{UAH} Bobi Wine and the Gordian Knot in Ugandan politics-spot on on this

Bobi Wine and the Gordian  Knot in Ugandan politics

Wednesday March 10 2021

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By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Uganda is still reeling from the aftermath of the January election, and how Robert Kyagulanyi (Bobi Wine) and his National Unity Party (NUP) upended the politics of President Yoweri Museveni's era.

It has ended in easily the largest crackdown outside a war zone Uganda has ever seen, and the use of abductions and kidnapping of suspected agitators on a scale last witnessed during the days of Field Marshal Idi Amin.

President Museveni has said, and now written, that the people abducted were picked up to be interrogated about plans to cause widespread insecurity, and national mayhem.

 That some of them have given the security agencies valuable information.  If, for argument's sake, we accept that he is correct, then it is extremely worrying. 

Given the government's vast intelligence and security resources, the LC networks, and the billions of shillings they gobble, for such a vast "conspiracy" to happen in and around Kampala, and not an outlying area like the far-flung border between Karamoja and Kenya, without them knowing it and having to beat it out of hundreds of people abducted from all over the place, would suggest our much-touted security apparatus is a paper tiger. 

This idea of a plot by the Opposition to destabilise Uganda with foreign confederates, feeds into the broader argument being made by pro-NRM intellectuals that, first, Bobi Wine as president would have ruined Uganda. That the country would fall apart. 

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That argument is escorted by a more complex and nefarious one; that changing a long-ruling regime like Museveni's (35 years), on a hyper-charged democracy platform, always ends badly. 

Attention is drawn to the collapse of Libya after the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi, after his 42-year dictatorship. In Zimbabwe, the economy-wrecking machine Robert Mugabe, was ousted in a soft coup in 2017 after 37 years. 

His briefly-sacked deputy Emmerson Munangangwa, who replaced him, by many accounts, has turned out to be worse – a feat many thought was impossible. Even in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the departure of the corrupt and reviled Mobutu Sese Seko, ended in a nightmare.

In Egypt, the street revolutionaries threw out Hosni Mubarak, and eventually ended under the steelier thumb of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.

 The critics are right that the ouster of dictators and long-ruling leaders in Africa have rarely ended in honky dory democracy.

Where they are wrong, is in seeing the leaders who come after as the failure. No, it is the strongmen who sow the seeds of later crises. 

Most long dictatorships will mostly end in Libya-type chaos, or an even more authoritarian order. Uganda under Kyagulanyi would probably go through a bad patch for a while.

 But it wouldn't be because of what he would have done or failed to do. It is primarily because of what has happened in the last 35 years.

Long, corrupt, violent, election-theft plagued rule, radicalises a country. Many groups, even when subdued, develop an ideology that rejects a centralised rule of a future autocrat or democrat, or even the nation itself. 

Or they feel so alienated by exclusion from power, it becomes religion for them to have their own rule them next time. 

Internally, 30 and more years of privilege and accumulation of patronage, means regime elements have so much they will go to extremes to protect what they own.

Several of these elements are in Uganda today. In nearly 95 per cent of cases, there are only a few ways you have a working transition that is not chaotic and results in expanded democratic space after a ruler has been in power for over 20 years.

One, when the leader himself initiates the transition when he still has moral and political authority, as Julius Nyerere did in Tanzania in 1985 after 21 years.

The other is a popular armed struggle, in which the insurgents win a comprehensive and decisive military victory on the battlefield, like happened with Museveni in 1986, or the Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army in 1994.

A street-born uprising that ousts the Big Man after a few months with, or even without, foreign backing; an election in which a long-ruling incumbent is fighting tooth and nail to hang on; a military coup; all are bound to end in chaos or fractious government. 

I don't see a Uganda in 1986 scenario. Most of the other options, including elections, will end in a few painful years, but eventually Uganda will get back on its feet. Bobi Wine wouldn't have changed that, because he can't. Or, because of the revanchist demons unleashed by Museveni's often iron-fisted rule, the only way he would hold the country is being our Al-Sisi.
The original sin, has already been committed. But if Museveni does a Nyerere, who knows?

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, 
writer and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans". Twitter@cobbo3

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