Author: Moses Khisa. PHOTO/FILE
To think about the legacy of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) is to ask what legacy the commander-in-chief, the Ssabalwanyi (chief fighter) Yoweri Museveni, will leave when he finally bows out.
The UPDF came out of the NRA, the National Resistance Army, the rebel group that brought President Museveni to power in 1986.
An honest and balanced assessment of the UPDF yields a mixed bag, a contradictory report card – a force for good but simultaneously tainted by all sorts of abuses and excesses.
The UPDF is Uganda’s most important state institution; it is also the foremost source of power for the ruling regime and primary guarantor of the incumbent’s hold on power. This is not new or unique to the current rulership.
The culture of rule by the gun, with a deep history dating to the colonial state, has been central to the modes of governing and the broadcast of state power since independence.
When Mr Museveni set out to fight the government of the day, starting in early 1981, a critical aspect of his stated mission was to tame the armed forces, make them accountable to legitimate civilian authority and respectful of rights and freedoms of the civilian public.
Many who joined Mr Museveni to fight for a supposed new Uganda did so out of sheer conviction, a genuine desire to transform the country’s governmental culture away from brutality and unaccountable use of military power. They believed in a revolutionary mission.
The NRA’s success against the government forces owed, at least partially, to forging and fostering convivial relations with civilians in the areas the rebel group conducted its military activities – the so-called Luweero triangle where the NRA did the bulk of its fighting.
As guerrillas, Mr Museveni and his fighters depended heavily on civilians in gathering military intelligence, acquiring logistical supplies including food, and building a network of commissars that helped embed the rebels in society.
To succeed, the rebel leadership had to cultivate a disciplinary regime and routine for commanders and fighters to guard against civilian abuses that would otherwise fuel a hostile environment for the rebel group.
Here, the strategy was to distinguish the NRA from other rebel groups but especially from the government forces considered notoriously brutal against civilians and unaccountable.
The disciplinary thrust of the NRA, a determination to be different as a source of protection, not predation against civilians, became a central plank of Uganda’s military for much of Mr Museveni’s time in power.
When they captured power, the army engaged in a range of military excesses, especially during counterinsurgency operations in the north and northeast.
Most recently in 2016, the army’s deadly assault on the palace of the Omusinga wa Rwenzururu in Kasese left a huge stain.
There is room to explain away, in fact even justify, the army’s wrongs in times of war or when facing combatants of whatever strength and stripe. If that had been the NRA’s and UPDF’s exclusive or only major front of excesses and abuses, the debate would be quite different.
The major wrongdoing that has grossly imperilled the professional standing of the UPDF, indeed torpedoed its transformation into a truly national armed force, is the permanent role as a force for regime sustenance, inevitably pulled into law and order tasks, the domain of the police.
In the past, the President boasted about the army’s strict disciplinary ethos that included swift public trial and punishment of any soldier who abused the rights of wananchi. Yet, the imperatives of regime survival are such that the armed forces shot dead more than 50 Ugandans in the streets of Kampala in November 2020: no serious inquest conducted, not a single person held accountable.
What is more, today, the Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), who is expected to display the highest levels of professionalism and responsible conduct, openly taunts an Opposition leader, gleefully confesses to illegally detaining and physically, emotionally torturing a Ugandan.
Not a word from the Commander-in-Chief, who otherwise of recent has been quick to issue letters addressed to ostensible grandchildren. Anyone who has closely followed Ugandan politics in recent decades must find the social media (X) comments of the CDF utterly surreal.
Undoubtedly, the army did a great deal in pacifying the country and assuring national security without which the public cannot engage in meaningful socioeconomic activity.
Given all that went wrong in the past, but especially considering the current trajectory that betrays impunity at the highest levels, the army is cementing a legacy that flies in the face of what the NRA promised as a rebel group and what Mr Museveni preached for most of his stay at the helm.
