FDC and the elusive quest for party politics

Two weeks ago, I promised to return to the subject of the crisis raging in the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party. I did not do so last week as a pending article on the crisis at Makerere University was in the queue. 

For some conflicts of interest reasons, I would rather not go into here, I had refrained from commenting on the meltdown in what was until 2021 Uganda’s main Opposition party – the FDC.

I argued two week ago that the FDC’s founding in 2005 was so promising but also got off to chequered starting point in Uganda’s new (but not so new) multiparty environment.

The rulers in charge, chiefly the ruler-in-chief, President Museveni, acquiesced to a return to open party politics not out of principle and conviction but rather because of convenience and deception.  

If you carefully study Museveni’s political history and trajectory, he has never been a believer in political parties despite forming and leading one in 1980, and has purportedly been heading one since 2005. 

At a very fundamental level, Museveni is a military man, imbibed with a strong belief in militarism and the deployment of coercion as the best way to run public affairs and manage society. This was squarely at the centre of his undergraduate degree dissertation at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1969. 

As a military man and strong believer in militarism, Museveni is mostly hostile to political pluralism and open competition for power, especially under organised political and social groups.

That is why he has consistently been crowned ‘sole candidate’ in his NRM organisation which, at any rate, does not exist as a functional and independent political party absent from the state and Government of Uganda. 

After the 2016 elections, Museveni ominously declared that come the next election cycle, 2021, there would be no Opposition to his rule. It is also in that very spirt that he imposed a ‘no-party democracy’ contraption between 1986 and 2006, which many Ugandans uncritically embraced and promoted. 

Among the promoters of the Movement ‘no-party’ experiment, which in hindsight was Museveni’s clever calculation to consolidate and cling onto power, was Dr Kizza Besigye, who has since become Museveni’s fiercest opponent and the central figure in FDC, a party facing a deep internal crisis but which has external causes. 

The FDC is unlikely to survive and soldier on as a strong and powerful national political party precisely because it is up against a State presided over by a ruler who sees parties as anathema and should be systematically weakened through a combination of the soft power of money or other material inducements and the physical force of State coercion. 

This has been the fate of the Democratic Party (DP) and Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). We need to recall that Museveni has previously divided up the DP into the good and the bad.

The former DP is led by the party’s official president, Norbert Mao, now a Cabinet minister. The bad DP, by contrast previously had as its defacto leader Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago, who has since decamped to FDC and is now leader of what for all intents and purposes is one FDC faction pitted against another.  

There is now what appears to be FDC-Najjanankumbi (party headquarters) under Mr Patrick Oboi Amuriat and Mr Nathan Nandala Mafabi, patently accused of going to bed with Mr Museveni, and FDC-Katonga where Dr Besigye and his able aid, Mayor Lukwago, are based. 

In the past, FDC-Najja under Mr Mugisha Muntu (FDC president 2012-2017) was at loggerheads with FDC-Katonga.

During that five-year period, there was a rather simplistic characterisation of the Muntu faction as representing party-building while the Katonga faction of Dr Besigye where Amuriat, Mafabi, et al belonged stood for defiance and street action to overthrow Mr Museveni’s government. 

Today, the people who previously were supposedly in the same faction at Katonga have turned the heat on each other. This is highly instructive.  

Whatever the endgame in the crisis eating away at the FDC, and indeed the entirety of the cancerous politics that has metastasised across the breadth of Uganda’s political party spectrum, we need strong and credible political parties capable of standing above individuals political actors. 

There are fantasies that scorn political parties, portraying them as a distraction and tools serving Museveni’s power interests. But this naïve and nihilist view of politics is intellectually spurious and practically dangerous. It lacks compelling argumentation. 

Precisely because parties are critical and consequential tools of political contestation is why Mr Museveni works so hard to demobilise them through infiltration and compromising key leaders, as well as deploying the State’s coercive arsenal to unleash violence with a chilling impact.  

Unfortunately, even for someone as intellectually grounded and politically savvy as Dr Besigye, a veteran in struggling against Museveni’s military rulership, there is a shocking ambivalence, if not outright dismissal, of the centrality of properly organised and functional political parties.

Moses Khisa, 
[email protected]