Goodbye Besigye. Some unlikely people might really miss you
After going toe-to-toe with President Yoweri Museveni in what, for him, were four bruising election battles, Dr Kizza Besigye is not standing in the 2021 polls.
It will be a long time before we witness a contest as impassioned and emotive as that between Museveni and Besigye, or witness a politician take the blows and be so fearless in the face of a violent State as he was.
Today, though, we won’t dwell on Besigye the man and his convictions. Daniel Kalinaki’s book, Kizza Besigye and Uganda’s Unfinished Revolution, did that for us. We will look to his impact, and how he – and FDC – changed Uganda and its politics.
Some of the changes, are outcomes he didn’t necessarily intend. To illustrate this, one needs to go back to 1995, to the campaign and candidacy of Democratic Party’s Dr Paul Ssemogerere.
Ssemogerere held several ministerial positions in the “broad-based” NRM government, and was Deputy Prime Minister in 1995 when the new Constitution was passed, rejecting multi-partyism, and entrenching the no-party movement system. Ssemogerere resigned, to face off with Museveni in the first general election of the NRM era in 1996.
Ssemogerere is not a dramatic or colourful politician. He is a dull policy wonk, and the odds were severely stacked against him.
However, he then announced that if he were elected president, he would introduce universal free primary education.
At that time, the idea was revolutionary, and it caused excitement in many circles. We saw diplomatic briefs gushing about it. The NRM and Museveni’s response was quick. They took the idea, and reconfigured it into what today is universal primary education (UPE).
Outmanoeuvred and outshouted, Ssemogerere’s attempts to rightly lay claim to UPE, was soon drowned out and that crucial fact was soon forgotten. Ssemogerere lost the 1996 election, and has long since left the political stage. But in UPE, he endures. Besigye will live on in similar fashion.
The story can be told of how things changed with each of the four elections, but that is stuff for a book. The dramatic 2001 election alone, had far-reaching consequences, that we focus on here.
Although the campaign for multipartyism and the push against the NRM’s “no-party” movement system as a one-party dictatorship by another name was always on, by 2000, its advocates were beginning to get exhausted. Museveni had won a first and fairly solid electoral mandate in the 1996 election, despite the usual rigging.
The economy was booming, and Uganda, outside the war-wracked north, was largely a happy place. It is not easy to go against such results.
Besigye’s shock candidacy, the first and most open such challenge to Museveni from within NRM, shattered the Movement idea, and became rocket fuel for multipartyism.
Without Besigye, Uganda wouldn’t have returned to multiparty politics when it did in 2005. The Besigye challenge was what finally turned the NRM into a party, with the “Movement” in its name serving only a decorative function. The second was subtler.
Until 2000, the NRM was quite focused on making Uganda a dairy and beef power, and the Netherlands was a favourite model. The big things used to be valley dams (which fuelled corruption), and acaricide for cattle, not seeds.
By the way, this cattle politics and economics, also shaped the rebellions in Teso and the north, the other two of the four “cattle lands” of Uganda (the fourth being Karamoja). We will revisit that in future.
Besigye’s 2000 manifesto was very advanced in its vision of modernising Uganda’s agricultural economy. People noticed. Now, one of Museveni’s little-appreciated strengths is his adaptability.
He pivoted to the broader agriculture modernisation advocate he is today, and in 2001, the National Agricultural Advisory Services (Naads) was established. That also birthed the string of “wealth creation” initiatives we have had since. Many a rich latter-day farmer, has Besigye to thank.
Third, Besigye’s 2001 outperformance of Museveni in the north, was also game-changing.
Despite its self-advertisement, the NRM was still largely a southern triumphalist movement as we entered 2000. With the war, and its choice of a military solution, it was little a glorified occupier in the north.
Besigye’s solid electoral fortunes in the region changed that. Museveni and the NRM fundamentally changed their approach, and became more politically astute. By 2011, they were finally able to turn the tables.
Besigye forced Kampala to demilitarise the north, but in the process the NRM burnished its credentials as a national party, and it enabled Museveni to finally emerge as a leader for all of Uganda.
Hence the ultimate irony. Besigye’s success, made Museveni a “better” leader by getting him to put armour on his Achilles heel. By 2016, it allowed Museveni to effectively prevent Besigye growing his base in any significant way. The person who might secretly miss Besigye most then, is…
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist,
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.
Twitter@cobbo3
