Who will inherit Museveni’s throne? A renegade view

Author: Charles Onyango Obbo. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

  • Oil money is how Museveni will fashion his pension, and also pay to cement his legacy. 

In recent months, there have been several moves by various actors to position themselves to succeed President Yoweri Museveni in 2026.

There is something old fashioned about it, because most of the factions jostling are in and around Museveni’s State House, resembling a 16th-Century European palace struggle to succeed a failing monarch. The most visible campaign, with t-shirts, and organisations championing it, is for First Son Lt Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is a presidential adviser and commander of the Land Forces.

Despite the fevered speculation and drama, it is not clear that Muhoozi is seriously already in the run to take over from his father.

In at least one tweet, Muhoozi has said he isn’t interested in politics or power. 

Despite the popular excitement, in reality nearly all the succession movements inside the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) today, are little more than the actions of pagans dancing around a stone.

Museveni is going to be a candidate in 2026 and is already campaigning. How do we know? The indicators are many, but three will suffice. From history, Museveni has consistently launched some grand social initiative (universal primary education) or economic “transformation” to fight poverty (Entandikwa, Operation Wealth Creation, Emyooga, and now the Parish [Development] Model) partly to distribute social bribes, which he uses as an election platform at the next vote. And he seems to have decided that at the next election when he will officially be 81, his launch pad will this time be the Eastern region.

When you see his lieutenants like Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja hovering in the East like no previous PM, and holding Zoom meetings from the roadside, those who snigger are not seeing the forest.

Largely unnoticed, over the last five years, the Museveni government has built a new or tarmacked a lot of kilometres of road through eastern Uganda to the Kenyan border.  Then, there is also yet no metanarrative for Museveni’s exit. He is not the kind of politician to leave “just like that”, without a grand framing of the meaning of his long rule. 

One sign he’s given is that he wants to be the one who turned Uganda into a middle-income economy. Depending on the projections you look at, especially with the two years lost to Covid-19, the realistic outlook is for that to happen around 2030.

The journey could be shortened, if Uganda started pumping oil, expected to be by 2025, but most likely a year or two later everything remaining the same in Tanzania, where President Samia Suluhu Hassan is in the trenches trying to consolidate her power after taking over from her authoritarian Covid-sceptic predecessor John Magufuli after he died last March. She needs to wrap that up, and then bid to be nominated and fight the election in 2025.

Museveni is particularly attached to the Ugandan oil project. He famously referred to it as “my oil”, and said he wouldn’t leave it to Opposition hyenas, to justify why he had to win elections by any means necessary. The President is, therefore, going nowhere until he turns the first oil tap to flow to the Tanga port. And even assuming it happens in 2025, he is definitely not to leave a few months later. 

Oil money is how Museveni will fashion his pension, and also pay to cement his legacy. He will need another five years for that, so that he can leave (maybe) in 2031, as Mzee Oil, with his metanarrative established with petro-dollars.

Finally, to test my thinking, I bounced them off the one person who knows Museveni well and has read him right on the big issues for all the years he has been in power. He told me, “when it looks obvious, you can be sure Yoweri won’t do it. On the big things, he is never linear”. In other words, on something like his successor, you know the person he will not back if that person looks like an “obvious candidate.”

Consider, for example, his attack on Kabamba military barracks in 1981 and then stationing his rebellion in Luweero. Few imagined it until it happened.  When he appointed George Cosmas Adyebo PM in 1991, and officers were sent to pick him up from Naguru where he was drinking malwa, people thought that he had been arrested and was going to be murdered. It was wild.

The path to Museveni’s succession, he thinks, will happen through a return to some kind of broad-based transition arrangement involving “friendly” parties. Secondly, he will go back to the NRM roots, which already is being signalled by the proximity he has shown to former ally and PM Amama Mbabazi whom he renounced but seems to be mending fences. “He will want successors who will be grateful, not loyal”, he said.

So, if you want to bet on the Museveni succession, put your money on a dark horse.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3