Maneuver that senior NRA men like Elly Tumwine disavowed the NRA as Marxist, permanent revolution in the NRA’s case would not end with victory or the establishment of a Socialist society.
Instead, the “struggle” would continue.
But to what end? Enter Franz Fanon
In a 1971 dissertation submitted as partial fulfilment for his Political Science and Economics degree course at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Mr Museveni wrote Fanon’s Theory on Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique.
Fanon's theory of revolution, principally expounded in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, posits that violent struggle against colonial oppression is necessary for the colonised to achieve liberation and reclaim their humanity.
It would be fair to argue that President Museveni still believes in this thinking. His thinking on colonialism has not changed, even though it stops short of an open declaration of war with the coloniser.
“Law is a neutral agent. It is providing legal protection. If it is a decolonised country, it follows that we must have laws that do away with colonial concepts and entrench democratic concepts as we understand them,” he said in a story published by The New Vision in 2018.
The President evidently looks to a society in which colonial control is a thing of the past. But how will this society be brought about, by violence or peace?
Uganda's defence budget for the fiscal year (FY) 2025/2026 is approximately Shs4.3 trillion (around $1.1 billion), which implies that Museveni’s regime is arming itself for more than an armageddon-like showdown with Bobi Wine’s National Unity Platform (NUP).
Museveni’s battle plans
Through a combination of military preparedness and calculated alliances, President Museveni seems to be marshalling a Strategic Counter-Offensive.
In a story on the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF) website dated June 4, Lt Gen James Mugira, the managing director of the National Enterprise Corporation (NEC), extolled the virtues of Uganda’s military-technical partnership with Russia.
Speaking during the Russia–Uganda Intergovernmental Commission on Military-Technical Cooperation meeting at NEC headquarters, Lt Gen Mugira said, “Russia has been a strategic ally of the African people, offering critical support to liberation movements during the struggle for independence from colonial rule.”
The question is whether Russia, the West’s sworn enemy, would be ready to close ranks with Uganda, in the event of a revolutionary war.
