Nelson Mandela: ANC and his legacy in Uganda

Almost immediately after becoming president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela chose Uganda as one of the first countries to visit.

Mandela’s quick visit is linked to the close relationship the African National Congress (ANC) had with Uganda, starting with the Uganda People’s Congress under Apollo Milton Obote and the NRM/A under President Museveni.

While ANC’s request for military help on the continent was shunned by many countries, Uganda took in the anti-apartheid struggle’s armed wing with open arms.

As the resistance against black suppression went on in South Africa, the ANC, under the leadership of the late Oliver Reginald Tambo, was stuck and did not know where to train its fighters from and they decided to look around the continent for military outfits which shared ideology with ANC.

After being rejected severally by different revolutionary groups around the continent, the ANC landed on the National Resistance Movement, which had just come from a five-year guerrilla war and were given Kaweweta training wing where the NRA had trained from during the five-year-bush war.

“We had just taken over power in 1986 and when they approached Museveni in 1989, he told them there was a place to accommodate them in Kaweweta where the NRA trained from,” said Lt Col Mambo Barabusa, the chief instructor at the Oliver Reginald Tambo School of Leadership Kaweweta.

The support the NRA gave the ANC was mainly the training ground and the guerilla ideology which enabled ANC to train its armed wing.

Many guerillas from ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), were flown here in 1989. They would train for a short time and fly back home.

“At the time, the guerilla war was intensifying in South Africa and ANC had to multiply its fighters,” Col Barabusa said.

During State Visit to Uganda, current South African president Jacob Zuma noted that many leaders now occupying senior positions in the South African defense forces received their initial military training in Uganda.

The Kaweweta camp was upgraded into a school of leadership for senior police, prisons and military personnel and was officially opened by president Zuma last year.

The school symbolises a deep sense of gratitude of the South African people to the Ugandan nation. It is also a symbol of what ANC president Oliver Tambo stood for - excellence, peace, harmony and justice all over the world.

Save for the seemingly ideological caprice that has lately engulfed the NRA political wing, the camaraderie the anti-Apartheid leader had with Uganda’s leadership was informed by the belief in democracy and good governance the two sides shared, especially then.

At one point, Nelson Mandela held a Ugandan passport.

Mandela died on Thursday, 17 years since his first visit to Uganda. He suffered repeated bouts of ill health and since September had been receiving treatment at home for a recurring lung infection.

But has Uganda’s leadership kept true to the beliefs that Nelson Mandela shared with it in the last part of the 20th century? Would Mandela be happy if he visited Uganda today?

Would Mandela have been happy if he visited Uganda today?
Veteran politicians and army officers say the NRM has since slipped off the path of righteousness and if Mandela were to visit Uganda now, he would mourn for the principles that he once thought he shared with the Ugandan leadership.

“Uganda has betrayed its own struggle. The NRM has become the enemy of its own cause of the 1980 struggle,” Ms Cecilia Ogwal, Woman MP Dokolo, who, during the Obote government, was employed as a civil servant whose job was looking at South Africans who were given Ugandan passports during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The difference between South Africa’s struggle and that of Uganda, Ms Ogwal opines, is that the one of ANC was against racial oppression while President Museveni was fighting a duly-elected government.

The veteran opposition legislator adds that Uganda now is a system masked as democratic but with a gun inside.

“You see nepotism being practiced openly, you see institutionalised corruption in Uganda and that’s what Mandela would have never condoned,” she said.

“He would have never been happy about what is happening in Uganda now. You can see how painful it is to be oppressed by your own people. Mandela would have condemned it strongly.”

Presidential adviser on media John Nagenda says NRA/M and the ANC and Nelson Mandela followed different convictions in their revolutions and so should not be compared to the letter.

“During the bush war, the Movement came to some conclusion about the way forward and they didn’t necessarily follow whatever ANC was doing,” he said.

“As the ANC was a saviour of the people of South Africa and much as some countries were giving it aid, the Movement was also fighting a war against bad governance and they did so.”

However, Mr Nagenda says the NRM has not kept true to the principle of dialogue that was held high in the beginning.

“Since dialogue was one of the things that formed the Movement, it would be very wrong to instead turn against it,” he said. “I have seen intolerance in some cases replacing dialogue.”

Unlike Mandela who, by resigning from leadership, allowed the ANC to outgrow individuals, Uganda, Maj (rtd) John Kazoora says, has become a one-man rule and has moved from “we” to “me”.

“Don’t insult ANC. Uganda has not learnt any lessons,” he said, when asked whether Uganda has learned any lessons from its association with ANC and Nelson Mandela’s beliefs.

Lessons for Uganda
“We are back to square one. We have never had a truth and reconciliation commission. ANC forgave its tormentors and now concentrates on service delivery unlike NRM whose specialty is greed, corruption and nepotism.”

A similar view is held by Forum for Democratic Change leader, Maj Gen (rtd) Mugisha Muntu.

“ANC and NRM are incomparable. ANC is a party that outlives individuals but NRM is built around one individual and that’s very dangerous,” he says.

Unlike Mandela’s South Africa that has seen three presidents since the anti-oppression struggle was won, Uganda, Maj Kazoora says, has been “bedeviled” with the same man for the last 27 years who has failed to realise that when the show is over, you leave the stage.

As a leader, Mandela is credited for his high level of tolerance for divergent views, a virtue that, according to those who have followed Uganda’s leadership, is terribly deficient in the current leadership.

“In his leadership, you didn’t hear of oppression of opponents; we never heard of his opponents being teargased,” former Democratic Party leader Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere said.

“When liberation is achieved, we should be able to lead under a democracy and pluralism and also don’t take yourself as the only person to lead the country.”

Mr Ssemogerere was the chairperson of the Organisation of African Unity committee of ministers that pushed for a free South Africa, and was also a UN team leader in South Africa during the 1994 elections that brought Mandela to power.

Maj Kazoora says if Mr Mandela visited Uganda today, he would die of “political septicemia.”

“Clearly Museveni and group have betrayed the revolution and the country. The country even lacks blood,” he said.

“Every leader chooses his own exit; Mandela chose his and retired honourably and is now a respectable statesman. Others such as Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak chose their own exits. It’s up to Museveni to choose his own exit.”

However, Mr Nagenda says we should all be very happy that we had an African like that in our midst because Mandela was a one off.

“We should never forget a man like this and we should always emulate him,” he adds.
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Mayanja Nkangi meets Mandela

I don’t exactly recollect when I met Nelson Mandela but it must have been one of those occasions when he came for the National Resistance Movement (NRM) anniversaries.

Then, I was at the Finance ministry so that is how I got the opportunity to accompany him and President Museveni, I think it was for a press conference. Of course, I was privileged because I was a simple minister in Uganda and here was a man with a history, a history of being mistreated but not revenging on his oppressors. I did not speak one on one with him.

Even while I cannot vividly remember every detail of the meeting, one particular aspect stands tall in my ageing memory. That is nothing other than the striking humility and dignity with which Mandela carried himself.

You just could not fail to recognise that he is an icon, a legendary of our time yet he did not tell you this. No one even had to recite praises of him before the meeting. There was just a way one literally touched, smelt, heard and felt his dignity. I am tempted to think Mandela is the most humble yet greatest man I have met.

But what impressed me most is that this gentle man had been incarcerated for fighting for the freedom but he comes out of prison, gets into a position of leadership and does not avenge. He had every justification to make the whites pay for the oppression but he did not.

The greatest lesson which leaders in Uganda must learn from Mandela is not to look to the past unless it helps their people. Idi Amin, for example, did not look at the past to oppress people. I think he behaved the way he did because of his personal judgment; eliminating people he thought were treasonous. He did not base on the past to target a particular group of people and I think leaders of today should not look at the past to kill the future but only use it to better the present and future.

As told to Ivan Okuda

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