History shows it was inevitable Mbabazi would fall on the sword of `sole’ candidate-culture
In 1965, then opposition
MPs introduced a motion on the floor of the National Assembly to repeal
the Deportation Ordinance. This was a draconian colonial law that
allowed the state to deport, to a remote party of the country, anyone
who gave government a headache through political agitation. Many
Ugandans fighting for independence would be deported from Kampala to
then-remote areas like Kisoro, Karamoja or Arua.
The motion was debated
in parliament at the beginning of February 1966. UPC’s Secretary
General, Grace Ibingira, convinced many UPC and KY members not to
support it. When the vote was finally called, the motion was lost;
Ibingira had won the day and the opposition were leaking their wounds in
defeat.
Three weeks later,
Ibingira was arrested – in the middle of a cabinet meeting – along with
four other ministers and jailed. Their lawyers successfully filed a writ
of habeas corpus. The five ex-ministers were produced in court and
released. As they were walking to freedom at Buganda Road Court, they
were served with deportation orders under the Deportation Ordinance. As
he was being hand-cuffed, Ibingira said: “Fate is a double crosser; I am
the one who saved the Deportation Ordinance from being repealed.”
This story came back
vividly to my mind when Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi came under pressure
to sign a resolution by the National Resistance Movement (NRM)
parliamentary caucus declaring President Yoweri Museveni the “sole
presidential candidate of the party.” Mbabazi had been accused of
“eyeing” Museveni’s job and that he was planning to challenge the
president in the ruling party primary in 2015. Intelligence dossiers to
the president about Mbabazi were filled with tall tales of sabotage and
subversion that bordered on treason.
The trick in Kyankwanzi
was to put Mbabazi on the defensive, to compel him to either restate or
recant his loyalty to his boss. He could have refused to sign; in which
case he would have been declared an enemy. But in signing, he risked
being seen as cowardly and humiliated before his supporters.
I thought Mbabazi would
try to be technical and argue that the resolution was against the
constitutional provisions of the NRM constitution and could be
challenged in courts of law. But Mbabazi was smarter. It seems he
realised that his opponents would seize the opportunity to accuse him of
subversion, which would be followed by dire consequences.
When Mbabazi capitulated
in Kyankwanzi, he was living to the logic of his own position over the
years. He was a key figure in building and consolidating the view that
the party chairmanship is a monopoly of the founding leader and a
position that cannot be challenged. From the time NRM was formed, there
is no evidence of how and when Museveni was elected vice chairman and
later, after the death of Yusuf Lule, who was the figurehead, its
chairman. From the time NRM became a ruling party in 1986 to 2005, the
party never held elections for its leader.
Since 2005, the NRM has
held elections for every other office except that of the chairman, which
has always been taken by Museveni through acclamation. Felix Okot Ogong
once tried but was never given a chance and so was the case with Capt.
Ruhinda Maguru. The first real attempt at an internal challenge was in
2000 when Kizza Besigye declared he would run against Museveni for the
presidency of the country.
Mbabazi, supported by
Sam Kutesa introduced a motion that the National Executive Committee of
the “Movement” (NRM was still claiming not to be a political party then)
should adopt Museveni as the “sole” presidential candidate.
Eriya Kategaya, Amanya
Mushega, Mugisha Muntu and Mathew Rukikaire successfully opposed this
move. The meeting at Conference Centre agreed to adopt Museveni as the
Movement presidential candidate but removed the wor d “sole” from the resolution and in fact added that others were free to contest.
If Mbabazi actually
wanted to challenge Museveni in 2015, then he has fallen onto the sword
he actively helped put in place. This way, he and Ibingira have met the
same fate. This kind of history repeats itself often because human
nature is human nature – the traps we lay for others today often turn
out to be the ropes around our necks tomorrow.
Did Mbabazi really want
to challenge Museveni? To many insiders, the answer is yes. But this
could be because these insiders stood to benefit from promoting the myth
that Mbabazi had become ambitious. To many outside observers, Mbabazi
was least likely to challenge Museveni for the leadership of the NRM. He
has been in the party long enough to know that opportunities for a
successful challenge to Museveni are limited. He is also acutely aware
of the costs of such an undertaking.
Mbabazi’s capitulation
at Kyankwazi is both depressing and illuminating. It represented the
consistence of the NRM with other such revolutionary movements of the
20th Century – the position of the founding leader cannot be challenged.
The NRM parliamentary
caucus presented any potential challenge to Museveni’s leadership as
subversive and signifying the creation of “cliques” in the party. They
used this to bully and intimidate Mbabazi to sign a hastily written
resolution. Mbabazi must have read the writing on the wall and yielded
to the inevitable perhaps recognising the nature of the political party
he belongs to.
NRM is like all other
such revolutionary movements – from China to Vietnam and Cambodia, Cuba
to Nicaragua, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Rwanda and Algeria.
None of these movements has ever lost power except Cambodia (due to
Vietnam intervention in 1977) and Nicaragua (US sabotage). In all these
cases, the founding leader’s position is never challenged. He dies in
office (or retires after 48 years of service like Fidel Castrol did in
Cuba). It may not have been inevitable that the NRM would tread this
path. However, it was always most likely that it would not fundamentally
depart from the script of other movements of its ilk.
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