What has made Museveni such a long-serving ruler

At the same time, the re-adoption of multiparty politics, which meant, at least on the face of it, opening up space for political competition, happened simultaneously with Museveni’s tightening grip and a turn towards what has become a decidedly personalist system of rule.

What some initially characterised as a ‘third term’ in 2005, in fact, turned out to be a quest for life presidency, as one analyst perceptively observed at the time. While the gradual deepening of autocratic rule of a personalist and clientelist hue may have been long in the making throughout Museveni’s reign right from the onset, there has been an acceleration and deepening, especially during the last two decades.

A series of events and actions since 2005 constitute a set of puzzling empirical questions that deserve close, careful and critical investigation. Why did the return to multiparty politics not translate into true political pluralism and democratic praxis? How has Museveni successfully balanced the boat to maintain a firm grip on power even with declining legitimacy and a worsening environment for political freedoms and civic space?

Removing term limits
Some of Museveni’s close allies in 2005, who acquiesced to removing term limits, seeing it as a necessary stopgap measure, have since fallen out while the incumbent has managed to replenish the ranks of his ruling coalition and realigned the system to serve his stay at the helm. A great part of the realignment has happened in the military, the most important pillar of Museveni’s rule.

How has Museveni successfully balanced the boat to maintain a firm grip on power even with declining legitimacy and a worsening environment for political freedom and civic space? How has he navigated the effective use of military power in a country with a long history of coups and armed insurgency?

As with all major socio-political questions, there are no simple or quick answers that explain the deepening of National Resistance Movement (NRM) and Museveni’s autocratic rule, especially in the last two decades. Numerous possible dimensions and recipes go into an explanatory framework considering the complex combination of factors and forces at play.

Dissecting the above questions from different analytical and empirical angles can help yield a comprehensive and compelling framework that converges on a common theoretical thread. This book’s goal is to bring together a set of analyses that examine Mr Museveni’s enduring hold on power and his autocratic trajectory, placing the outcomes in a broader comparative lens and theoretical compass.

Life presidency
Since the 2005 turning point, but especially during the 2010s, Uganda’s socio-political landscape has had a series of unsettling developments and dramatic shifts. For one, Mr Museveni’s determination to rule for life, simultaneous with a rumoured scheme of grooming him soon, is a trend that complicates the state of Ugandan politics with implications for stability, security and succession dynamics.

In a 2012 television interview with Uganda’s NTV, Museveni stated categorically that he would not stay in power after 75 years, the constitutional age limit. But in 2017, the age limit clause was deleted from the constitution. Earlier in 2015, the NRM party constitution was amended to give the party chairman, Mr Museveni, complete powers to appoint the secretary general and other top party officials.

What is more, fragmentation of Opposition parties, the weakening of alternative centres of power and erosion of independent institutions are a feature of Uganda’s political trajectory. These and other developments have combined to give Mr Museveni’s presidency an imperial grandeur and a deeper autocratic tenor, arguably more pronounced than the period before 2005.

In hindsight, the excitement of returning to multiparty politics in 2005 did not anticipate the rough winds ahead and Museveni’s long-term power calculus. The expectations and excitement of returning to multiparty faded somewhat, giving way to frustration and disappointment in a political environment increasingly characterised by militarism, coercion and ‘controlled consent’.

A toxic mix
In the early phases of his rule, both local and foreign analysts considered Museveni a reformist leader who had come with revolutionary promises and was presiding over a democratising polity. Despite the ban on political parties instituted in 1986, which made Uganda a de facto one-party state but couched in the language of no-party democracy, a favourable assessment of Museveni and the NRM regime held up relatively well up to at least the early 2000s.

During the first two decades of NRM/Museveni’s rule, Uganda’s democratic credentials were modest, if tenuous, but the country’s democratic institutional landscape during the 1990s and early 2000s held some promise for a stable and sustainable system of government, one that appeared to transcend individual preferences and idiosyncrasies, including Museveni’s.

Since the mid-2000s, however, especially during the 2010s and into the 2020s, the trend and tenor of Uganda’s political landscape have decidedly and unequivocally pointed in the direction of a highly personalised autocratic system of rule, characterised by retrogression, repression, endemic political corruption and widespread uncertainty about both the present and future.

A lot has gone wrong. From institutional malaise and rampant graft in the public sector, to contraction of space for political competition and civic engagement, the erosion of checks on Executive authority and resort to unbridled patronage, Uganda sits at a particularly precarious intersection of state dysfunction and social tension.

There has been an admixture of political twists and turns, stresses and strains, including fault lines in the ruling party, fragmentation of the Opposition and social anxieties fuelled by a demographic drift of masses of unemployed and desperate young people. All these add up to tempestuous times in Ugandan politics and society.

There is so much at stake that requires rigorous scholarly investigation and a sharp-edged analytical exercise, which this book attempts to accomplish. While the issues at hand are expansive, the task ahead for this book is relatively circumscribed, focusing pointedly on the growth and resilience of a personalist autocracy but one that is situated within the broader terrain and chain of Uganda’s recent political history.

There is a growing consensus that points to a resurgence in new forms of authoritarianism, including among previously relatively established democracies. There has especially been a turn to deeply personalist autocratic forms of rule in countries that have had latent and fledgling democratic institutions even when in practice falling short of meeting the minimum democratic threshold.

In that regard, some scholars have noted a ‘third wave of autocratisation’, suggesting that in the same way there were three major waves of democratisation (pre, post-World War and 1970s/80s) and two corresponding counter-waves (interwar period and the late 1960s/1970s), as argued by Samuel Huntington, a third counter-wave has been underway.

In the next section, I propose a general theory of regime resilience and the bases of autocratisation. While the theory addresses the Ugandan case study, its basic building blocks and underlying assumptions hold relevance beyond Uganda, given that the deepening of autocratic regimes, of a highly personalist stripe, and the crisis of the hitherto celebrated triumph of liberal democracy is now a worldwide phenomenon and the subject of considerable scholarly interest.

Issue

Since the mid-2000s, however, especially during the 2010s and into the 2020s, the trend and tenor of Uganda’s political landscape have decidedly and unequivocally pointed in the direction of a highly personalised autocratic system of rule, characterised by retrogression, repression, endemic political corruption and widespread uncertainty about both the present and future.

The book serialisation continues next Saturday.
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