57 Uganda
Opalo
The presidency of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni (1986-present) offers important lessons on the nature of power (and leadership) in most African countries.
Museveni’s long tenure (37 years and counting) illustrates this reality. Instead of using his power to transform Uganda as he had promised in 1986, politics transformed him into loving power as an end in itself. As a result, he will leave office largely as a failed state-builder, a failed nation-builder, and a failed developmentalist president.
The Ugandan state is still scarce in much of the country, while his governance style still relies on ethnicity as the dominant mode of organizing mass politics. He also failed to transform the economy. In 1986 Uganda’s per capita income was 71% of Kenya’s. As of 2022 Uganda’s per capita income had shrunk to just 46% of Kenya’s, having essentially stagnated since 2009. The political instability that will follow his departure from office will likely erode current levels of state capacity, social cohesion, and economic development.
Like other rulers in the region, Museveni chose to cope with his inability to maximize the state’s hegemony and to define and enforce the operative rules in society by adopting a model of authoritarianism characterized by “institutionalized arbitrary governance.” His style of governance focused “more on weakening competition than on maximizing control.” The ensuing generalized decay of civilian institutions has left the military, itself factionalized under the logics of arbitrary governance, as the main game in town (with an ever increasing role in the economy through the National Enterprises Corporation).
Museveni had to use a share of the economy’s limited output to prevent elites from defecting from his coalition with their co-ethnics in tow. To his credit, he certainly did better than either Milton Obote or Idi Amin.
For much of his tenure he has been genuinely popular on account of having brought political stability.
Museveni’s aversion to institutionalization stunted political development in Uganda.
The National Resistance Movement (NRM) is a Potemkin party, a pale shadow of more illustrious hegemonic parties in the region like Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). Ugandan parliament, judiciary, and other public institutions continue to decay.
Museveni relies on unstable personalist purchasing of elite loyalty as a substitute for institutionalized mass politics and rationalized administrative-bureaucratic management of state affairs. The system is unstable because it is a chaotic “musical chairs” queueing system marked by constant reshuffling.
The tragedy, of course, is that Museveni and Uganda could have avoided this state of affairs. When he took power he was rightfully viewed as a revolutionary leader who could transform Uganda by stabilizing its politics and focusing the state’s attention to the important tasks of state-building, repairing the social fabric, institutionalizing politics, and improving Ugandan’s material conditions. These views of Museveni were not unreasonable. Objectively speaking, he was/is better than the modal African leader. However, at some point Museveni ceased to see power as a means to and end — i.e. transforming Uganda. Thereafter merely holding power became an end in itself. This reorientation has since left him unable to escape what Branko Milanovic calls the dictator’s trap:
There is nothing that can be offered to dictators to make them step down. They have to continue to rule until they either die peacefully in their beds and after death became either vilified or celebrated (or at times, both), or until they are overthrown, or meet an assassin’s bullet. Once on the top, there is no exit. They have become prisoners like many others whom they have thrown in jail.
Uganda is on track for a messy transition. Neither the NRM nor the military have institutional mechanisms for enforcing an orderly transition.
Power changed Museveni and that the direction of change was a function of the manner in which the “Bush War” (1981-1986) war was prosecuted and settled. The young Museveni was a radical revolutionary who became politically conscious early in life.
Visited areas liberated by FRELIMO in northern Mozambique, from where he learned about resistance councils that he would go on to found during Uganda’s “Bush War.”
NRA’s lack of political hegemony when it seized power in early 1986 meant that Museveni had to pragmatically negotiate with and accommodate other political forces within Uganda — a cycle that continues to this day.
The absence of a politically mobilized countryside with institutional influence created room for Uganda’s economic reforms to largely focus on monetary policy (exchange rates), stabilizing the urban economy, and cash crop producers. Peasant agricultural production was simply ignored.
A continued western domination of Uganda’s political economy may invite systemic political instability, including a military coup by disaffected units.
Opalo (2023) The Museveni Succession
57.1 Mining
Radly
In 2017, 70,000 miners were displaced by Ugandan military and police in Mubende to make way for a Canadian-listed mining corporation. Speaking to local media shortly after the displacement, Edwards Katto, a Director at the Ugandan Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, said:
Those people [Ugandan miners] still joking should style up. Now, I’m not only a director [in the Ministry] but also a commander of the Minerals Protection Unit of the Uganda Police Force. So, those illegal miners still behaving like those in Mubende [who were evicted], they should pack and vacate the mines, otherwise, my police force will them help to pack.