NRM has grown from a mass party to a party mess

There is substantial evidence to show that President Museveni believes in growth; in nurturing small beginnings to big things.
The cattle keeper delights in a calf growing into a big cow; a few cows becoming several big herds.
As a warlord, he believed 28 men could grow into a nation-shaking army. As a war planner, he rejected the big drama of a coup d’état and chose a protracted people’s guerrilla war for overthrowing bad governments. 
The vehicle would be a body of citizens whose patriotism and faith in the struggle were growing. Instead of scheming to get a few hundred men killed in a day or two like a trigger-happy military thug grabbing power, he chose to have several hundred thousand people killed over many years in a Bush War and qualify to be called a ‘revolutionary’.
The very title of his book, Sowing the Mustard Seed, implies his deep faith in the enlightening power of growth.
But everything that possesses power has the capacity to do good or evil. The ‘primitive dictators’ he fought used their power for evil. Rooted in ideological commitment, struggling patiently in a slow ‘furnace’, his power would be for making Uganda great.
The citizens – many of them peasants – with whom and among whom he had fought were part of his struggle. They were in his ‘Movement’.
As a simple person, that is how I understand this NRM/Museveni thing. In more abstract interpretations, some people speak of dynastic fantasies and many other intentions that are the very antithesis of revolution. But I will stick to the version of his vision that the ghosts of the Bush War dead would understand.
After victory, the NRM spirit would spread further; truly, a mass movement. Because of agitation by conservative pluralists, remnant UPC ‘reactionaries’ and ‘opportunists’, multiparty political activity was restored. Museveni’s message: Get rid of “them”. The Movement chunk that remained was the collection of good “we”; the party championing his vision; and the only leader and party that had a vision. That was 2005.
Now, just as rulers claim responsibility for virtually every praiseworthy event, action or condition, they must be forced – if need be ruthlessly dragged – to accept responsibility for every unfavourable outcome whose cause can be reasonably traced to their policies or actions, and even their omissions.
So, after the horrendous barbarism exhibited in the NRM primaries, there are questions squarely facing the NRM chairman, Mr Museveni, and his fellow leaders: Do you finally admit that your vision was thoroughly mistaken? Or that maybe you never believed in democracy in the first place, and your vision was always secretly aimed at leading us into the mess where the arrogance, intolerance, greed and electoral fraud that the NRM is now spreading violently is the reference by which a country that endured a bloody revolution should conduct its peacetime politics?
Did you plan this wretched cycle? Or did you just fall foul of your old wisdom and cannot return to that wisdom, in whose light you saw clearly that the problem facing Africa was rulers who stayed in power for too long? 
Does the NRM recognise that its current sins tell very loudly the story of its ideological bankruptcy; that the space where ideas used to grow is now filled by the single obsession to retain power, by hook, crook or any other means, completely regardless of the NRM’s incompetence at governing Uganda? Was the NRM vision aimed at growing this scenario to justify another fake revolution?

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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