{UAH} When coupled with ambition, loyalty has been punished in NRM - Comment -

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When coupled with ambition, loyalty has been punished in NRM - Comment

President Museveni talks to NRM members during the party's meeting at Kyankwanzi. Photo/Morgan Mbabazi 

It is now clear that President Yoweri Museveni has been unsettled by intelligence reports accusing Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi of using his position as secretary general of the ruling NRM party to quietly build support for his alleged presidential ambitions.

What is not clear to many is why President Museveni has chosen to humiliate and emasculate Mr Mbabazi, one of his longest-serving political allies, in such a public manner.

At a recent meeting of the NRM parliamentary caucus Mr Mbabazi was openly ridiculed by party MPs before being made to sign a resolution endorsing the incumbent as the sole candidate for the party ticket in the 2016 election.

Before we attempt to understand the objective outcomes of President Museveni's strategy, it is useful to first examine the idea of loyalty with regard to the country's contemporary politics.

The conventional wisdom in Uganda — and in many countries with long-serving leaders — is that those who remain loyal to the leader are rewarded for it.

Thus, although he raised and has continued to raise principled arguments against the NRM and its leader, Kizza Besigye continues to be framed by many pro-regime commentators as a disloyal friend-turned-foe who fell out with the system that made him.

In Uganda, Mbabazi has, over the years, come to represent the face of loyalty to Museveni and the NRM. When Besigye declared his candidature against Museveni for the 2001 elections, it was Mbabazi who famously said — and as many have reminded him with large dollops of schadenfreude — that he was jumping the succession queue within the NRM.

In reality, loyalty in Museveni's Uganda has only been rewarded if it was useful to the status quo, and not a threat to the political order.

After the death of its chairman, Prof Yusuf Lule, the NRM needed a senior Muganda in its senior ranks and appointed Dr Samson Kisekka, first as Prime Minister (1986-1991) and then as vice president.

However, when Dr Kisekka began to ally himself with Buganda nationalists ahead of the constitution-making process in Uganda, he was fired, famously in a radio bulletin, while abroad on an official visit in 1994.

On his return he was told he could not use the VIP lounge at Entebbe International Airport and had to take a taxi to his country home.

By that time Museveni had already demonstrated political nous of the highest order, keeping his political wing (NRM) and the fighting force (NRA) separate, with him as one of very few players who had a leg in both arenas.

This would continue into government whereby he initially kept most NRM fighters and historicals out of the Cabinet, only easing a few in after he had consolidated his own political base.

While loyalty might have helped Mbabazi to the top, he would only have to look around him and his fallen comrades to see that it was never enough to keep anyone up in the tree if they threatened Museveni politically.

‎When Eriya Kategaya, who had been Museveni's childhood friend and the de-facto regime number two, criticised the unholy machinations around the lifting of the presidential term limits out of Uganda's Constitution, he was summarily dropped from Cabinet. Also fired with Jaberi Bidandi Ssali who had masterminded Museveni's campaigns for the 1996 and 2001 presidential elections campaigns.

Yet the current contest between Mbabazi and Museveni, like that of Museveni and Besigye before it, are more than a mere falling out of allies (it must be noted that the current scenario is much milder, the two officials are still working together, and Mbabazi is yet to show his hand).

The power struggle within the NRM represents a second rupture within Uganda's ruling party within a decade. When Besigye emerged from within the NRM to challenge Museveni, he was the face of three separate interest groups, two of them internal, that had emerged to challenge the leadership narrative in and of the ruling party.

Besigye represented the "historicals" whose involvement stretched back to the Bush War that had brought the NRM to power, and who had grown disillusioned with the grand scale corruption and patrimony that had emerged around President Museveni and his ruling inner circle.

The second internal constituency was that of younger parliamentarians who, in many cases, did not have roots in the "struggle" as the war was popularly called, but who saw an opportunity to build power bases out of their platform in the House.

The third constituency was external. It comprised of the older established political parties that were suffocating under the blanket ban on multiparty politics and which also shared concerns with the governance deficit in the country.

Museveni's response was a classic political trade-off; he gave up the ban on political parties in exchange for the lifting of the presidential term limits, which would have forced him to retire in 2006.

As Dr Sabiti Makara of Makerere University noted in an essay he co-wrote in theInternational Political Science Reviewjournal, "the decision to open up for multiparty competition was intimately linked to Museveni's ambitions to remain in office and control the transition process. By linking the return to multiparty politics to the removal of term limits, the power of the executive was consolidated, arguably, through a weakening of the institutions that could act as a check on executive dominance."

One of the institutions weakened in that process was the NRM party itself, which by necessity had to become subordinate to the overall objective of keeping Museveni in power.

The current crisis, therefore, is as much about control of the ruling NRM as it is about competing for the top prize of president.

President Museveni has ensured that the NRM did not grow into a strong institution separate from his own authority: The ruling party constantly suffers the indignity of being threatened with eviction from its rented offices; several positions remain unfilled because there is no money to pay salaries; funding, especially during elections is opaque and directly controlled by Museveni who often personally hands out large wads of cash late into the night. This control has allowed Museveni to dominate and manipulate the internal processes of the NRM.

In 2000, faced with Besigye's surprise candidature, Museveni had the NRM declare him as its sole candidate. This was technically in violation of the 1995 Constitution of Uganda that specified, under its concept of individual merit, that all positions were open to competition by any qualified Ugandan.

For the 2006 and 2011 elections, Museveni was able to rally the NRM against the common threat of Besigye while filling the vacuum created by the departure of historicals following the return of multiparty politics, to slalom to the NRM candidacy and the presidency.

Although the NRM has failed to develop as an institution separate from Museveni and one capable of acting as a bulwark against any candidate it offers for the presidency, the underlying interest groups with their varying interests remain and have emerged to contest Museveni's grip on state and party.

As in 2001, there are young parliamentarians within the party who have sought to build political capital by agitating for reform. In the sixth and seventh parliaments they organised themselves into formidable caucuses such as the Young Parliamentary Association (YPA) and the Parliamentary Advocacy Forum (PAFO) which remained reformist and, for a while at least, outside Museveni's direct influence.

Keen to avoid a repeat, Museveni has given the NRM Parliamentary Caucus some notable authority and appointed some young turks like Ronald Kibuule, Richard Todwong and Frank Tumwebaze to Cabinet.

He has also ruthlessly clamped down on the more critical and independent-minded NRM MPs. The most notable example is that of the "rebel" MPs — an unfair epithet cast upon them by the media — against whom considerable effort and political capital has been expended.

The four — Barnabas Tinkasiimire, Wilfred Niwagaba, Mohammed Nsereko, and Theodore Ssekikubo remain in the House awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on whether expulsion by the party is enough to force an MP to lose his seat.

Besigye has transformed from an internal critic to an external threat. Although he stood down from the leadership of the FDC opposition party in order to agitate for a citizen uprising against the regime, he remains the face of the opposition and the most consistent and articulate critic of the regime.

A decade and a half after he accused Besigye of jumping the queue, Mbabazi now finds himself — potentially and ironically — as the new "Besigye" in the NRM, seeking to defend whatever democratic tendencies the ruling party ascribes to, at least on paper, in selecting its leaders.

As we argued in part one last week, the attempt to keep Mbabazi's political ambitions in check go back many years but, like a boxing opponent who keeps rising to his feet, the Prime Minister refuses to go away.

Part of the reason is that Mbabazi saw and learnt lessons from his fellow historicals that broke away. He refuses to adopt Besigye's aggressive stance because it scares off the large middle of undecided voters in both the NRM and the opposition.

He has spent many years building his financial support and networks because he saw how Kategaya, worn down by a large family, a small income, and ­as a popular tale says, a Volvo with a large thirst for fuel that ran aground inconveniently at a city round-about ­ finally returned home as a prodigal elder, eating his words so that his people could eat.

Mbabazi also refuses to stomp off to start his own party because he saw how Bidandi Ssali struggled to entrench his People's Progressive Party. For all its weaknesses, NRM retains the brand appeal that incumbent parties enjoy and, more importantly, an extensive army of party functionaries masquerading in public political positions and sponge off the state.

Mbabazi, therefore, needs the NRM if he is to get Uganda. As secretary general, his tentacles spread across the party making, at the very least, a direct contest between him and Museveni in the party, were one to somehow happen, far from a foregone conclusion.

Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga has hinted on having presidential ambitions but the all-out attack on Mbabazi suggests that Museveni and those in his kitchen Cabinet see him as a more potent threat.

With former intelligence co-ordinator General David Tinyefuza Sejusa ominously quiet in his self-imposed exile in London, Museveni was keen to deal with the "Mbabazi problem" comprehensively and well ahead of the 2016 elections (in order to avoid any nasty last-minute surprises), a senior Cabinet minister in Kampala familiar with the matter told The EastAfrican.

Museveni's strategy, for now, appears designed to push Mbabazi out of the NRM or force him to play his hand now to give the incumbent enough reaction before the election.

People close to the presidency say Museveni is keen to oversee a transition to a more youthful crop of leaders, probably around 2021 and sees this power fight as "an unnecessary distraction." Many critics, however, see selfish parallels between Museveni's overtures to the youth, and the rapid rise of his son, Brigadier Muhoozi Kainerugaba and his extensive network of contemporaries.

Mbabazi appears determined not to resign as Secretary General and he can only be removed in a delegate's conference, which is still several months away.

However, the open attack on him means he cannot openly promote his ambitions, whatever they are, without being seen to be hostile to the President and in defiance of "party discipline."

With Mbabazi's hands thus tied behind his back, Museveni has, on the other hand, now sent out NRM MPs to their constituencies to "popularise" the motion endorsing him as the sole party candidate, even if the resolution is not binding on the party.

At a meeting last Sunday of the NRM's Central Executive Committee — the party's steering organ — several members openly spoke out against the sole-candidature resolution, arguing that it defied the party's Constitution and undermined its democratic credentials.

That matter remained inconclusive, pending further meetings. If history is any guide, the CEC will meet and meet again until there are enough votes for it to be adopted.

In the alternative — and history is again instructive here — a taskforce, separate and distinct from the NRM, manned by MPs and youthful Museveni supporters and allies, will be set up to sell the notion across the country and campaign for the incumbent in 2016.

This would leave Mbabazi holding a boarding pass to a plane that has already taken to the skies. He would, of course, retain the option of chartering his own plane but he would have to split the bill with other passengers waiting in the terminal, some of them currently in the opposition.

Whatever his contribution to the NRM, Mbabazi might discover that his loyalty and long service to Museveni was only useful as long as it did not morph into grand illusions of power, for in being propelled to the heights of the prime ministership, he was expected to lose ambition.

At the last EAC Infrastructure Summit in Kampala last month, Museveni, speaking off-cuff after a presentation by South Sudan Foreign Affairs Minister Benjamin Marial Barnaba, noted that people who carry the title "doctor" do not make good politicians.

"You can see why you should not allow doctors to become politicians. They become very dangerous," he said. The presentation had been about the fall-out in South Sudan and the remark was in reference to Dr Riek Machar, whom Museveni dislikes intensely.

Yet three of Museveni's four vice presidents — Kisekka, Specioza Kazibwe and Gilbert Bukenya — were all doctors. (The current Vice President Edward Ssekandi, is a lawyer and former Speaker of Parliament. Mr Mbabazi, also a lawyer, cannot have missed the wider meaning of the disparaging remark.

If he really harbours presidential ambitions, he will have to hit the ground running.

When coupled with ambition, loyalty has been punished in NRM - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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