COMMENT: The Otunnu factor in this election

As the 2011 general election campaign gets fully underway, much has been made of the recent defections of leading members from the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) party like Henry Mayega and Badru Wegulo.

If we were to go by the one percent of the votes in the 2006 general election that the UPC led by Miria Obote won, even if the entire UPC party including Olara Otunnu were to defect to the NRM, a gain of only one percent of the national vote would not make much difference to the NRM.

So why does President Museveni go to great lengths early in this campaign to weaken the UPC, to encourage defections from the party, and to make this show of UPC defections public?

At the same time, much as usual is being made of a mythical force in Ugandan politics called the “Buganda vote” or the “Buganda factor.”
Political analysts and the media have more or less written off the UPC as standing no chance in the forthcoming election, preferring to view the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) as the main challenger to the NRM.

Public harassment
In this same conventional view, the Ugandan polity and media continue to believe that Buganda is the factor that determines the outcome of any election, because of the large Buganda population and its central location and cohesive cultural mindset.
A few examples render this view as unfounded.

The Kabaka of Buganda, Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II, planned to visit Kayunga district in September 2009 but was denied permission by the government and he did not travel there. Following riots on September 10 in much of Buganda, the kingdom-affiliated CBS FM radio station was shut down for more than one year.

None of these two actions, deeply offensive to most Baganda, threatened President Museveni’s hold on power and despite endless pleas and petitions by Baganda for the re-opening of CBS, the station was re-opened in October 2010 at his will.
FDC President, Dr Kizza Besigye, has often been harassed by the police or vigilante groups like the “Kiboko Squad”. FDC women activists have been beaten up by the police in Kampala and life has gone on.

The fact that Buganda can be unable to stand up to Museveni and Besigye can be harassed in broad daylight by the police, punctures the general view of Buganda or the FDC as being decisive factors in Uganda today.

Within Uganda’s geographical territory, President Museveni has so far proved able to outmaneouvre or subdue all rivals, military and political, since 1986.
Therefore in order to understand the prospects for the 2011 election, the first step is to examine the areas in which he is at his weakest. By this we mean the areas of policy or operation in which he is either weak or his challengers are at par with him or even slightly stronger.

Option for opposition
The first of these is the area of information technology. As Smart Musolini’s emails and the website Radio Katwe demonstrated in 2005 and 2006, damaging information could be published at will on the First Family and government and apart from ordering the website blocked (readers easily found a way round the block) he was helpless to do anything about it.

The second area of vulnerability is in his relations with international political actors, especially those in the West.
Every time President Museveni acts on stages outside Uganda or is confronted by political situations and pressure from the western world, he almost always emerges the loser, is forced to back down from positions he deeply holds, or comes out looking bad and damaged.

In other words, the best and most effective way to neutralise him politically and militarily is to resort to the Internet as a weapon and secondly, to internationalise any situation and bring in the West as interested parties.
Let us concentrate on this latter area of weakness because it is the more important and the most likely option for the opposition.

When Dr Besigye was arrested in late 2005 and the High Court was raided by armed commandos, this move backfired and the November 2005 Commonwealth summit in Malta turned its focus to condemning Uganda’s leader.
With President Museveni insisting on keeping Dr Besigye under detention from November 2005, against public outcry, a European Union and American delegation of ambassadors met President Museveni over the matter, a few days before Dr Besigye was released on bail on January 2, 2006.

However, the most striking example of weakness in the face of western pressure came in December 2009 as the anti-gay bill proposed by MP David Bahati caused controversy in Uganda and all over the western world.

From Museveni himself to his military commanders, intelligence chiefs, cabinet, NRM party leaders and members, to the opposition, Christian and Muslim leaders and groups, the media, civil society groups, and academia, this revulsion toward homosexuality cuts across Ugandan society.

If democracy and leadership are founded on bowing to the wishes of the majority (in this case an overwhelming majority), Museveni had the full mandate of nearly all his countrymen over the gay issue.
However, he knows something that most Ugandans do not know and to understand this something is vital to understanding the facts of Ugandan politics.

Under pressure
President Museveni knew that even if 98 percent of Ugandans opposed the granting of a legal status and rights to Uganda’s tiny homosexual minority, this did not matter in the wider scheme of things.

As he told an NRM leaders’ meeting at State House Entebbe this January, he had come under pressure and received personal phone calls from the leaders of the Canada, the United States and Britain asking him not to consent to the Bahati bill.
The opinion of these western leaders, ignoring the publicly stated wishes of the vast majority of Ugandans and Museveni’s giving in to that pressure on the grounds that the passage of the bill into law had “foreign policy implications”, was the most revealing clue to where Museveni’s real power base lies.

In effect, this suggested that the opinion of the West -- who not only fund of Uganda’s budget but provide his regime diplomatic backing, military assistance and intelligence information -- is much more crucial.

Whoever then is to present the greatest challenge to President Museveni would have to be the politician who has the ears, friendship and support of western leaders, academics, human rights groups and the media, and not the politician who attracts the largest crowds in Uganda or has the Buganda vote.

That being so, we now start to see Mr Otunnu in a new light. Mr Otunnu, a former Ugandan foreign minister from 1985 to 1985, is also a former United Nations Undersecretary for Children and Armed Conflict, as well as being well-connected in the West.

These same politicians, academics, diplomats, lobbyists, corporate executives and other leading lights in London, Otttawa and Washington who pressured Museveni over the Bahati Bill, be it Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Harper or Gordon Brown, also happen either to be Otunnu’s colleagues in the UN system or friends and acquaintances.

This might explain why Mr Otunnu can consistently defy police summons to the CID headquarters, even after President Museveni has repeated his order to the police to arrest him.

Since Otunnu’s arrest was ordered in April, President Museveni has slowly dropped the subject of arresting the UPC leader and instead turned to trying to engineer defections from the UPC to the NRM.

Anticipating that Mr Otunnu, rather than Dr Besigye or any other candidate poses the biggest threat to him, Museveni is trying to weaken the UPC, so that a few months from now, he can possibly argue, when he comes under the inevitable pressure of the West, that Mr Otunnu has no real power base in Uganda, as seen by these defections.
This could be the story behind the UPC defections and the effort spent trying to weaken what is widely believed to be a spent force rather than concentrate on the FDC.

In a way, Mr Otunnu might remind President Museveni of a 1980 presidential candidate called Yoweri Museveni of the Uganda Patriotic Movement party.
While the public and the media in 1980 (like the public and the media today) focused their attention on the two candidates, Apollo Milton Obote of the UPC and Paulo Ssemogerere of the DP, who were followed everywhere by huge crowds, UPM’s Museveni had far smaller crowds.

But this Museveni kept warning at various rallies that he would “go to the bush” if the 1980s elections were rigged. Unknown to most people, Museveni had behind him a Plan B in the form of armed and trained FRONASA fighters integrated in the government army, the UNLA, already secretly preparing for a guerrilla war.

Museveni was not an important factor before and during the 1980 election. He became the vital factor because of what he did after the election, which was, wage a guerrilla war that turned Ugandan politics upside down.

Likewise, Mr Otunnu seems unbothered by the defections from UPC. He does not seem to be much bothered about printing many campaign posters. As he travels about the country, campaigning, he is also gathering signatures for his petition against the Electoral Commission.

And these signatures, Mr Otunnu has said, he will take to Washington. He appears to be preparing not for the 2011 election but for the aftermath and in this aftermath, he will become the decisive force in Uganda.

Unlike Dr Besigye Mr Otunnu cannot, it appears, be arrested or exiled without stirring a major storm in the West. These are the lines along which the Ugandan media, political class and the general population should be thinking rather than the conventional view of “mammoth crowds” or the Buganda vote as a gauge of political strength.