NUP can trade short-term electoral pain for long-term political gains

Author, Daniel Kalinaki. PHOTO/FILE.

In the coming weeks and months, leaders of the National Unity Platform will dedicate themselves to trying to overturn the incumbent’s controversial electoral victory. 

After a campaign remarkable for its violence and an election remarkable for its fraud, this is a tempting path to take. It might even turn a profit, either through overturning the result by the Supreme Court, or a complete moulting of legitimacy off the regime in the court of public opinion.

However, this path is strewn with obstacles. It still isn’t clear how much damage the arrest of hundreds of NUP supporters and mobilisers, including cutting its leader away from legal and political advisers, and the debilitating shutdown of the Internet, has undermined the party’s ability to collect evidence of electoral fraud necessary to file a competent and compelling court petition.

A road less travelled, but one which will certainly profit NUP is one along which the young party invests serious thought and energy in consolidating its electoral gains and teaching its eager but inexperienced newly elected leaders how to govern.

This is practical and pragmatic. Even if NUP were to prise the presidency from the incumbent via the Supreme Court, it would face an NRM parliamentary majority that would undermine its legislative agenda. NUP can then force the issue and force fresh elections, but it would also have to contend with a civil service and deep State that has been entrenched for decades. Thus while it decides how it wants to deal with Museveni, NUP must figure out how to deal with Musevenism. Here it has three broad tasks:

The first and most basic is to learn the art of governance and the science of politics. In voting for Bobi Wine and NUP, many people stuck their middle fingers at the political elite and the tyranny of experts. They didn’t care whether their candidates had a fiscal policy or understood the difference between broad money and narrow money; theirs was a protest vote.

But these things matter. And while NUP indeed had a readable manifesto, its leaders must now show that they have a cogent set of policy alternatives beyond the rhetoric of campaign stump speeches.

The second task is to bring these alternative policies under a big church umbrella that unites progressive elements in the government as well as in the Opposition to chart a new path forward for the country. As the biggest party in Parliament, the task of organising and leading now falls on NUP, but it will benefit immensely from the more experienced FDC and what’s left of DP and UPC.

Some of the NUP MPs are experienced and capable; a few are enthusiastic and skilled orators experienced in rural reptilian pursuits than in drafting Bills or building cross-platform support for legislative agendas. Having campaigned on a threat to “take the ghetto to Parliament” NUP must now show that this was metaphorical, not literal.

Third, having gone farther than FDC and captured significantly more positions at the lower electoral levels, NUP must also demonstrate competence in managing public affairs. A party that wants to govern a country better should demonstrate that it can govern a county well.

In our nakedly partisan politics, the central government will probably starve such Opposition-controlled enclaves of funding. But many of these are urban enclaves where residents are used to building their own roads, lighting their own streets and paying for their own education and health. 

With some ingenuity, this predictable handicap can be turned into an advantage, marshalling area residents to do for themselves what the central government might not be in a hurry to do. You don’t always need an excavator to unclog drainage channels. NUP has benefited from a wave of disgruntlement and restlessness from a young and hungry nation. It can use some of its political capital to delegitimise the regime but should find the intellectual bandwidth to begin crafting a post-Museveni reality and broad political consensus that a majority can rally around. 

In other words, the best way for NUP to deal with Museveni is to look beyond the stolen election and paint a picture of what a Uganda unshackled from military rule will look like. Then it needs to show that it is ready to lead, and that it understands life to be a marathon, not a sprint. NUP can trade short-term electoral pain into long-term political gain. 

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 

Twitter: @Kalinaki