{UAH} JEEMA

By YAHYA SSEREMBA

The Campus Journal

Sep -- Nov 2011

JUSTICE FORUM (JEEMA)

When it came into being in 1996 the Justice Forum exhibited an ambition and a drive to seize power that left no reason to doubt its seriousness. It fronted a presidential candidate whose education and professional profile, whose articulacy and assertiveness, whose devotion and selflessness, emphasized the seriousness with which the new party launched its quest for State power.

Even though Muhammad Kibirige Mayanja expectedly lost the election, winning no more than 2.1 percent of the vote, the party he led fascinated the minority Muslim population and proved its grip on the community the like of which every major political party in Uganda has used as a stepping stone. In almost every district he reached during the campaign, Mr. Mayanja was welcomed as a messiah by a people whose imams had passionately warned against letting down their Muslim brother.

In part this Muslim support for Jeema was due to 100 years of state-led marginalization of the community, impelling the faithful believers to distrust everyone except their own. In part this support was rooted in the Islamic tradition of a Muslim is a Muslim's brother, wish for your brother what you wish for yourself, believing men and women are allies of one another, and the like.

But Jeema did not enjoy this support, and whatever other support it may have had, for long. In the 2001 presidential elections Mr. Mayanja scored just one percent of the vote – down from 2.1 percent five years earlier. Predominantly Muslim areas, such as Bwera in Kasese District, which had voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim candidate in 1996, looked the other way five years later.

The party continued to change for the worse until it won one parliamentary seat in 2006, a whole decade after its formation. Efforts to increase Jeema's presence in parliament failed every time they were mounted, with the latest disappointment recorded in 2011. The party's founding president, Kibirige Mayanja, who had contested for president twice, decided to run at a lower level – at parliamentary level – but finished in third place behind little-known politicians. Jeema's biggest achievement in the elections, besides retaining its Makindye West seat in parliament, came as a surprise when the party won the Bukomansimbi District Chair.

By and large Jeema remains in an embarrassing state, with one MP out of 375; one district chair out of 112; three local council councilors out of thousands. This, for a party that has existed for 15 years, is surely one step forward, two steps back. This stagnation, as I argued elsewhere in What Went Wrong at Jeema, is rooted in three factors: the forgotten terror, the desertion of the mosque, and the absence of leadership.

The forgotten terror

The strength with which the wheel of Jeema started rolling in 1996 alarmed President Museveni. The ease with which Jeema attracted Muslims portrayed the party as a vanguard that had come to mobilize, unite and lead Muslims to State power.

Whereas its appeal to the general public was trivial, the party displayed some potential to develop into a much more organized and formidable political movement in future. Museveni could not fold his hands as a political threat materialized, and, most importantly, as a Muslim political threat materialized. In non-Muslim countries the rise of Muslims – whether in population size, in political influence or in economic clout – is viewed by the bigots as an invasion, by the conservatives as a takeover, and by both as a calamity.

To prevent the 'calamity' that would erupt from a much more organized Muslim political movement in future, Museveni saw it fit to 'disrupt, dismantle and defeat' Jeema in its embryonic years. In the name of fighting the ADF rebellion Museveni's government embarked on a slaughtering campaign, summarily executing countless Muslims, especially politicized Muslims, and confining others to secret torture chambers locally know as safe houses.

Rebel became a label to be stuck on Muslims who wore long beards and shortened trousers. This campaign was seen at Jeema as a strategy to weaken the party by eliminating its agents and frightening remnants.

If this is what the campaign of terror sought – to terrify Jeema members – it succeeded. So frightened were the members that they virtually gave up mobilization and decided to spend the rest of their time distancing the organization from its constituency – the Muslims – and from its engine – the mosque.

Desertion of the mosque

But Jeema is not the only party that has suffered such brutality. How comes the FDC party – whose leader has frequented jail on fabricated cases of rape, treason, and, most recently, of inciting violence – has managed to grow relatively stronger? The difference lies in how the two parties responded to the painful torments.

FDC, far from giving up, intensified its aggressiveness and escalated its confrontation with the government. Jeema, on the other hand, not only withdrew in the face of brutality, it failed to publicly speak out against the atrocities that were being committed against its key supporters – the Muslims. Jeema, in other wards, deserted its supporters when they needed it most; it actually abandoned everything to do with Muslim problems.

Whereas Muslims embraced Jeema, Jeema did not embrace them. The party hardly espoused Muslim causes and, on the contrary, tried hard to distance itself from Islam. Surely some individual Jeema members, especially Dr. Abasi Kiyimba and Imam Kasozi, often voiced Muslim concerns, passionately denouncing all sorts of oppression perpetrated on the believers. But they did so not as Jeema leaders, nor even as Jeema members, but as leaders of the Uganda Muslim Youth Assembly or as patrons of the Makerere University Muslim Students Association.

Jeema's unforgivable silence came at the height of the forgotten terror, a campaign in the late 1990s in which Museveni's government summarily executed, detained without trial and tortured countless Muslims for allegedly aiding the ADF rebellion. Surely some party members did quietly secure the release of some victims, particularly Jeema members. But seldom did they condemn the campaign of terror publicly, fearing, as a senior party official told me, to be labeled the political wing of the ADF.

The campaign to delink Jeema from its undisputed Muslim identity continues. A section of the leadership of the party has constantly attempted to convince members not to use the Islamic greeting of salaam at party gatherings that involve non Muslim members, and not to open party meetings with overtly Islamic prayers, such as those recited wholly or partly in Arabic, or those in which the name of Allah is mentioned.

Surely beyond having a Muslim president and a Muslim secretary general Jeema failed to prove its relevance to Islam, its usefulness to Muslims, and its concern for both. This is certainly no inducement for Muslims to support the party. They, accordingly, withdrew the support they had offered.

The leadership claims the party can be deregistered for being 'religious'. This fear is farfetched, for no party can be banned for simply speaking out against atrocities committed on a religious group or for opening its meetings with prayers that involve invoking the name of the Creator, whether it is Allah, God, Jehovah or Adonai.

Many an organisation in this part of the world opens its meetings with prayers that end with the declaration, "In Jesus' name, Amen," even when some members in the sitting are not Christians. The Christians confidently, and at times aggressively, express their beliefs as loud as they can, at private and public meetings, at formal and informal gatherings, at civil and state functions. The Muslims, on the other hand, feel uneasy about their beliefs and wish to conceal or disguise them, thinking that doing otherwise would displease the followers of other religions. This is but an inferiority complex that plagues minority groups worldwide and that has constrained Ugandan Muslims since the triumph of Christianity in the religious wars of the late 19th Century.

For semiliterate Muslims to feel inferior is excusable. But for highly-educated and widely-respected founders of a political organisation to harbor similar feelings is shocking. By discarding its Muslim identity and by being indifferent to Muslim problems Jeema was not stating why it deserved Muslim support. And once Muslims, as far as their interests were concerned, found little or no difference between supporting JEEMA and NRM, FDC, UPC, or DP, they went for whichever they thought was more appealing.

As Jeema fought to undress its Muslim garment, it did nothing, and totally nothing, to take its campaign to the general public – to members of all religious denominations. It ignored Muslims and made no effort to woo the rest, and, eventually, lost both. Jeema's desertion of the mosque is, in other words, a symptom of a wider failure – the failure to carryout mobilization. This could not have befallen the party under the watch of competent leaders.

The absence of leadership

It is surely unfair to accuse the leadership of Jeema of lack of achievement. The impressive presidential campaign mounted by the founding president Muhammad K. Mayanja in 1996 encouraged many Muslims to compete for political offices in subsequent elections, marking the start of the end of the marginalization of Muslims that this country had known since colonial era. And the fact that Jeema, despite its weaknesses, has stood the test of time is a credit to its leadership.

But these leaders also had serious shortcomings that made Jeema the laughing stock it is today. They became party presidents and party secretary-generals without adequate leadership experience in politics or in any other formal setting. This made them susceptible to all the uncertainties of trial and error. Until 2008, twelve years since they formed Jeema, they operated without secretariat, save for makeshift offices that appeared for one or two months during elections and closed shortly after.

Without headquarters and without central command the leaders could not meet to confer and to plot a course for the party. They could not even think. They lost touch with their district representatives, forgot everything about mobilization, and slept until the electoral commission would announce nomination dates for presidential and parliamentary elections. It was then that they would emerge from slumberland, fill nomination forms, hold a few rallies here and there and expect to win in elections.

This, unfortunately, is how most Muslim organizations in Uganda operate: without plan, without discipline, without direction. From schools to mosques and from firms to orphanages, Muslim organizations are managed haphazardly – without formal procedures, without proper record keeping and without proper accountability. Jeema is no exception.

It is this leadership that has failed almost on all accounts that remains in charge of the party.

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