Contradictions of Museveni’s rule

President Yoweri Tibuhaburwa Museveni has a first-rate grasp of modern statecraft, but he also presides over an egregious form of state decay and dysfunction.  From very early on, as a university student, Mr Museveni imbibed and embraced the question of violence as a core feature of managing society, the uses and misuses of coercive force. His path to power was cultivated via war.

In this, he understood the central fulcrum of power and authority as force and coercion but which had to be tempered with rhetoric, charisma and persuasion. A successful guerrilla military campaign required a political philosophy, an articulate political programme and rootedness in civilian power. While guns and battle strength were critical, ideas, political persuasion and appealing to civilian masses were equally crucial to successes.

However, Museveni has tended to subordinate institutionalised civilian politics to an ideology of militarism, and the gun as the final arbiter in the matrix of power. That was the first contradiction of Museveni’s rulership: an appreciation of political persuasion and civic engagement, but resorting to coercive power as the ultimate way of settling matters.

A second contradiction draws from the first. Faith in force and violence, the belief that power ultimately resides in control over the means of violence, which is how the modern state has been conceived and constructed, in Museveni’s world plays out in quite contradictory ways.

The state that Museveni believes in, and set out to build, was one of centralised control of the means of violence, but he has presided over privatised and decentralised practices of force and violence, often allowing disparate non-state actors to proliferate along with a multiplicity of state armed outfits.

In effect, you get a nearly criminal-like set of actors in cahoots with the very state agencies meant to beat back those actors. This situation became most pronounced at the peak of the powers of Gen Kale Kayihura at the helm of the Uganda Police Force. Museveni said as much when he referred to weevils in police under Kayihura’s command!

While this set up where criminal-like entities become key state actors may have helped in tightening Museveni’s hold on state power, it also tremendously undermined the evolution of a competent state apparatus.  Today, Uganda’s state suffers gross incompetence in enforcement because it has gradually been captured by particularistic interests of private individuals but who wield enormous power and control, either directly or indirectly.

We are in a situation whereby someone who long retired from the army, and holds no official government position, nevertheless wields actual power than almost everyone in government and the armed forces. At one point, it was known that a private individual who had a big boda-boda constituency had so much powers as to give orders to senior police commanders!

The contradiction in this basic aspect of statehood, that is, centralised control of the use of force, is only bettered by Museveni’s excellent grasp of basic economic theory yet pursues contradictory policies and postures.

Museveni has always correctly understood that to create wealth and develop a country, you need to produce rather than be parasitic, to enhance productivity but also diversify production.  While generally unethical and poses a big conflict of interest, the President has sought to lead by example as an active player in the productive sectors. It is unethical because no way can a head of state fairly compete with other players in the market place; there simply can’t be a level-playing field of economic competition involving a head of state especially in getting business from government.

But it is worth noting that Museveni has strived to demonstrate that the way to develop and be prosperous is to produce. Yet here too, the contradictions are legion. A president who preaches production and riles against consumption is at the same time presiding over profligate government spending with a staggering budget, including supplementaries, going to state house and for his direct consumption while productive sectors are allocated paltry votes.

While fully aware of the folly of having money without actual goods because money is worthless unless there is corresponding productive output, Mr Museveni nonetheless has no problem with unleashing huge monies during elections. As we witnessed in 2011, this practice can bring about collapse of the economy with inflation running amok. Arguably, the most glaring contradiction of pax-Musevenica (the rule of Yoweri) has to be in the realm of nation-building. Articulate and compelling in denouncing sectarianism and cheap identity politics, the same president presided over indefensible ‘tribalism’ and nepotism.

Rather than a decentralised system of competent and efficient subnational structures of public management, we have ‘tribal’ homelands that are little more than sites of localised corruption and sheer dysfunction.  For someone with such lofty  grandiose pan-African pretensions, supposedly committed to fostering the total unity of African people’s across the continent and beyond, Mr Museveni is president of a country that is socially fragile and fragmented, lacking a sound sense of nation-ness.

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