No-party democracy? : Ugandan politics in comparative perspective 9781588266309, 2008009264

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NO-PARTY DEMOCRACY?

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NO-PARTY DEMOCRACY? UGANDAN POLITICS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE GIOVANNI CARBONE

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

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Published in the United States of America in 2008 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2008 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carbone, Giovanni No-party democracy? : Ugandan politics in comparative perspective / Giovanni Carbone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-630-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Political parties—Uganda. 2. One party systems—Uganda. 3. Democracy— Uganda. 4. Uganda—Politics and government—1979– I. Title. JQ2951.A91C37 2008 324.096761—dc22 2008009264 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America Printed on 30% postconsumer recycled paper The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

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A Isa, Enzo, Pietro e Tommaso

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

1

No-Party Democracy

1

2

Building a No-Party State in Uganda

29

3

The Political Economy of Support for the New Regime

49

4

Museveni’s Political Trajectory

77

5

The Movement: A Partisan Organization in Disguise

89

6

The State of the Old Parties in a No-Party State

109

7

The Electoral Politics of No-Partyism

137

8

The Parliamentary Politics of No-Partyism

155

9

The Demise of a Democratic Model

187

List of Acronyms Notes References Index About the Book

203 207 231 243 259

vii

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Illustrations

■

Maps

Uganda Ethnic Groups in Uganda

2 7

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Tables

2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

8.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4

Military Expenditure in Uganda, 1988–2004 Annual GDP Growth, 1983–2005 Public Debt and GNI, 1980–2005 Official Development Assistance to Uganda, 1990–2004 Growth in the Number of MPs, Districts, and Government Posts, 1986–2006 Number of Candidates per Parliamentary Constituency, 1996 and 2001 Parliamentary Caucuses in the Sixth Parliament: Membership and Main Objectives Women in Uganda’s Elected Assemblies, 1994–2006 Presidential Election Results, 1996–2006 Presidential Election Results, 2006: Regional Breakdown Parliamentary Election Results, 2006 Parliamentary Election Results, 2006: Regional Breakdown

■

Figures

3.1 3.2

Annual GDP Growth, 1983–2005 Growth in the Number of MPs, Districts, and Government Posts, 1986–2006

7.1 8.1

ix

45 55 56 61 66 138 164 180 195 196 196 197

55 67

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Acknowledgments

In my efforts to make sense of no-party democracy in Uganda, I owe a debt to several people. First among them is Fred Golooba-Mutebi, who, over the years, thoroughly scrutinized my ideas. While helping me learn more about his country and fellow Ugandans, Fred has become a great friend. Teddy Brett and Brendan O’Leary were also extremely helpful, and both were a source of great fun. At different stages, James Putzel pushed me to think harder, while consistently supporting my academic endeavors. I also benefited from occasional discussions with many people, including Nicolas De Torrente, Marco Giuliani, Elliott Green, Graham Harrison, Donald Horowitz, Nelson Kasfir, Sallie Simba Kayunga, Robert Law, Patrick McAuslan, Charles Onyango-Obbo, Aili Mari Tripp, and Angela Wapakhabulo. In Uganda, Filippo Ciantia’s family and the other people at the Associazione Volontari per il Servizio Internazionale (AVSI), an Italian nongovernmental organization, provided a beautiful and friendly place to stay when I first arrived in the country. AVSI people were also very kind and hospitable during my visits to Gulu and Kitgum. In Kampala, I received indispensable assistance from the Makerere Institute for Social Research (particularly from Patrick Madaya) and from the Centre for Basic Research (particularly from its director, Simon Rutabajuka, and from the former librarian, Judith Akello). Fieldwork often implies a dose of importuning: I am therefore very thankful to all the people who made themselves available for interviewing in Uganda, including parliamentarians, local politicians, party officials, civil servants, NGO representatives, and journalists. The Facoltà di Scienze Politiche of the Università degli Studi di Milano supported me with generous grants, as did the London School of Economics, its Development Studies Institute and Crisis States Research Centre, and the Central Research Fund of the University of London. I dedicate this book to my mother, Isa, my father, Enzo, and my two brothers, Pietro and Tommaso. xi

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1 No-Party Democracy

THE PRESENCE OF POLITICAL PARTIES DOES NOT SUFFICE TO MAKE a political regime democratic. Yet all modern democratic states include party systems and organizations: in point of fact, contemporary democracies are regimes in which multiple political parties compete for power. But are political parties indispensable to democracy? Can a no-party political system constitute a democratic alternative to multiparty democracy? The notion of a “no-party” system of elected government raises a number of theoretical, comparative, and empirical questions. Such questions range from the dubious possibility, under participatory politics, of implementing a prohibition on the establishment of parties or party-like organizations, to the alternative arrangements that the citizens of a no-party state would try to devise for the coordination of political action. What kind of arrangements would they be, if any, how would they work, and to what extent would they substitute party activities? What would be the implications of these arrangements for the political process? In other words, what happens when parties are done away with in an election-based participatory system? The politics of Uganda over the past decades provides a rather extraordinary opportunity for addressing the above questions. In January 1986, Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A) finally took power in Uganda and formally established what it claimed was a new type of democracy, which soon came to be known as “Movement” or “no-party” democracy. After a five-year civil war, the new regime officially restored a system of political participation. By the late 1980s, the holding of local elections had been regularized and became the platform for an indirectly elected national parliament. In 1994, there were direct elections for a Constituent Assembly and, under a new constitution, presidential and parliamentary elections followed in 1996 and again in 2001. By the time the country returned to multiparty elections at the beginning of 2006, twenty long years had been spent trying to achieve the remarkable and highly controversial objective of a democratic system without political parties. 1

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Uganda

Uganda

S U D A N

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

KENYA

Kampala

Lake Victoria

RWANDA

BURUNDI T A N Z A N I A

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Uganda’s no-party democracy was based on the principle of what was termed “individual-merit politics,” representing the NRM leadership’s answer to the country’s postindependence history of sectarian and ethnic political party conflict, the alleged cause of sequential patterns of ethnic exclusion, political violence, and chronic instability. The individual-merit reform aimed at transforming politics—and notably elections—into a game played by individuals only, rather than by political organizations. Thus, parties were “banned” (or, in fact, marginalized) and all Ugandans were declared members of an umbrella (albeit poorly structured) “Movement.”1 While party activities were subject to strict limitations prohibiting delegates’ conferences, public rallies, local branches, and the sponsoring of candidates for election, the NRM nevertheless tried not to exacerbate political opposition by letting parties exist as independent entities (allowing them to maintain a head office, for example). The key elements of no-party democracy were thus electoral politics, contests based on individual merit, and strict restrictions on party activities. For a few years, a “broad-based” government was also part of the scheme—whereby the most prominent leaders of the old parties were co-opted pursuant to the offer of cabinet positions—but this was never logically or necessarily part of a no-party system. As a result, the broad-based approach progressively lost momentum, and, by the early 1990s, politicians, public discourse, and the country itself had become increasingly divided between those supporting the existing system (the “movementists”) and those advocating a return to a more orthodox system based on a plurality of political parties (the “multipartyists”). Indeed, the very fact that the Movement itself was not a political system, as claimed by its creators, but a political organization was gradually coming to light. In spite of the oppositions’ boycott, however, in a June 2000 referendum, Ugandans voted not to replace the existing system with a full-fledged multiparty democracy, but to keep the no-party system in place for at least another five years. The idea of a no-party polity was not exclusive to Uganda. Early studies of politics in the developing world had already noted that calls for banishing political parties were traditionally made by ruling elites on the grounds that “the country was not ready” for such, or that “parties were the cause of the country’s troubles.” As Samuel Huntington put it almost forty years ago now, the point was that, especially in the least developed states, “a ruling monarch tends to view political parties as divisive forces which either challenge his authority or greatly complicate his efforts to unify and modernize his country” (Huntington 1968, 403). However, identical antiparty calls were made in the West by such founding fathers of democracy as George Washington and Charles de Gaulle (cf. Coleman and Rosberg 1966, 663; La Palombara and Weiner 1966, 23). Regimes claiming democratic credentials while running no-party arrangements are very rare, but recent or contemporary experiences can be found in countries as diverse as Nepal, Afghanistan, and Swaziland, while elections based on individual merit were the basis for local-level politics in Ghana and

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Rwanda.2 Within the category of such rare experiments, the Ugandan case stands out not only for the relative complexity of its reforms or for its considerable duration, but notably for the great attention that the Museveni regime attracted within the international development community. Uganda’s no-party democracy represents an exceptional example for understanding the linkage between participatory politics and political organizations and for assessing the consequences, both intended and unintended, of trying to sever such linkage.

■

Political Parties and Democratic Politics

The will to establish a no-party democracy in Uganda inevitably points to the role played by political parties in open, democratic political systems. Political parties in participatory systems are not there for nothing: they help organize and order political participation by selecting, aggregating, and channeling the increasing demands and pressures that a modern political system is required to address. In one view, “the political party is the one agency that can claim to have as its very raison d’être the creation of an entire linkage chain, a chain of connections that runs from the voters through the candidates and the electoral process to the officials of government” (Lawson 1988, 16). Of course, party linkages, or the connections through which political parties carry out most of the above processes, can assume diverse forms, some more commendable than others, and these often include clientelistic practices. However, the fact remains that parties perform a number of important functions within the larger political system. Political scientists have long investigated the nature of these functions. By promoting political participation and bringing different, or newly emerging, social forces within the political system, parties can further the legitimacy of that system. An effective party system provides a structure for the participation of new groups in politics by giving expression to the public’s concerns— by bringing together and conveying a multiplicity of opinions, interests, identities, values, and preferences. Parties enable such demands to attain political salience. They can articulate policies and mobilize the popular, political, and institutional support that their implementation requires. Alternatively, when they are not in government, parties can constitute a coherent opposition and elaborate policies different from those of the government. Party activities also contribute to the definition, structuring, and stabilization of the political game in terms of issue dimensions, voting patterns, agenda setting, coalition building, payoff distribution, and so forth.3 As a synthesis of the main findings of studies investigating parties and party systems, Russell Dalton and Martin Wattenberg propose a comprehensive framework of core functions that builds on V. O. Key’s classic distinction of the three sides of a political party: the party in the electorate, the party as an organization, and the party in government (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000, 5,

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with reference to Key 1964). In the electorate, a political party helps simplify voters’ choices, educating citizens, producing symbols of identification and loyalty, and getting people to participate in politics. As an organization, a political party recruits the political leadership and organizes its bid for governmental office; it also trains political elites and expresses and aggregates political interests. Finally, within governmental institutions, political parties are essential to creating governing majorities; to organizing governmental activities and implementing policy objectives; to articulating dissent and opposition; to controlling the country’s administration and guaranteeing the responsibility of those in government; and to fostering governmental stability. Museveni’s purported justification for the adoption of a no-party framework, however, was the fear that uncompromising, ethnically based parties would dominate the political scene and simply polarize multiparty politics. Similar parties may, in fact, tend to compartmentalize politics, promoting the separation and alienation of a communal group from the rest of society. The more a party is strictly based on a group’s communal identity and is concerned with expressing the interests of that group alone, the less it will be prepared to settle for interparty compromises. This, in turn, may hinder and stifle the capacity of a party system to integrate and accommodate all of a polity’s sociopolitical groupings (cf. Dogan and Pelassy 1990, 97). Communal parties are an example of how modernization processes can provide the means—for example, party organizations and party-based electoral competition—for the institutionalization of so-called “traditional” identities, rather than their replacement or transcendence. By institutionalizing differences, ethnically based parties can be potentially dysfunctional from the point of view of the larger collectivity and may even lead to political disintegration (see, for instance, Horowitz 1985). Yet, even in a situation characterized by strong group differences and segmentation, parties can still be instrumental in channeling participation and inputs toward a successive stage of the political process, where the integration of separate groups into the polity can be achieved. For this to happen, specific mechanisms for conflict management may have to be worked out, whereby parties are put in a position where they can pursue compromises with other groups. With regard to this issue, scholars have advanced solutions that range from power-sharing (consociational) party-based regimes to more explicitly integrationist devices.4 Political parties emerge when the number and variety of different interests and unstructured demands require something more than informal interaction to bring them together. Of course, most of the elections held before the twentieth century were nonpartisan; but this was not normally the result of bans on political parties, rather, it indirectly derived from the limited extension of the suffrage (cf. Przeworski et al. 2000, 20). With the advent of modern mass politics, the basic fact that politics is a collective game, and that effective action in a collective game requires some form of coordination, becomes most evident. The more

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people involved in the game and the greater its complexity, the greater the need to organize cooperation: “the novelty derives from a politically active, or politically mobilized society . . . modern politics requires a party channelment. . . . A partyless polity cannot cope, in the long run, with a politicized society . . . [which requires] a stabilized system of canalisation. . . . The larger the number of participants, the more the need for a regularised traffic system” (Sartori 1976, xii, 41–42). The exclusion of political parties, besides raising questions concerning the democratic character of the polity, may also create more elementary problems concerning the institutional soundness and viability of the new system. Political parties can promote the institutionalization of participatory politics, and thus the stabilization and governability required for a regime to be effective. Eliminating parties is likely to open gaps in the wider political system,5 unless other arrangements are devised to fill the organizational vacuum. In fact, in participatory systems, there are strong reasons for the emergence of party-like organizations, which may become key features of the political-institutional setup. A ban on parties may, in fact, merely produce effects similar to those of other forms of prohibitions, such as the prohibition of drugs and alcohol; that is, when something is forbidden, people often look for, and perhaps find, alternatives. Uganda’s no-party system was no exception to this. The country’s politicians needed to reach out to the voters, to group together in parliament, and to provide inputs to the policymaking process. Thus, they needed to organize, and indeed they tried to do so. Attempts at surrogating the organized activities of political parties included, as we shall see, the formation of parliamentary caucuses designed to coordinate the actions of MPs in responding to governmental initiatives and in lobbying or pooling resources for the purpose of constituency activities; the instrumental use of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to bypass restrictions on party activities and reach out to old party members; and legislative measures setting up party-like structures in disguise at national and local levels. Before tackling these issues, however, we need to understand the rationale that allegedly prompted the creators of the no-party regime to set it up; we also need to examine such rationale in the face of the history and development of political parties in postindependence Uganda.

■

The Argument for No-Party Democracy: Ethnicity, Exclusion, and Political Instability

The introduction of so-called no-party democracy, in 1986, was professedly aimed at solving a problem of profound sociocultural divisions. The country’s political history had been largely shaped by changing power balances among its various ethnic groups. The politics of exclusion—whereby dominance by

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Ethnic Groups in Uganda

SUDAN

KAKWA

METU

LUGBARA

MADI

ACHOLI KARAMOJONG

OKEBU ALUR JONAM

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

BAGUNGU

LANGI

ITESO

BANYORO BARULI BEBEI SEBEI

BAKENYI

BAAMBA

BAGANDA

BATORO

BAGWERE BANYOLE

BASOGA

BAGWE SAMIA

Kampala BAKONJO

BAGISU

ITESO JOPADHOLA

BANYANKORE

BAHORORO

Lake Victoria

BAKIGA BAFUMBIRA BANYARWANDA BATWA

KENYA

TANZANIA

RWANDA

Bantu Communities Luo/Nilotic Communities Luo/Nilo-Hamitic Communities

. . . . . . . Ma’di-Moru Communities Nilo-Hamitic Communities

Source: Adapted from “Protracted Conflict, Elusive Peace: Initiatives to End the Violence in Northern Uganda,” Accord, no. 11, Conciliations Resources, 2002.

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one or more communities was, or was perceived to be, at the expense of Uganda’s other communities—had fostered a chain of violent ethnic and religious conflict. In turn, the capture of the state by specific groups, be they the Luo or the Langi under Milton Obote during the 1960s and the early 1980s, or the “Nubians” under Idi Amin during the 1970s, was reflected in the creation of nondemocratic, politically unstable regimes. The ideological underpinnings of no-party politics were thus provided by an interpretation of Uganda’s postindependence history as a spiral of violent conflicts prompted by ethnically based political parties. The bulk of Museveni’s argument for a no-party model was that Western representative democracy could hardly be imported to African countries. The latter’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious fragmentation was accompanied by preindustrial development and the lack of a modern class structure. In similar contexts, conventional democratic politics promoted the polarization of communal antagonisms, because parties and party alignments invariably acted as vehicles for ethnic or religious claims and disputes (Museveni 1992). By any definition, ethnicity is based on a cognitive distinction between those who are inside and those who are outside a given communal group.6 As a consequence, ethnic politics tend to be inherently exclusive. This is true no matter what kind of political regime is adopted. While a democratic system does offer the greatest potential for the inclusion of different communities by ensuring their representation, democracies in heterogeneous societies also risk losing this legitimizing inclusiveness early on. Democratic legitimacy is largely, if not exclusively, a form of procedural legitimacy. Free and fair elections as a way of selecting a political leadership can spread the belief—and legitimacy is about beliefs—that the system is a “just” one because the rulers are subject to proper procedures (the electoral process) designed to guarantee their right to rule. The opposition is meant to be constitutionally loyal and to acknowledge a government that has been empowered by popular vote. The government of the day, in turn, accepts the legitimate attempts by the opposition to take over power in subsequent elections and the possibility that the existing majority/opposition relation might be reversed. In other words, the notion of democratic competition implies that every minority or opposition group has the chance to govern the country in the future. The problem with democratic politics in an ethnically divided context stems from the segmentation of the electorate. Voters are likely to vote according to their ethnic identity, and because communal bonds are hardly negotiable, relatively few of them will modify their allegiances over time. Successive elections may simply produce, or be perceived to produce, census-like results that reflect the ethnic segmentation of the electorate and the demographic size of the different groups (see, for instance, Horowitz 1991). Because electoral outcomes tend to mirror sociocultural cleavages without promising any foreseeable change, the roles of the majority and the opposition may appear to be frozen,

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and in theory a demographically majoritarian part of the population, or an alliance of groups, may remain permanently in power. A demographic majority that is transformed into a democratic majority can claim formal legitimacy; however, by permanently excluding opposition groups from the governmental sphere, what it in fact does is alienate the opposition and undermine the substantive legitimacy and stability of the political system. Thus, the democratic system runs the risk of generating the conditions for its own implosion. Groups condemned to the opposition progressively lose their stake in the existing order and are most likely to react by violently challenging the system. While such a pattern is not inescapable, cases in point can be found worldwide, from Sri Lanka to Northern Ireland. Two African countries that make for dramatic, textbook cases are Rwanda and Burundi, both divided between a huge Hutu majority of about 85–90 percent of the population and a Tutsi minority of some 10–15 percent. In Rwanda, the 1961 legislative elections that preceded by one year the country’s independence produced an evident ethnic alignment of the voters: the Hutu voted massively for the Parti du Mouvement de l’Émancipation Hutu (Parmehutu), which received 77.7 percent of the votes, while the Tutsi largely supported the Union Nationale Rwandaise (Unar), which obtained only 16.8 percent. The election results seemed to point to an inevitable political hegemony by the Hutu and, vice versa, to the political exclusion of the Tutsi ethnic minority. Such perceptions contributed to setting off the cycle of intermittent, brutal violence that has plagued the country since independence. Similarly, in Burundi, multiparty elections were introduced in 1993 and gave a 64.7 percent majority to Melchior Ndadaye, who became the first Hutu president, while his Front pour la Démocratie au Burundi (Frodebu) won 71.4 percent of the votes in the legislative elections. Sectors of the military, however, refused the perceived marginalization of the Tutsi, who had dominated the country’s politics up to that point. When Ndadaye was assassinated after only three months in office, the country plunged into a decade of on-off civil war that lasted at least until 2003. In its broad and sweeping formulation, therefore, Museveni’s no-party argument was built on his questioning the very possibility of successfully applying non-African democratic frameworks to Africa’s heterogeneous and less developed societies. But did this kind of reading fit Uganda’s postindependence political history?

■

The Emergence of Modern Politics and Political Parties in Uganda During the 1960s

When Uganda achieved independence in 1962, the country inherited from its former colonial rulers a set of new institutional arrangements that broadly reflected the British, or Westminster-like, political system (see, for example, Engholm

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1963). The latter included prime ministerial executive authority, multiparty elections, a single chamber of parliamentary representatives, and the absence of any central representation for local and regional political-administrative units.7 The most notable difference from the Westminster model displayed by the country’s main institutional features was the semifederal arrangements envisaged by the constitution. These were only granted to the four kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole, thus creating an asymmetric setup whereby the remaining areas of Uganda merely retained their district status. Thus, “a peculiar form of federalism [was established] with political units based on a presumed common ethnic identity possessing sharply unequal degrees of power and wealth. The kingdom of Buganda was the only political unit with real federal autonomy” (Kasfir 1994, 149). Despite the new participatory framework left in place by the departing colonial power, Ugandans had hardly ever organized for modern politics before independence loomed. Social demands and grievances had only been politicized on occasion, as in the case of the Bataka (i.e., the Baganda clan heads) Movement in the 1920s and again in the 1940s. In the latter period, a farmers’ union or federation—which partly overlapped with the Bataka Movement—demanded the breakup of the Asians’ monopoly over the processing and commercialization of cotton and coffee (Karugire 1980, 147; Mamdani 1976, 181ff.). Overall, however, “the few pressure groups that existed, like the Bataka Movement, the Taxi Drivers’ Association and the Uganda Farmers’ Association were more concerned with specific grievances than with questions of democracy and good governance” (Mugaju and Oloka-Onyango 2000, 14). Although a colonial assembly had existed since the 1920s as an advisory body to the governor, it was only in 1958, barely four years before independence, that the majority of the African representatives to the Legislative Council were elected by Ugandans. Before that, members of the so-called LEGCO had been appointed by the governor, and the representation of African people had been delegated to one or two European members. The first African to join the assembly, made up of whites and Asians, was only appointed in 1945. As in several other African countries, the lack of any preindependence experience in modern politics and government was as striking as it was complete. Independence came to many African countries in a somewhat unexpected fashion. It was rarely the product of prolonged nationalist struggles, which meant that nationwide movements or political organizations barely existed. In the case of Uganda, in particular, preindependence political issues had largely focused on district-level disputes, resulting in a parochial fragmentation and compartmentalization of political life. The departing British authorities themselves, despite trying to leave some form of participatory framework in place, had been highly critical of the formation of political parties on the grounds that such parties would foment populist campaigns and sectarian divisions (Mugaju and Oloka-Onyango 2000, 15).

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Political parties emerged in Uganda only in the late 1950s and early 1960s—and not without some difficulty. During the 1950s, according to D. A. Low, “Powerful, extensive, nationalist political part(ies) failed to develop” (Low 1962, 7–9; cf. Kasfir 1976, 114) in the country. Several factors have been cited for this fact. Not only were there no non-African model political organizations to emulate, but the lack of a common language and the colonial divisions based on what were supposed to be tribal units, now reproduced as electoral districts, were further obstacles to the organization of a truly “national” politics (Karugire 1980, 145). The almost total lack of electoral experience further impeded the development of strong, nationwide political organizations. Thus, when independence finally arrived, although parties did take central stage, they remained very weak. In fact, the emergence of sound political organizations, such as the Tanzania African National Union, was a true rarity (Low 1962, 7–9; cf. Apter 1997). In many African countries, the development of strong organizations was also inhibited by the fact that, after independence, “the work of the party tend[ed] to be neglected,” since several party officials took over governmental posts in the newly created states (Kasfir 1976, 244; cf. Hill 1980, 230). In Uganda, this was what happened in the case of the Uganda People’s Congress. In describing such developments, some observers went so far as to suggest that, in practice, even “the one-party state in Africa has become a no-party state” (quoted in Kasfir 1976, 247). The main political parties that emerged in Uganda shared this common organizational weakness and displayed an evident tendency to rely too much on individuals: [Virtually] none of them was a full-time politician. [Party] organisation . . . was almost invariably the work of these few men—most usually upon their free week-ends. Parties had executive committees in which they sat with a certain number of others. Very occasionally—once, perhaps, in three or four years—a party convention would be held. Subscriptions were sometimes paid . . . Party branches were nominally established in many parts of the country, and from time to time political excitement might be enough to stir local rural leaders into activity. But more frequently, party organisation lay moribund. It was only in the Congress outside Buganda that branches ever displayed any considerable activity on their own, and even the course of these up-country branches was sometimes chequered . . . one saw nothing at all comparable with the signboards marked “TANU Headquarters.” . . . Even Congress never worked its widespread radical following into a strong party organisation. (Low 1962, 36)

The year 1952 saw the creation of Uganda’s first political party. The Uganda National Congress (UNC) was formed and led by Ignatius Musazi, who had already been the prominent figure in the Bataka Movement and was the former head of the Federation of Ugandan African Farmers, which had conducted a campaign of riots in 1949. The UNC was a radical, socialist-oriented party that had named itself after the Indian National Congress and was controlled by a

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predominantly Baganda and Protestant leadership. Its own branch system was largely borrowed from the Farmers’ Federation; however, it failed to attain any national scope or agenda (Apter 1997, 312; Karugire 1988, 30ff.; Low 1962, 19). The party remained trapped in the context of highly parochial or localized issues, as was clearly seen during the “Kabaka crisis.” In 1953, the Kabaka of Buganda, Mutesa II, had been deported to Britain after his refusal to sanction constitutional reforms that the colonial authorities envisaged for the kingdom and for its traditional parliament, the Lukiiko, as well as their possible inclusion in a Federation of East Africa. During the political turmoil that followed the exile of the Kabaka, the UNC, which was not a prominent voice in this issue, decided to take sides with Buganda’s ethnonationalists. This led to increased factional divisions in the center and a weakened control over local party branches. Despite these difficulties and the virtual absence of any elections, the UNC’s was the first attempt at establishing a physical presence on the ground, with some 50,000 supporters and 10,000 fee-paying members (Apter 1997, 318ff., 332). While the party failed to establish itself as a durable national organization, it made significant inroads in certain areas outside Buganda, such as the northern districts of Lango and Acholi (Karugire 1980, 150). While the UNC relied on the Federation of Farmers to reach out to the populace, the Democratic Party (DP) was assisted by priests and by the Catholic Action movement in its efforts to take root. A moderate party, the DP was formed between 1954 and 1956 to counter the prospect of another Protestant becoming katikiro (prime minister of the Buganda kingdom, who was now an elective figure under the new Buganda Agreement of 1955).8 The party aimed to rebalance the appointment of chiefs on the grounds that while Catholics constituted the majority in the country, Protestants were consistently overrepresented in public office. In this sense, the DP was actually “a Christian Democratic Party . . . almost exclusively Roman Catholic in origin, inspiration and membership” (Low 1962, 22–23; see also Karugire 1988, 30ff.). The DP’s strategy of building upon religious foundations proved to be more effective in establishing political parties as a set feature of political life in Uganda than the UNC’s policy was. From the outset, the Democratic Party had a large following in areas that would guarantee the bulk of its support for decades to come, notably Buganda in the south together with the northern districts where the Verona Fathers operated (West Nile, Acholi, and Lango). The party thus managed, to a degree, to bring together people from significantly different areas, especially by bridging the north-south divide. While it may have been true that “only the Catholic political groups have been able to call upon people’s loyalties to lessen the effects of ethnicity” (Apter 1961, 306), the Democratic Party significantly contributed to the politicization of religious affiliations. Protestants, who had occupied the vast majority of appointive offices since the end of the nineteenth century, did not have the same need and urgency to organize politically for the promotion and defense of their interests—that is, at least not until Catholics

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threatened to modify the status quo in their favor up until then (Karugire 1980, 162). These divisions were not only set to render the emerging national political framework a highly conflictual one, but they also exacerbated political confrontations in the primary setting of Ugandan politics—the districts—where religious factionalism “dissipated the energies of the political parties at a time where more coherent national politics could have been formulated” (Karugire 1980, 174). The DP was led from 1958 by a lawyer, Benedicto Kiwanuka. Aside from the issue of how chieftaincies were being distributed, the party pressed for a policy of rapid Africanization of political representation and of Uganda’s civil service, and for an improvement in social welfare. The immediate achievement of independence, in comparison, was considered less of a priority by the party (Apter 1997, 340). At the time when the UNC and the DP were taking their first steps on the emerging political stage, a number of other parties made short-lived appearances prior to independence. In the late 1950s, for example, the Progressive Party was organized within the Lukiiko assembly by a Westernized, yet conservative, group led by Eridadi Mulira. This party, however, survived for only a brief period (1955–1958). Further attempts at making an impact followed, and failed once again, including those of the Uganda Taxpayers’ Party, the Uganda Labour Party, the Uganda Nationalist Party, and the Uganda Reform Party. None of these small political parties managed to establish a durable presence in the country. Both the Uganda National Congress and the Democratic Party, on the contrary, succeeded in getting delegates elected to the Legislative Council as soon as they were given a chance to do so, in 1958. In spite of their newly gained status as national representatives, however, most politicians continued to focus on local issues and disputes. The Buganda establishment and its Lukiiko even decided to boycott the election, refusing to send the representatives they were entitled to. The growing demands made on the colonial authorities by the elite at Mengo, the traditional center of the Buganda kingdom, helped reinforce the fears and dislike of Buganda that other communities shared. As the divide deepened, a coalition of local leaders hostile to Buganda emerged within the LEGCO—under the new label the Uganda People’s Union (UPU)—bringing together certain representatives who had been elected as independents and others from existing parties. The emergence of the UPU immediately set in motion the substantial realignment of Ugandan politics, causing a split within the relatively new Uganda National Congress. There was an internal clash between the Baganda members of the UNC, led by Musazi, and the non-Baganda members. Milton Apolo Obote emerged from among the latter as a charismatic and articulate leader capable of channeling anti-Baganda feelings into a new party, the Uganda People’s Congress, which he formed in March 1960 by merging his wing of the UNC with the recently created UPU.

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The Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) rapidly took center stage, assembling a majority in the LEGCO and positioning itself as a key player in the two splits shaping Ugandan politics. The UPC’s roots clearly saw it stand on one side of the first key divide: “The UPC was specifically an anti-Buganda party right from its inception and this was to remain throughout its history” (Karugire 1988, 36). At the same time, the party assumed the political identity of an anti-Catholic coalition, dominated by a Protestant leadership and built around Protestant associations (Young 1976, 250; Kasfir 1976, 196, 142). Regardless of its success, however, the UPC struggled to establish a national organization. The party was not so much the organizational and territorial projection of a strong central leadership, but rather a loose association of local political notables who continued to focus on their own districts, even more so than those of the DP (Doornbos 1978, 12). This fragmentation jeopardized the UPC’s capacity to develop a centrally coordinated, strong organizational structure (Karugire 1980, 190). Uganda’s new political parties represented the advent of modern politics, based in theory on popular participation and electoral competition for political office. While the parties themselves appealed to “existing” differences such as ethnic origins or religious beliefs, they nevertheless had to deal with opposition from political forces that were even more strongly rooted in a specific cultural or traditional milieu. These nonparty political forces were not going to look on while newly emerged political organizations fought among themselves for power. Despite the role that Uganda’s political parties were gradually acquiring, the most effective political grouping was arguably the one controlled by the leadership of the Buganda kingdom, whose specific ethnic appeals for the mobilization of communal networks proved highly effective (Apter 1997, 306). Since the mid-1950s, politics within the Lukiiko assembly, Buganda’s traditional parliament, had been dominated by neotraditionalists. The latter combined an attachment to old style politics—and thus an innate distrust of parties— with the acknowledgment that in order to meet the challenge represented by the emerging political parties, they had to organize their own actions better. The example of Ghana, where after independence in 1957 the Convention People’s Party had adopted measures strongly penalizing traditional institutions (Low 1962, 42), prompted some prominent Baganda to organize the Uganda National Movement (UNM) in 1959. Political leaders such as Mulira and Musazi coalesced in this short-lived party, which faded soon after orchestrating a boycott against non-African products targeted at the much-resented Asian processing and marketing activities. The UNM, which was only a loose association, was somewhat tightened and formalized with the formation of a quasi-party, the Kabaka Yekka (KY), in 1961. The “King alone” organization, which was endowed with abundant resources compared to other political forces, was founded on an explicitly conservative, proroyalty, federalist political platform. Since the

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Baganda elite at Mengo—the site of its traditional institutions—had been historically dominated by Protestants, the KY also came into being as what could be described as an anti-Catholic coalition. As the postindependence political scene began to take shape, a game of three players thus emerged as a result of the politicization of two communal cleavages: the one involving ethnic Baganda versus non-Baganda, and the other consisting of a Protestant versus Catholic alignment. In the new political arena, the young, partly organized Kabaka Yekka movement followed the quick path to success. Only three months before the KY was founded, the Mengo government had orchestrated an impressive boycott of the 1961 election for the first National Assembly, on the grounds that the requested guarantees that Buganda would have a special position within an independent Uganda had yet to be met. Only 3–4 percent of the Baganda electorate bothered to vote. This success, however, somehow backfired. The traditionalists’ boycott of the election meant that the DP, which won most of the seats in Buganda with just a few votes, together with a further share in other areas of Uganda, managed to put together an absolute majority in the assembly. The DP leader, Benedicto Kiwanuka, formed the first national executive in June 1961. The new government—and the prospect of it becoming even more powerful after the granting of independence—sparked fears among the Protestant hierarchies, both within and outside the country’s political parties (Hancock 1970). Buganda’s boycott had meanwhile prompted the decision to repeat the vote the following year. On the basis of a fragile anti-Catholic pact, and despite the various differences between the two, the Uganda People’s Congress and the Kabaka Yekka resolved to join forces. In view of the 1962 election, it was agreed that the coalition would be formed just before independence. The KY was now “confronted by novel problems of electoral organization . . . but into the breach stepped the now chastened chiefly hierarchy . . . [which] enjoyed the great advantage of being organized already as a functioning political bureaucracy” (Low 1962, 55), a “formidable organization” (Kasfir 1976, 126; cf. Hancock 1970, 427). Whereas during the first election Mengo had influenced the vote by keeping most Baganda away from the polling stations, the following year it went straight for their votes. In February, the Kabaka Yekka thus won sixty-five out of sixty-eight seats in the Lukiiko, losing only the three seats that were contested in the “lost counties,” an area of Buganda that had formerly belonged to Bunyoro and was still inhabited by Banyoro people. This remarkable electoral success gave the KY control of Buganda’s twenty-one representatives in the National Assembly, since the kingdom had been allowed to elect them indirectly. While Mengo certainly exerted a strong appeal over many Baganda, there were still cases of preelection intimidation and harassment by Baganda chiefs, who were exempted from the control of Uganda’s new self-governing institutions and still led by Mengo. The fact that the kingdom fought hard at the London constitutional conference, held toward the end

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of 1961, to get its National Assembly representatives elected by the Lukiiko is open to interpretation: “If the Buganda populace was given a free hand in choosing their representatives to the Lukiiko and to the assembly, they would have unquestionably removed the backwoodsmen who had ruled them by bullying and intimidation for so long. . . . Thus the Baganda were carefully shielded from expressing their loyalty so directly.”9 However, the crux of the matter was that the KY, just like the other parties, remained firmly focused on local issues and communal representation, which in turn implied that central party organs could hardly have been any weaker. National politics continued to be driven or constrained by local diatribes and ethnic concerns, with local notables and their branches largely impeding the development of coherent organizations by any one of the three main political organizations (Kasfir 1976, 113–115). In both the 1961 and the 1962 elections, the Democratic Party won mostly Catholic votes (especially outside Buganda), while the Uganda People’s Congress represented non-Baganda non-Catholics, and the Kabaka Yekka controlled a large section of the Baganda. Milton Obote, leader of the UPC, winners of a relative majority in the second election, took office as prime minister on Ugandan Independence Day—9 October 1962—while the Kabaka became the first president of the newly born Ugandan state shortly afterwards. However, differences within the KY-UPC coalition—the latter party having been created to fight the Baganda’s economic and political predominance—were bound to fully emerge sooner rather than later. The Kabaka Yekka, relying on external institutions rather than on its own organizational strength and coherence, was rapidly consumed by infighting. Defections to the UPC, which controlled the Ugandan government and was gradually reducing the Kabaka’s scope for political involvement, became unstoppable.10 Now deeply divided, the UPC-KY coalition, formed only two years before, collapsed in 1964, by which time the UPC could count on a party majority in the National Assembly. The end of the governing coalition, however, was not the end of the story, as subsequent developments soon led the then prime minister, Obote, to stage something akin to a coup. Following a serious rift within his own majority party, Obote suspended and then abrogated the independence constitution in early 1966. The abolition of Buganda’s quasi-federal status exacerbated the relationship between the central government and Mengo, a relationship that had already been strained because, two years earlier, a referendum held in the “lost counties” had established that the latter be returned to Bunyoro. Obote’s self-coup triggered the explosion of the Buganda crisis: as the Lukiiko resolved to expel the Ugandan administration from Buganda, the central administration responded with an attack by the national army on the Kabaka’s palace. The Kabaka himself, Edward Mutesa, was forced to flee into exile. The enactment of a new constitution, the so-called pigeonhole constitution (named after the fact that MPs saw the document only after they had voted

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to ratify it, when they found a copy in their pigeonholes) designed to further increase Obote’s powers, was the result of a much longer process, albeit not its final step. In 1967, a third constitution was produced, merging the figures of the head of state and the head of government into that of a president with strongly enhanced powers.11 Traditional kingdoms were abolished, Buganda as a political entity was broken up into a number of districts by Obote the Northener, and over the course of time a centralizing undemocratic tendency saw the gradual elimination of most democratic cornerstones, from free elections and decentralized representative bodies to opposition parties. To an extent, this authoritarian trend had been unfolding since soon after independence. Party pluralism as such had lasted only a couple of years or so. By 1964, Uganda had become a de facto one-party state, while, somewhat paradoxically, the organization of the UPC itself had become rather marginal to Obote’s politics, which increasingly relied on the army instead of mass mobilization (Mugaju and Oloka-Onyango 2000, 21; Onyango Odongo 2000, 55). After a party conference held in the northern town of Gulu, in 1964, the organizational efforts and activities of the UPC were reduced to the bare bones. By the mid-1960s, virtually the only trace left of Uganda’s political parties was “the old battered party flags,” hesitantly signaling that local party offices had been there during the elections held at the beginning of the decade (Karugire 1980, 190). The shelving of elected state institutions such as parliament or local governments, together with the ban on political parties, were not unique to Uganda. As Nelson Kasfir pointed out, they were rather part of those “departicipation strategies” that were being adopted in many, if not most, other countries on the African continent. Several African leaders were trying to cope with the politicization of ethnic groupings by limiting the opportunities for political involvement envisaged by the participatory arrangements hastily installed at the time of independence. Tanzania remained the most notable (albeit partial) exception to this common pattern. Under Julius Nyerere, participation was maintained at a comparatively high level, although in this case it was controlled by the Tanzania African National Union (TANU), which simultaneously developed a relatively strong organizational framework (Kasfir 1976, 25ff., 276).

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The Second Attempt: Elections, Parties, and Conflict in the 1980s

In the majority of postcolonial Africa, the legacy left by the virtual absence of organized politics prior to independence helped pave the way for the early abolition of participatory practices. In Uganda, the tendency to disregard constitutional rule became even more evident under the military dictatorship of

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general Idi Amin Dada, between 1971 and 1979. After an army coup backed by the Israelis, and quickly endorsed by the British, had overthrown Obote, his former army commander Amin not only completed the latter’s project to eliminate pluralist institutions by abolishing parliament, but he also tried to ban “politics” altogether,12 ruling by (capricious) decrees and in a totally arbitrary fashion. In his first year of rule, thirty-five decrees were issued, including an Armed Forces decree establishing the Defence Council, an Administration and Urban Authorities decree abolishing local councils, and a Suspension of Political Activities decree (Okoth 1995, 261–262). The army, which thanks to Obote had been the basis of political power since the mid-1960s, was now the key institution, albeit one run by Amin in a completely chaotic manner. The Ugandan army tripled in size within a few years, troop numbers reaching 20,000 by 1978 (Sathyamurthy 1986, 646). In the process, loyalty to the new head of state among the new ranks and officers was ensured by increasing the number of West Nilers and by purging the army of Langi and Acholi soldiers. The latter were systematically expelled or murdered in the barracks, as thousands fled the country to form the bulk of a frustrated diaspora eager to rid Uganda of the tyrant Amin. During most of the 1970s, Amin’s Uganda became infamous throughout the world as a synonym for civil repression, political disorder, and random violence, with the expropriation and expulsion of tens of thousands of Asians in 1972 and with estimates of extrajudicial killings ranging between 50,000 and 500,000 (Sathyamurthy 1986, 738; Reinikka and Collier 2001, 16). In 1978, Idi Amin tried to divert attention from the domestic problems of economic hardship and factionalism within the army by invading and annexing the Kagera River region of northern Tanzania. This played into the hands of the numerous Ugandan exiles wishing to overthrow the general. Making the most of Nyerere’s reaction to this invasion of Tanzania, the UPC-controlled Kikosi Maalum forces and Yoweri Museveni’s Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), both based in Dar es Salaam, marched into Kampala alongside Tanzanian troops in April 1979. The Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF), an alliance of anti-Amin forces formed at the Moshi conference the previous month, installed a transitional government, and Yusuf Lule became the interim president of the country. The collapse of Amin’s despotic regime and the divisions between those groups represented in the transitional governing bodies, however, rendered Uganda’s politics and administration increasingly confused. A discrepancy emerged between the country’s Baganda leaders—first Lule, then his successor Godfrey Binaisa from June 1979 onward—and the newly reconstituted army, the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA). The latter was dominated by members of the Langi and Acholi ethnic groups, such as Brigadier David OyiteOjok and General Tito Okello, loyal supporters of Milton Obote and the UPC. In the factional infighting that ensued, Yoweri Museveni, vice-chair of the piv-

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otal Military Commission, was removed from the Ministry of Defence at the beginning of 1980. Shortly afterwards, the UPC’s Paulo Muwanga, chair of the Military Commission, ousted Binaisa and took over as the third transitional head of the Ugandan state. Muwanga’s takeover also implied that the scheduled election would be held as a multiparty competition rather than under a UNLF noparty umbrella as had been previously hypothesized.13 The months that followed still constitute one of the most controversial periods in Uganda’s political history, and one that triggered the country’s subsequent civil war. With Obote’s return to Uganda, in May 1980, the UPC had a transitional head of the executive (Muwanga), a prospective president (Obote), and a loyal, albeit undisciplined, army. The party immediately began its aggressive election campaign. Soldiers were deployed to harass civilians in those areas allegedly not loyal to the UPC. Candidates and voters were subjected to all sorts of violence, looting, and political intimidation by UPC-controlled authorities, party activists, and the army itself. The Democratic Party and its supporters, who seemed to be enjoying growing popularity, were specifically targeted as the main threat to the UPC’s electoral success. In addition to the way the campaign was run, when election day arrived, on 10 December 1980, the UPC acted in a heavy-handed fashion in order to manipulate the voting process and election results (see, for example, Karugire 1988, 88, appendixes; Ondoga Ori Amaza 1998, 18; Mutibwa 1992, 140). Paulo Muwanga’s decree, issued the day after the election, prohibiting the Electoral Commission and polling stations’ returning officers from declaring constituency winners until he himself gave the green light, was viewed by many—including most international observers (Human Rights Watch 1999, 34)—as definitive proof that the election had indeed been rigged. Although it was the Democratic Party that was probably deprived of an election victory, the decision to act came from among the ranks of a minor party, the Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM). Set up shortly before the election by Yoweri Museveni and other former-UPC youth leaders—such as Eriya Kategaya and Jaberi Bidandi-Ssali—the UPM had gained a certain degree of support from among the urban sections of the populace. This support, however, was not transformed into an electoral showing of any significance, as the party only won one parliamentary seat. Not even Museveni, the leader of the UPM, made it to parliament. On the grounds that Obote and the UPC had returned to power through the use of political violence and electoral manipulation, Museveni and twenty-six others decided to fight violence with violence by “going to the bush.” From the so-called Luwero triangle in Buganda, the area delimitated by the KampalaGulu road, the Kampala-Hoima road, and the Kafu River, which cuts across them—that is, the very geographical heart of the country—they were to launch what would be one of the first guerrilla takeovers of an independent African state. Here, drawing on notions of protracted people’s war and on his visits to

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the training camps of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) during the Mozambican liberation war, Museveni started recruiting people and organizing civilians into “Resistance Councils” (cf. Kasfir 2005, 275–277). The insurgency was allegedly aimed at radically changing the politics and socioeconomic structure of Ugandan society, as spelled out in the Ten-Point Programme, the political platform of the NRM/A. In the five-year civil war that followed, Obote’s controversial army—which large sections of the civilian population in the southern regions of the country saw as a synonym for uncontrolled terror—was challenged by a new politicomilitary force that made discipline the very foundation of its pursuit of popular legitimacy and backing. Accounts of the infamous behavior of Obote’s UNLA soldiers, security agencies, local authorities, and UPC activists played into the hands of the NRM/A insurgents.14 On the one hand, the population was being terrorized, with some areas being especially targeted. In the Luwero triangle, where the rebels had their core operational bases, civilians were often killed for allegedly backing them. The West Nile region, on the other hand, was doubly guilty, both for hosting pro-Amin guerrilla forces and for being a DP political constituency, and as such was also the target of frequent violence. Neither were the Banyankole (especially the Bahima subgroup) nor the Banyarwanda of southwestern Uganda spared, as their homelands were where many NRM leaders were from. In many of these communities, local people reacted by actively or passively supporting the rebels, who in turn appeared to be more disciplined and trustworthy in how they behaved toward civilians. Indeed, it was later claimed that “the NRM/NRA ‘bush’ war was a ‘revolution,’ in the sense that it transformed the image of the army among the population.”15 Interacting with a largely nonhostile population, the insurgents were able to establish embryonic forms of civilian participation and to restore some degree of order in the areas they came to control. The military defeats suffered by the second Obote regime, together with growing discontent with the country’s social and economic plight, had in the meantime nurtured a deep divide between the different Luo groupings that dominated the army. As presidential appointments increasingly hinted at an attempt to grant full control of the military to Obote’s Langi people, a coup was organized against the moribund regime by a group of Acholi officers. This, however, could not change the outcome of a civil war that was well on its way toward a conclusion. In January 1986, roughly six months after Obote had been ousted by Tito and Bazilio Okello, Museveni overthrew the latter and took over power in Kampala. The well-known opening to his inaugural speech as the head of state testifies to the ambition that lay behind the takeover, an ambition that raised expectations among many Ugandans: “No one should think that what is happening today is a mere change of guard: it is a fundamental change in the politics of our country. In Africa, we have seen so many changes that

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change, as such, is nothing short of mere turmoil. We have had one group getting rid of another one, only for it to turn out to be worse than the group it displaced. Please, do not count us in that group of people” (Museveni 1992, 21).

■

The Dawn of a New Democratic Model?

In setting up his new regime, Museveni had little difficulty in presenting Uganda’s violent postindependence history as shaped by the politicization of ethnic and religious differences. It was true that Uganda displayed an extreme degree of communal heterogeneity, a feature it shared with most African countries. The complexity of the ethnic map is furthered by the lack of a demographically majoritarian group and the presence of a multiplicity of potentially salient collective identities to which, in several cases, the same individual could refer. Thus, for example, many Ugandans regarded themselves or were regarded, at one and the same time, as Kakwa, West-Niler, Sudanic, Nubi, Muslim, Northener, and so on. Although some of these overlapping identities could be described in terms of higher- or lower-level loyalties, others simply could not. A Muslim identity, for instance, was one that partly cut across a multireligious unit such as the Kakwa. At one point or another in the country’s history, some of these identities (e.g., Acholi, Langi, Kakwa, Muslim, or Protestant) had represented the power base of the country’s political leadership. Idi Amin, for example, had initially relied on Kakwa support but later expanded the ruling alliance by creating a broader “Nubi” category.16 Another, somewhat contrary, development saw the Luo support on which Milton Obote’s second regime was based split dramatically along the Acholi/Langi divide at the time of the Okello coup in 1985, and during the period of violence thereafter. It was also true that, in the two short spells when multiparty competition was allowed—during the early 1960s and again during the first half of the 1980s—this had been associated with the politicization of profound cleavages. On both occasions, the country went multiparty, elections ushered in exclusion by opening the way to one-partyism and electoral fraud, and violence inevitably followed. Communal polarization was primarily reflected in the religious antagonism between the Catholic-based Democratic Party and the mostly Anglican Uganda People’s Congress. The UPC of the early 1960s also relied on clear ethnic affiliations, being “a result of an alliance by the élites of northern, eastern and western Uganda against their counterparts in Buganda” (Ondoga Ori 1996, 33; cf. Kasfir 1991, 267). The emergence of this rather hostile coalition, in turn, contributed to prompting the Baganda establishment to organize an ethnonationalist party, the loosely organized, short-lived Kabaka Yekka. Thus, ethnic and religious antipathies had appeared to shape Ugandan politics since independence. A partial attempt to depoliticize communal loyalties was made

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by Obote in the late 1960s, when he progressively eliminated any opportunities for the Ugandan people to get involved in politics (Kasfir 1976). Initially, the result of the process was the creation of a state in which the UPC was the only recognized party; subsequently, under Idi Amin’s military dictatorship, Uganda witnessed an era in which “politics” itself was outlawed. The country, as we have already seen, did not fare any better when it tried to go multiparty for a second time in the early 1980s. Obote’s return to power was marked not only by election rigging, but also by the deepening of ethnic rivalries and an upsurge in violence—the alleged cause of the NRM insurgency. Given the country’s past, the argument went, an immediate return to multiparty politics was inappropriate for Uganda, and a transitional period was necessary in which alternative participatory arrangements could be adopted. The notion that ethnic politics can be highly dangerous was thus at the very heart of the rhetoric adopted by the fathers of Uganda’s 1995 constitution, who explicitly pointed to the adoption of highly inclusive political institutions as the right way to reduce occasions for, and the public’s perception of, exclusion, and thus as a method of promoting political legitimacy and stability (cf. Republic of Uganda 1993b, 7, 56; Museveni 1992). To avoid the kind of exclusionary politics fostered by multiparty competition in ethnically divided societies, a “Movement democracy” was devised that boiled down to a few, but critical, provisions banning most political party activities. Party conferences, local branches, and party electioneering were all prohibited. The NRM was in fact relaunching the idea of doing away with opportunities for the politicization of ethnicity. With the aim of breaking with Uganda’s past, the NRM’s Ten-Point Programme manifesto condemned “sectarian, religious and tribal cleavages” as “manufactured divisions,” claiming that “one’s religion, colour, sex or height is not a consideration when new members are welcomed in the National Resistance Movement” (Museveni 1992, 279). This time, though, the process of ethnic depoliticization would not occur through the demobilization of the masses, but by means of a new “disorganization” strategy: popular participation would be retained, but party pluralism was rejected as a dangerous embodiment of politically organized ethnicity. The problem was then what sort of participatory system would replace party-based electoral competition, and the proffered answer was the individual merit principle that underlay no-party democracy. According to this new model of democracy, elections were to be held strictly between individual candidates. Political competition among individuals, as opposed to parties, constituted the main theoretical cornerstone of the allegedly inclusive Movement democracy. This was the most original feature of Uganda’s novel constitution—a blend of old institutions, of those already introduced by the NRM, and of others that were entirely new.17 According to the constitution, the Movement system should be “broad based, inclusive and nonpartisan and shall conform to the following principles: a) participatory democracy; b) democracy, accountability

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and transparency; c) accessibility to all positions of leadership by all citizens; d) individual merit as basis for election to political offices.”18 The focus on the individual as the principal, autarchic political actor was the only aspect, among those listed by the constitution, with immediate and practical implications: candidates running for office in local, parliamentary, or presidential elections were only allowed to campaign using their own capacities, without recourse to any political organization. The underlying assumption was that this would eliminate all occasion for direct confrontation between communal groups through the proxy of ethnically based political parties. The ban on most forms of political party activity, introduced in January 1986, was initially limited to a four-year transitional period necessary to “modernize” the country. However, this period was later extended and, as pointed out, the ban was made part of Uganda’s constitution in 1995.19 The new framework, however, formally prohibited party activities, rather than parties per se. It still allowed parties a formal existence and a head office, as it was rather their operations that were the main target of the ban. This series of limitations was meant to attenuate the radicalism of the opposition, in particular the country’s historical political parties—the Uganda People’s Congress and the Democratic Party. In fact, the ban led to a temporary halt to the organizational development of Ugandan parties. Scarce activity and a lack of organized competitive politics affected both the legitimacy of the parties (both major parties, for instance, failed to hold one single election for leadership offices for all of twenty-five years, between 1980 and late 2005) and their degree of institutionalization. Attempts by new leaders, such as the UPC’s Cecilia Ogwal, to renew their parties were systematically frustrated by the old guard, on the grounds that the existing leadership could not be legally challenged without convening a delegates’ conference. While some analysts claimed that “the old parties have in fact remained very much alive” (OlokaOnyango 1995, 171), Mamdani observed that they were actually “weak structures with shallow roots, at best a collection of factions organised around individuals. The pre-1986 parties have been artificially protected by a ban on [parties’ activities functioning as a barrier for] new parties” (quoted in Twaddle 1996, 324). Having banned other political organizations, the NRM—simply known as the Movement—claimed to provide representation for all Ugandans because of its allegedly nonpartisan, “civil” origins (and, in particular, because of a real military victory) (cf. Hansen and Twaddle 1995, 141). The notion that every Ugandan was a member of the overarching umbrella Movement became the basis on which the country’s politics was unilaterally refounded. Under socalled Movement politics, it was individuals that were supposed to take center stage in public life. This also implied the fragmentation of the opposition and therefore the easy co-optation of its individual members by the Movement, the only permitted organization.

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However, the alleged “inclusiveness” of the Movement soon showed clear limitations. On the one hand, in spite of the restrictions on other political organizations, certain well-known members of the opposition stood for election against declared Movement supporters. Nobody could be prevented from participating in politics, albeit on an individual basis only. The Democratic Party leader, Paul Ssemogerere, and former NRM politician Colonel Kizza Besigye, for example, ran for the presidency against Museveni in the 1996 and 2001 noparty elections, respectively. Other opposition politicians won important electoral contests, as in the case of DP’s Ssebaana Kizito, who won the Kampala mayoral election in 1999. Nobody could officially be expelled from the Movement. In this sense, the latter was quite different from a full-fledged one-party state—an option that was officially banned by the constitution20—and for a long time it remained a very loose organization. On the other hand, in spite of the Movement’s alleged open, broad-based character, the limits of its integrationist ambitions became apparent when the multipartyism versus movementism issue polarized the Constituent Assembly delegates along a north-andeast versus southwest ethnoregional cleavage (Katorobo et al. 1995; Mukholi 1995). The delicate ethnic balance that had originally and informally characterized Museveni’s governmental team was gradually abandoned, and, although the Movement claimed to reject communal identities, the ruling group was increasingly perceived to be, in practice, of western or Banyankole origin.

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Plan of the Book

At a time when multiparty reforms were sweeping across the globe, and across Africa in particular, Uganda opted for a controversial no-party democratic model. Based on the Ugandan experience, this study provides an empirical analysis of how a no-party electoral regime works in practice and assesses its achievements and failings, thus filling a gap in democracy studies as well as in the study of African politics. To this end, the book tries to shed light on the forms, strengths, functions, and roles of political organizations that existed, resisted, or were formed within an allegedly no-party framework. A complex picture of the reality of Uganda’s no-party politics emerges, which requires us to move beyond the simplistic notion that parties and party-like organizations were done away with completely. Fieldwork was carried out in Uganda at different times during 1999, 2000, 2004, and 2006. In addition to the use of party documentation, parliamentary archives, newspaper articles, and secondary literature, numerous interviews were conducted with national and local politicians and civil servants, as well as with representatives of civil organizations, ranging from various NGOs to the media. The text of the interviews has occasionally been modified to make it fully intelligible when quoted here. This, however, has been done only when

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the message was devoid of all ambiguity, as I have tried my hardest to avoid any kind of distortion of the original message. The book is organized as follows. Before examining the specific workings of no-party democracy, I investigate (in Chapters 2, 3, and 4) the broader institutional and political foundations of Uganda’s atypical regime. In Chapter 2, I argue that political developments under the no-party system were largely driven by two broad, contradictory dynamics. On the one hand, the country embarked on a long process of rebuilding and reforming the state that was initiated and promoted by Museveni. On the other hand, the Ugandan president himself acted as an obstacle to a full implementation of this project by resisting any attempts at constraining his personal power by consolidating institutional and organizational arrangements. I then illustrate the rebuilding of the Ugandan polity by focusing on three aspects that proved crucial to the development of the country’s no-party democracy. First, the reconstruction of the no-party state was largely a bottom-up process that began by instituting local self-governing councils during the bush war. Second, the reform process continued with a long, complex constitution-making phase, which defined the rules of no-party national politics and set up new central institutions. Finally, the reconstitution of a national army out of the victorious NRA guerrilla movement acquired a central role in the country’s political development. The case of the Ugandan army illuminates the contradiction between the process of institution building and the maintenance of Museveni’s personal control over the key areas of the no-party governmental system. Chapter 3 details the political economy of support for the NRM regime. Both an internal dimension of alliance building and an external dimension of international backing were crucial for the survival and consolidation of the noparty regime. Domestically, Museveni increasingly came to rely on the support of his home region and of the Baganda, Uganda’s largest ethnic group. This support largely came to depend upon a privileged access to state resources granted to the political elites from these regions, which contributed to the spread of patronage and political corruption. The political and economic marginalization of peoples from the north of the country, however, was most evident in the failure to pacify the region, which had been ravaged by a cruel guerrilla movement for virtually the entire duration of the NRM regime. Internationally, Uganda’s political leadership was able to capitalize on its own will to embrace a neoliberal reform promoted from the outside and to gain the status of a favored recipient of foreign aid and diplomatic assistance. For a long period, donors almost uncritically sponsored Museveni’s politics and his noparty regime. Supporting Uganda was also considered by some key Western players as an important investment in the stabilization of a troubled region. Chapter 4 examines the political rise, the governing style, and the consolidation in power of Uganda’s former guerrilla leader and current president, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who played a major individual role in determining

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the decision to set up the country’s no-party democracy as well as the path it should follow. I argue that, since the beginning of the NRA rebellion in the early 1980s, Museveni presented himself as an antiestablishment political outsider, adopting a consistent antiparty, anti-institution approach to politics. When he took control of State House in 1986, his strong antiparty stance was immediately translated into a legal ban on the activities of Uganda’s old political organizations. Ten years later, the presidency of the former rebel was sanctioned for the first time by a successful electoral campaign, and he won a second mandate in 2001. In the course of this electoral phase of his rule, Museveni’s leadership took on an increasingly plebiscitarian nature, while developing an uneasy relationship with other newly created central institutions, notably parliament and the courts of justice. Eventually, the Ugandan leader succeeded in having the constitution amended in 2005 so that, while accepting to do away with no-party democracy, he could run for a third term and preserve his position of power. Chapters 5–8 examine the actual workings of no-party politics. The first step is to investigate the presence of political organizations—be they new or old actors—under the no-party arrangement. To that end, I focus first on the Movement, whose organization has not been comprehensively studied so far, and then on the main opposition forces, namely the Uganda People’s Congress and the Democratic Party. Chapter 5, in analyzing the organizational development of the ruling Movement group, reveals a continuous process of internal change and relative organizational tightening. In spite of the antiparty credo, the Movement group used parliamentary legislation to prompt the development of a fully partisan, hegemonic (albeit fragile) political organization. Indeed, the Movement was never a “political system”—as claimed by Movement supporters—but a partisan organization: its inclusivist claims were contradicted by a de facto situation where the distinction between who was “in” and who was “out” was always quite clear. The Movement was hegemonic, its organization resting on a clear supremacy that peripheral parties could not hope to challenge. Nevertheless, the Movement was also fragile: it had virtually no institutional setup until late in the no-party era, and its structures still boasted only a scant presence on the ground. Yet, in a context where the opposition was legally disorganized and the Movement had exclusive access to state resources, such a weak organization was enough to enforce hegemony. Chapter 6 examines the (under)development of political parties within this no-party framework. Parties were never prohibited as such; the Movement did ban most of their activities, however. Thus, an understanding of actual political practice requires an analysis of the country’s politics beneath the surface of the no-party philosophy, if we are to account for the scope of action that political parties retained and the organizational evolution they went through over two decades. The analysis of the organizational setup of both the Uganda Peo-

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ple’s Congress and the Democratic Party—that is, the country’s two historical parties and for a long time the main opposition to Museveni’s regime—reveals how Uganda’s parties reacted to existing restrictions and how they managed to maintain a degree of organized presence in the country’s politics. Evidence shows that the two parties were, unsurprisingly, heavily constrained by the antiparty measures adopted at that time. Their organizational development must be read as a rather feeble attempt to devise internal arrangements, or to find external support, in order to improve their chances of survival and the effectiveness of their opposition. Two further chapters provide an account of how no-party politics worked by focusing on selected aspects of the political process, namely electoral and parliamentary politics. Chapters 7 and 8 address the question of how political action was organized in no-party elections and in a no-party parliament. Electoral politics appear to have been dominated by the fragmentation resulting from, or rather maintained by, the no-party or individual merit principle. No strong organizational arrangements emerged at the election stage. Individual campaigning prevailed, with only weak attempts made to coordinate individual behavior by the Movement and the old political parties. The analysis of the inner politics of what was supposed to be an atomized parliament is extremely revealing. There was a constant move toward the establishment of party-like devices within the assembly—especially in the form of parliamentary caucuses—thus providing evidence of the fact that MPs needed to overcome the individualization of political action by coordinating their activities. Similar arrangements ran counter to the original idea of building a participatory political sphere capable of doing without political organizations. Chapter 9 summarizes the main argument of the book and the lessons learned from the inquiry into the politics of no-partyism by framing them within a broader comparative perspective and by examining the country’s 2006 transition to multiparty politics. The democratic value of Uganda’s noparty experiment is assessed within the context of the history of the country and of the region at large. With these terms of comparison in mind, one may want to acknowledge the progress Uganda has made over the past twenty years. Although political reform has been limited, the achievement of relative political stability and the regularization of electoral practices should not be overlooked. Yet, the empirical investigation shows that insofar as the ideal of no-party politics promised a system that did not require political organization, Uganda’s regime displayed a substantial inability to fulfill its own premises and promises. A “hegemonic party system” model fits the country’s recent political history better than the no-party ideal, as it grasps the essence of an electoral regime that combined coercive and constitutional practices. Thus, the study proves the practical difficulties of having participatory politics without having any political organizations—a point that is of direct relevance to the debate over how good, democratic governance can indeed be achieved.

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2 Building a No-Party State in Uganda

FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION OF ITS LIFESPAN, THE CREATION AND development of no-party democracy in Uganda reflected a long struggle between two opposing dynamics, one favorable to the re-construction of state structures, and one hostile to the building of new political institutions and organizations. By the time Museveni became president of Uganda, years of misrule and civil war had almost completely disrupted the country’s political and administrative structures. The newly appointed Ugandan leader’s first task was to create an infrastructure for the exercise of political power, in the form of brand new political institutions and organizations that would enable him to cast his authority over the best part of Uganda. Within the space of a few years, new governmental foundations had been laid down, starting with the creation of local participatory organs, right up to the restoration of ministerial hierarchies at the center of the state. A complex, multistage process led to the adoption of an elaborate constitution. Revamped national legislative institutions, together with a series of novel judiciary institutions, were also set up, which gradually began to function and take root. Innovative political arrangements, such as parliamentary caucuses, started to take shape more or less independently. A modern Ugandan army was forged out of the merger of a few minor rebel groups and the massed ranks of NRA guerrillas who had emerged victorious from the years of bush war. From the late 1980s onward, the development of multifarious new political institutions unmistakably characterized modern Uganda. Yet, from the very beginning, the country’s budding state institutions and political organizations were faced with a serious threat, the causes of which, surprisingly, lay in the work of their own chief architect, Museveni himself. Uganda’s president gradually exhibited a tendency to keep things around him as disorganized as possible to avoid the formation of any ordered arrangement that might possibly be turned against his own, personal raw power. While embarking on a broad state-rebuilding project, the president’s quasi-populist style of 29

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leadership became increasingly evident in his aversion to sharing power or accepting constitutional constraints on his own authority. This made it virtually impossible for Uganda’s nascent political institutions and organizations to flourish and become fully effective. There are several aspects to this general trend. First, there were the legal restrictions and antiparty rhetoric, which although initially presented as being of a temporary nature, were later “engraved” in the new constitution. Under the no-party system, elections were meant to be based on individual personalities rather than on organizations. Even the party-like Movement structures that were at some point launched to coordinate the activities of government supporters, were in fact undermined by Museveni’s determination not to let go or delegate any degree of control, and as a result they never really thrived. The complete institutionalization of the military was also hindered by the president’s highly personal management of Uganda’s armed forces, and by the prevalence of loyalty over competence and efficiency when it came to dealing with military matters. The law courts and the legislative assembly were overshadowed by an excessively powerful government that was determined to counter the emergence of any autonomous powers at the expense of the rule of law. Too soon, the country’s new constitution itself came under attack as basic rules were defied and manipulated by the country’s political powers. Thus, two interrelated yet opposing dynamics generated the political and institutional development of no-party democracy in Uganda: the country’s politics was largely a struggle between the forces of unbridled power versus those forces trying to establish institutionalized politics (cf. Ottaway 1999; Huntington 1968). The tension between the two poles was reflected in a twenty-year period of rapid, constant institutional change. Moreover, the two trends did not overlap with the government-opposition cleavage, but were the principal feature of a much more complex overall picture, one that was in part characteristic of African politics on the whole. The kisanja (third-term) issue, which became prominent toward the end of the no-party experience, perfectly embodied the contrast between the institution-building and the institutiondestroying processes: despite the fact that Museveni initiated Uganda’s constitution-making process, he was also the one who trashed the country’s fundamental charter, when the moment came for him to hand over power, by amending the key article restricting presidential tenure to two terms only. For the better part of his time as Ugandan president, Museveni undermined the very things that he was creating.

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Successes and Limits in Rebuilding the Ugandan State

The 1980s were difficult times for most sub-Saharan countries, characterized as they were by widespread talk of a generalized “crisis” of the African state.1 The

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Ugandan state, which had all but collapsed under Idi Amin’s uncivil rule and during the subsequent years of civil war, represented the extreme expression of this crisis. During the latter part of the decade, however, Kampala became one of the few places where a U-turn was actually being performed under a new political regime. Over the subsequent decade or so, events were variously described as the rebuilding, recovery, or reconstruction of the Ugandan state; but what did rebuilding the state in Uganda mean during the late 1980s and 1990s? While the creation of state institutions is obviously an exceedingly complex process, a few key themes were undoubtedly of critical importance in the case of Uganda and of its no-party regime. These included: the construction of local administrations as cornerstones of the new system; the design and creation of a new constitutional framework through which state institutions were reorganized; and the upholding of the army as the backbone of the stability and security that had been restored throughout the best part of Uganda. New Foundations: A Decentralized State The proliferation of rebel insurgencies across Africa during the 1980s and 1990s was partly the result of the institutional decay and loss of legitimacy blighting the continent’s various states, which were made all the more vulnerable by the drying up of the foreign support and funding that had characterized the Cold War period. A number of observers have rightly pointed out that guerrilla movements often sprout from the edges of weakening states and at times even strike out across state frontiers (Clapham 1998, 1; Young 2002, 537). In Uganda, the NRM’s revolt did not fit in with this pattern in the strictly geographical sense, given that its key operations took place within the Luwero triangle, an area of Buganda not far from the capital, Kampala. In this particular case, the country’s rebels could not count on any nearby havens of safety they could easily retreat to, or get resources from, just beyond the country’s borders (Kasfir 2005, 282). Yet, the guerrillas’ takeover was rooted in the periphery in the sense that it consisted of a relatively lengthy, bottom-up process of dismantling existing state structures in rural areas and replacing them with others. The overthrow of the higher echelons of the state was only the final step in this process. The launching of the NRM rebellion coincided with the beginning of the complete rebuilding of the Ugandan state starting right from its foundations. Decentralization had been a key aspect of the NRM’s state-building efforts since before it officially took over power: When we started the bush war in 1981, we had secret committees of volunteers who banded together as support groups for fighters, to mobilise food, recruits and intelligence information. From 1982, beginning in the liberated zone near Semuto, we started holding elections to these committees and formalising them

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as “Resistance Councils” (RCs). Their brief was extended to controlling crime and to general administration in their areas. After our victory in 1986, we spread the concept and practice of Resistance Councils throughout the country.2

Thus, the clandestine Resistance Councils, which were originally established as a partisan tool for organizing civilian support for the rebellion, in the form of human and material resources and intelligence, initially acquired additional powers concerning the maintenance of law and order, and the performance of basic administrative tasks in liberated areas, and then became instrumental in extending the new regime’s authority over the greater part of the country. During the years of wartime transition, when one system of government was collapsing and another one was being put in its place, those areas where the councils were functioning most effectively produced a situation in which “life was like you had another republic in Uganda.”3 After the war, a Resistance Councils and Committees Statute legalized the system as early as 1987: councils were numbered from one (the 30,000 or more village-level bodies) to five (the thirty-three districts), and their electoral mandate was set at two years (Green 2007). Direct elections were only held at the lowest level—that of the village unit—where all residents over eighteen years of age automatically became members of the local assembly. A pyramid of indirectly elected councils and committees was then built upon the various village units. Starting from the bottom, a representative council elected an executive committee. The committee members of a larger area (such as a parish, a subcounty, a county, or a district) would then meet to form a higher-level council. This, in turn, would elect its own executive committee, which would be part of another, higher council, and so on right up to the district level. The gradual process of institutionalizing the system and transforming the councils to something akin to standard local government organs continued during the 1990s. Two successive decentralization laws were approved—the 1993 Local Governments (Resistance Councils) Statute and the 1997 Local Governments Act—while the 1995 constitutional provisions consolidated the country’s unitary, albeit highly decentralized, state. The resulting decentralization scheme was constantly praised and presented as a model for the rest of the development community (cf. World Bank 1999, 108). The constitution gave the districts the status of key territorial entities. District chairs—that is, the political leaders of the executive committee with the power to appoint the latter’s members—were now to be elected directly by the people.4 The popular mandate was designed to reaffirm the principle of direct accountability within a system that thus far had been largely based on indirect elections. Local administrations, including lower-level councils, were granted relatively comprehensive policy powers: a “residual powers” approach made them responsible for every public function not reserved for the national government.5 Elected district officials were also in charge of the local civil service as well as

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of the sensitive land question. To ensure that the autonomy of territorial subunits was not infringed by central authorities, the list of those areas over which national government had exclusive powers was made amendable solely by means of special procedures requiring the participation of the districts themselves, an arrangement that is usually adopted in federal systems.6 The central government itself, however, demonstrated restraint and commitment to decentralization by intervening on only one occasion—with regard to the Kibale question—doing so on the basis of the constitutional clause allowing government to suspend a local administration and take over its rule of the district (Green 2007). The considerable concentration of resources, both human and financial, at the district level raised the stakes of the competition for control over local government, particularly with regard to the election of district chairs, while at the same time lessening political interest in lower-level administrative units. As Elliott Green shows, district politics became increasingly conflictual, as demonstrated by the increased degree of mobilization for elections, by the tough political and legal struggles, and even by factional violence. Moreover, the concentration of powers at the district level fostered local requests for the creation of new districts, which in turn furthered the politicization of ethnic identities and led to the emergence of new divisions (Green 2007). The link between communal identities and self-administration ran counter to the original design of the NRM’s decentralization framework, as well as to the broader no-party political system. Under British colonialism, the so-called native authorities had been created along ethnic lines.7 After independence, the same administrative divisions remained largely unchanged. An internal subdivision of districts began in 1966, when the traditional kingdoms were dismantled by Milton Obote. Under General Idi Amin, provincial governors were officially reintroduced; however, several former ethnic districts were split in two (as in the case of Acholi, Ankole, Bunyoro, Busoga, Kigezi, Lango, Karamoja, Teso, and Toro) (Green 2007). In its original formulation at least, Museveni’s decentralization project, while not necessarily going against preexisting territorial divisions, paid even less attention to existing communal distinctions. The NRM had traditionally rejected community-based federal arrangements as an expression of ethnic politics (Kasfir 2005, 282). Thus, at the outset, the establishment of the new Resistance Councils appeared to be a “change from indigeneity to residence as the basis of rights.”8 This was consistent with Movement democracy’s broader objective—namely, to downplay the role of ethnicity in the political sphere— and with its focal policy of banning party activities. Hence, although the constitution “attache[d] ethnic identity on some districts” (Mukholi 1995, 100) and included an annex listing the country’s recognized ethnic communities, there was a marked absence of any explicit references to cultural, ethnic, or similar criteria as a basis for existing or new districts: “Any measure for the alteration of the boundaries of or the creation of districts or administrative

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units shall be based on the necessity for effective administration and the need to bring services closer to the people and it may take into account the means of communication, geographical features, density of population, economic viability and the wishes of the people concerned.”9 The wording of the constitution reflects the general desire to keep ethnicity out of politics and political bodies as far as possible. The president himself openly discarded ethnicity as a basis for the creation of new districts (New Vision, 4 August 1997, in Green 2007). During the first ten years of Museveni’s rule at least, Uganda’s internal boundaries reflected the ethnic map to a lesser extent than those prevalent at the time of independence and in the years immediately thereafter. As David Apter observed, “Districts whose original boundaries were in some rough accord with the distribution of dominant ethnic groups have . . . altered. Today ethnic groups are less neatly contained within territorial boundaries” (Apter 1995, 164; cf. Regan 1995[a], 297). Ethnic areas were not so much split up by the crosscutting of district boundaries (i.e., boundaries incorporating sections of various different ethnic regions), as they were internally divided into a number of smaller districts. While Uganda’s large number of districts reflected the presence within the country of numerous ethnic communities, the decision to establish smaller units meant that large, homogeneous communities were fragmented by internal administrative divisions. No real efforts were made thereafter to grant Uganda’s major ethnic groups territorial and political status as single, unified entities. Thus, Buganda as such had no administrative or political organs, as it remained divided into Mpigi, Masaka, Rakai, and several other districts. The same went for Acholi (divided into Gulu and Kitgum districts, and later subdivided further); Bunyoro (Masindi, Hoima, and Kabale districts, and subsequently also Bulisa district); and Ankole (Mbarara, Bushenyi, Ntungamo, and Rukungiri districts, plus the recently created Ibanda, Kabingo, and Kiruhura districts). From the mid-1990s onward, however, the increased importance of Uganda’s various districts prompted local requests for the establishment of new ones. Petitions asking for the creation of “their own” political unit were frequently advanced by ethnic minorities within existing districts. As national politics needed increased popular support, Museveni was particularly responsive to such demands. The carving out of new districts, whose number doubled from thirty-nine to seventy-seven in the decade or so after the approval of the constitution, was substantially influenced by the ethnic factor.10 Whereas smaller ethnic groups benefited from the process of fragmentation that saw greater autonomy granted to homogeneous local communities, larger ethnic groups that had been separated by district boundaries were not reunited but were split even further. Indeed, in the case of Uganda’s larger ethnic communities (Buganda, in particular), the fragmentation process ran counter to the principle of federo as “ethnic federalism . . . where powers are devolved to regions taking into account ethnicity.”11 In a memorandum sub-

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mitted to the Constituent Assembly, for example,12 a group of Baganda opinion leaders, led by Vice-President Simon Kisekka, addressed Museveni with an explicit request for “a Buganda restored to its pre-1966 boundaries.” While espousing the district-based system, the constitution nevertheless officially gave groups of districts the opportunity to establish independent cooperative links with each other. The charter even stated that “the districts of Buganda shall be deemed to have agreed to co-operate.”13 Moreover, prior to the 2006 election, a regional tier was also introduced under the Constitutional Amendment Act (2005), as a further measure to woo the Baganda into supporting the government. Districts willing to do so could establish a regional government headed by a directly elected chief executive. For a number of reasons, however, these various provisions were never implemented. The adoption of cooperative frameworks was prevented by vested interests in maintaining the status quo (e.g., those of local elites whose power base lay within the district organs) and by the external pressure from central government (since smaller units were less capable of challenging the latter’s authority). In early 2006, it was the Lukiiko itself that voted to reject the proposal for a regional tier. Such a regional administrative framework would have meant the popular election of the traditional Katikkiro (prime minister), rather than his appointment by the Kabaka and his being subject to the establishment’s control; indeed, in theory he could even belong to one of the ethnic minorities present within the region. Through the creation of the local councils, Uganda’s development of a decentralized framework for participation and administration represented a fundamental tool for bridging the distance between top state authorities in Kampala and the population at the grassroots and, to a large extent, in the geographical peripheries. As much as this was not a trouble-free tool (for reasons that include the NRM’s partisan use of council organs, the neopatrimonial and irrational proliferation of new districts, and the latter’s limited financial autonomy), it certainly proved a critical component in the process of reconstructing the Ugandan state and its territorial coverage and capacity. Decentralization, however, was not just a state-building device. It was also instrumental in consolidating the Movement’s hold on power: not only, as Rubongoya notes, “during the first years of NRM rule, the [RC] system was without question the most important legitimizing strategy” (Rubongoya 2007, 69), but a system based on small districts, as the Buganda case most prominently shows, helped foster and retain the fragmentation of potential political challengers, thus working hand in hand with the principle of individualized politics at the basis of no-party democracy. Constitutionalizing the New Regime The Ugandan state was not only at the heart of a thoroughgoing process of decentralization, but it also required rebuilding at its very center. The new

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regime’s institutional framework was the result of a long, gradual process of pragmatic reflection and legislative reform. When Museveni took over power in the mid-1980s, the National Resistance Council—the main political body of the NRM—had been installed as a provisional parliament, and upon its arrival it immediately issued the focal Legal Notice No. 1/1986. This notice introduced limitations on party activities by simply amending the 1967 constitution, and it gave the NRC itself the power to bring about further constitutional changes by ordinary legislative means. Thus, while the old constitution officially survived well into the 1990s, when it was eventually replaced by an entirely new document, its alleged supremacy had in fact been negated sometime beforehand.14 If Ugandan politics ever had “strong constitutionalist tendencies” (Engholm and Mazrui 1967, 591), these were barely visible in the thirty years after independence. The restrictions on political parties were instrumental in consolidating the NRM’s hold on power, which also relied on the local councils for grassroots support and on the broad-based government for integrating opposition elements within a somewhat inclusive coalition. By the end of the 1980s, once the National Resistance Movement had secured control over most of the country and had stabilized domestic affairs, Museveni was ready to launch a second, longer phase designed to fine-tune the newly established political regime. In 1989, a constitutional commission was set up to draft the wording of a new constitution. The latter served as a platform for the work of an elected Constituent Assembly, which was to approve Uganda’s new constitution in September 1995. By the following year, the first direct national legislative and presidential elections were held; eventually, the no-party framework was almost fully up and running. In the process, the restrictions on the activities of political parties, originally spelled out as interim measures, were first constitutionalized and then, in 2000, further sanctioned by a popular referendum. Despite the limits imposed on the freedom of political association, influential observers hailed the democratic beginnings of Museveni’s political reforms (cf. Apter 1995, 158; Young 1999, 31; Mamdani 2001, 276 ff.). The Odoki Commission, the constitutional working group named after its chair, Justice Benjamin Odoki, had been mandated to make proposals designed to “create viable political institutions that will ensure maximum consensus and orderly succession to government.”15 Its twenty-one members, handpicked by the president and generally perceived as proregime people, made concerted efforts to reach out to the populace. Their first aim was “to educate” Ugandans on the essence of the constitutional exercise, mainly by means of seminars for the local elites. Then, a massive consultative process was set in motion, and this eventually produced some 25,000 popular submissions in the form of memorandums, articles, position papers, school essays, and the like. The whole process took about four years (1989–1992), and the resulting popular involvement generated considerable excitement. Even an ex-

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perienced observer naively described the country not only as a model of alternative, no-party democracy, but also as a new form of “‘consultative democracy’ . . . which can enable people to share and understand common civic principles” and thus to diffuse and inculcate a form of democratic culture (Apter 1995, 158–159, 174). While the Uganda People’s Congress, the most radical opposition group, constantly denounced the constitution-making process, other groups that had initially been very critical of the commission, such as the Democratic Party and the Baganda establishment, eventually accepted the legitimacy of its work (Regan 1995[b], 169). As a result, and in spite of its leaning toward the NRM, the draft constitution that the commission presented to President Museveni in late 1992 was held to be fairly representative of the views of the Ugandan people. With the constitutional reform debate under way, a Constituent Assembly (CA) was then elected, in March 1994. The principle of no-party politics, which in the meantime had been experimented with at the local level, was for the first time implemented in national-level politics and elections. Competing candidates were meant to run on the basis of “personal merit,” without party, partisan, or even individual campaigns. Touring their electoral constituency together, they moved from one parish to the next, taking part in public meetings at which they briefly presented their views and were then questioned by the public. Not surprisingly, there was a degree of party campaigning—despite the no-party rules—especially, although not only, by the NRM: “Many a candidate won and lost the election not on ‘personal merit,’ but rather on what the voters perceived was his or her party political label” (Furley and Katalikawe 1999, 12; cf. Regan 1995[b], 178). All the same, most of the 214 directly elected delegates received their mandate through an election that foreign observers acknowledged as being open and transparent and thus a genuine expression of the will of the people.16 Given the individualization of elections between supposedly nonpartisan candidates, it was difficult to accurately assess the aggregate results of the proMovement and the pro-multiparty camps. The number of supporters of the noparty philosophy who were in fact elected to the assembly is generally estimated to be about two-thirds or more of all assembly members. From the CA’s inception, two aspects of its working methods shaped its activities. The first of these was that, as delegates set out to debate and decide issues, the discussion centered on solving the more important disputes while avoiding the deepening of existing political divisions. The commission itself had stressed the need for “consensus politics,” and the practice of seeking inclusive agreements was successfully adopted when it came to establishing the assembly’s working procedures (Regan 1995[b], 183). The second aspect, which had key implications for the substantive issues on the table, was that the assembly was bound to the constitution drafted by the commission, which it could amend only by a two-thirds majority. The agenda was largely predetermined.17

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Despite the draft established by the commission, a number of long-standing controversial issues were squarely addressed and hotly debated, if not always successfully resolved. The most important of such issues included the choice of political system (movementism versus multipartyism) and its future duration; the role of traditional rulers; the specific nature of decentralization (and, in particular, the possible introduction of federal arrangements); the adoption of one or more national languages; the electoral reform; and the involvement of the army in politics. The key battle between “multipartyists” and “movementists” came to a head when the DP’s Paul Ssemogerere and the UPC’s Cecilia Ogwal proposed an amendment to the constitution deleting all references to the Movement. Their proposal was rejected, and this led to a walkout by all multipartyists, except those belonging to the small Conservative Party (CP). Although in the minority, the multipartyists very soon proved that they were better organized than their more numerous opponents. Delegates from the UPC and the DP had formed the National Caucus for Democracy to coordinate their actions. This made life slightly more difficult for the NRM, which despite its numerous supporters in the assembly, occasionally found it difficult to obtain those majorities it needed to safely see its positions through. However, the constraints on political organization and on the agenda meant that there was very little chance of witnessing any constitutional provisions other than those supported by the NRM being approved by the CA. Since the restoration of the cultural leaders and kingdoms that had been abolished almost thirty years earlier, thanks to the Traditional Rulers (Restitution of Assets and Properties) Statute approved in 1993, the Baganda had become more accommodating toward the Odoki Commission’s proposals (Furley and Katalikawe 1997, 248). Nevertheless, the very nature of the restored kingdoms remained a contentious matter, as many people wished for a much broader, increasingly political role for their Kabaka than the nonpartisan role prescribed by the new law. In particular, they reiterated their traditional demands for a federal state that, by consolidating the region’s districts into a single political entity, would grant Buganda the territorial autonomy it had previously enjoyed during the immediate postindependence period.18 The constitution makers did make some important changes to the draft wording of the constitution, including those articles concerning the national executive and the decentralization process. In a move that increased the incumbent president’s powers, it was decided that the executive vice-president was to be appointed by the head of state, rather than elected with him. Should the presidency become vacant, fresh elections would be called rather than the vice-president completing the term of office. As for decentralization, the direct election of district chairs and the “interdistrict cooperation” option with its associated structures resulted from debates within the assembly. Furthermore, while the list of central government powers was extended beyond those powers envisaged by the draft constitution, any unlisted or residual functions were now the exclusive pre-

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serve of Uganda’s district administrations.19 The most important amendments to the draft constitution also included the abolition of a proposed “council of state” consisting of ministers and parliamentarians. The council was designed to link parliament and executive, thus in all likelihood strengthening the government’s control over legislative activity. The proposed council “incidently was not a people’s idea but was . . . ‘smuggled into the draft constitution’ by some members of the commission” (Furley and Katalikawe 1997, 253). Despite the rather important nature of these provisions, the modifications to the draft constitution affected only a limited part of the constitutional framework. In the end, the CA had approved a final document that reflected not only most of the commission’s purportedly technical or neutral solutions, but also the main institutional innovations introduced since 1986—that is, the Movement or no-party style of politics and the local councils structure. However, the multipartyists’ achievement consisted in the fact that the essential debate within the CA had now become “largely a matter of when, not whether, noparty democracy will give way to the multi-party kind again in Uganda” (Hansen and Twaddle 1995, 150). The making of a new constitution did not mark completion of the politybuilding process. In subsequent years, Ugandans took further significant steps forward, and the political system retained the dynamism that had characterized it since Museveni had come to power. The most significant measure adopted during the second half of the 1990s was the Movement Act (1997): this law violated the very principle of no-party politics, namely, the idea of doing away with political organizations. While increasing confusion about the exact nature of the Movement and about its relationship with the state, the Movement Act somehow relaunched the old NRM, which had gone into abeyance for some time, by providing for the establishment of NRM organs throughout the country.20 The constitutionalization of the new regime and the creation, by law, of Movement structures, fanned the debate over the status of, and the limitations on, political parties, which in turn raised questions about both the democratic character and the sustainability of the existing political framework. The constitution required that a referendum be held to chose between the Movement system and a multiparty system one year prior to the end of the first parliament’s mandate. Since legislation was needed to ensure that “any person shall be free to canvass”21 for the preferred option, a Political Organisations Bill that addressed the broader question of the status and operations of political parties was tabled in late 1998. Museveni and his minister for constitutional affairs, Jehoash Mayanja-Nkangi, tried to use the bill to further institutionalize restrictions on party activities. Predictably enough, the bill was fiercely attacked by the opposition. More surprisingly, even the Movement-dominated parliamentary Committee on Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, which had examined the proposed legislation, suggested a number of radical amendments that met some of the multipartyists’ demands. The debate heated up, and divisions emerged

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within the Movement parliamentary caucus. Faced with criticism of the illiberal provisions of the bill and of the drastic changes proposed by the committee, the government decided to drop the proposed legislation in June 1999. Instead of introducing clear regulations governing party activities in view of the referendum, the executive decided that two nonparty committees would be set up to campaign for and against Movement politics, respectively. The idea, contained in a referendum bill, did not go down well and in fact led to a constitutional crisis. As in the case of the bill on political parties, the Movement caucus could not agree on the proposed law, and many MPs simply kept away from the floor when the bill was voted on. Thus, while 157 MPs had signed the parliamentary register, only about 40 MPs were actually sitting in the House, under the watchful eye of the national press, which was well below the minimum requirement of 90 physically present members. Bowing to the government, however, the speaker, Francis Ayume, had parliament pass the Referendum Act (1999) without the required quorum. The state-owned newspaper New Vision, usually very supportive of the government, described the maneuver as “the first case of daylight vote rigging in parliamentary history since the tabling of the 1966 ‘pigeonhole constitution.’”22 Because parliamentary procedures did not envisage the recording of who voted for what, it was difficult to prove that the rules of the House had been blatantly breached. Yet, the following year, on the eve of the referendum, the Constitutional Court ruled on a petition filed by Paul Ssemogerere and deemed the Referendum Act to be unconstitutional, declaring it null and void. In early June, a new Referendum (Political Systems) Act (2000) had to be rushed through parliament and made acceptable to the court before the imminent referendum. This prompted the government to adopt an even messier, more manipulative approach: Museveni had the constitution amended and parliamentary rules suspended and, through a speech he made to the Movement caucus and through the suspension of the secret ballot, intimidated MPs into enacting the new law. Eventually, the first referendum on the political system was held on 29 June 2000. The multipartyists boycotted it on the grounds that freedom of association and political organization were fundamental, untouchable individual rights and as such were not subject to political decisions or a popular vote. While the outcome of the boycott was a mixed one, the turnout at the referendum, at 51.1 percent, was not very high. A combination of low (opponent) voter turnout, manipulative pressures, and genuine support resulted in Ugandans endorsing the regime with a massive 90.7 percent vote in favor of the existing Movement system.23 Beyond the Constitution: The Role of the Army The weakness of organized political actors under no-party democracy was both a cause and a consequence of the key position that the army was able to

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occupy over the entire duration of Uganda’s political experiment. With a role that went well beyond its constitutional mandate24 and impacted significantly on legislative and executive processes, the military was instrumental in both state and regime consolidation. Ultimately, however, it was only the army’s own founder, Museveni, that could personally count on the loyalty of soldiers and officers. As is the case in much of the developing world, postcolonial politics in Kampala saw the armed forces emerge as a pivotal player. The Ugandan army, which had only about 900 soldiers in 1962, had been drawn by the middle of the decade into the political arena. While politicians learned to make political use of the military, the army itself realized how much power it wielded, and from there on there was no way back. The politicization of soldiers, which had begun under Obote, reached its climax with the 1971 coup and the creation of a military dictatorship. The initial low level of military professionalism meant that the army was not reluctant to get involved in politics, and this, in turn, further delayed the development of a fully professional army.25 For over forty years after independence, the Ugandan army thus retained a pivotal, highly politicized role, regardless of the regime in power at any one time. Museveni’s rule did not allow for any clear-cut departure from this well-established pattern. The NRM’s takeover was the direct result of an armed initiative. Its outright military victory created a solid foundation on which a new regime could be established, and the creation of a regular and integrated army became a centerpiece in efforts to rebuild the polity.26 The most pressing priority of the new leadership was to protect itself from the fate that had befallen Obote and the Okellos; any real or potential armed challenge had to be averted or rendered ineffective. The regime’s counterinsurgency strategy relied both on preventive measures, such as the co-option of a number of rebel movements, and on responsive measures, particularly the building up of its military capacity to thwart nascent or future rebellions. While the insurgencies that have plagued the northern regions over the past twenty years have raised questions as to the government’s ability and will to put an end to instability, the survival of the regime has never been seriously at risk. Security was the main priority of the new political system, for both ideological and practical reasons. During the bush war, guaranteeing the safety of those people living in the “liberated areas” was a fundamental way of securing their support, be it active or passive. This required a radical change in Ugandans’ perception of armed men. From colonial times onward, the military had been perceived by most people as a fearful presence, one that was detached from the population and a source of many of its worries. When deployed, the troops in the King’s African Rifles, the regiment established by the British, were required to be of a different ethnic group, geographical location, and religion from the people of the areas they operated in, a practice that set the military apart from the country’s local communities (Okoth 1995, 255,

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265). After the country had been granted independence, unpredictability and predatory behavior became the trademark of Obote’s and Amin’s rowdy soldiers. By the early 1980s, the daily life of many Ugandans was characterized by fear and uncertainty. The extent to which the country’s citizens longed for a general improvement in the genuine level of security can be gauged from the following lines, in which a former guerrilla mentions certain fundamental factors that led many ordinary people to join the rebels: Museveni once asked a soldier . . . what he understood by democracy. Speaking in Luganda, the soldier answered: “Democracy kitegeza eddembe lya muntu (Democracy means leaving everybody to enjoy his peace). . . . For example, if I have my money and go to drink I should be left to drink for as long as I want. And nobody should disturb me as I go home, however late, and in case I collapse by the roadside before reaching home, I should be left to sleep and when I wake up I should find my money still in my pocket, and nobody should have beaten me.” . . . It was not idealistic notions such as democracy that forced us to go there . . . for most of us it was the demand of physical survival that forced us into the bush. (Ondoga Ori Amaza 1998, xiii)

When they met the NRA rebels, the peasants of central Uganda were for the first time confronted with armed men who were committed to ensuring a degree of security of both persons and properties. Discipline had been stressed and enforced by the rebel leadership from the outset, and it had featured prominently ever since. In 2006, the army boasted that over the previous twenty years, 23 soldiers had been executed for homicide, 123 had been sentenced to death but had not had their sentences carried out, and 20 had been sentenced to more than ten years’ imprisonment.27 The end of impunity and the restoration of security—with the significant exception of the north—constituted such an achievement and a break from past practice that, twenty years later, Museveni could still claim credit, and count on popular support, for this accomplishment. Security was not just an end in itself. It was seen as an indispensable step both for promoting economic development and for enabling the poor to benefit from the country’s growth (Holmgren et al. 2001, 126; cf. Reinikka and Collier 2001, 21), and it thus gained primacy “over virtually any other public good” (Oloka-Onyango 2004, 37). One implication of this was that the military, while accustomed to rules, became a legitimate party to rule making— that is, it took up a central position in the post-1986 political system. As a bastion of the new polity, however, the army needed building. The NRA guerrillas, originally united behind a revolutionary project, had to be transformed into a regular army and as such become the principal defender of the status quo. The transformation involved a vast recruitment drive; the integration of other armed forces; the establishment of bureaucratic structures, with the introduction and rationalization of administrative and financial man-

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agement; the technological upgrade of military capacity (including the purchase of modern weapons, vehicles, and other equipment in order to go beyond what was still largely “an army on foot”); the proper formalization and differentiation of ranks; the organization of training programs; the provision of pay for soldiers; and the definition of military privileges (Mudoola 1991, 242). These changes were not all implemented without certain problems. The feeling was that, once the bush war was over and a transition period was under way, the NRA—“a proud army in rags”—could easily fragment or become nonresponsive to control from the top. The strict code of conduct that had been adopted since 1982, which was largely devoted to soldiers’ relations with civilians, was quickly made legally binding and, with Resistance Councils often helping check indiscipline by arresting or denouncing unruly soldiers, reports of prompt punishments within the army became regular in the press (Mudoola 1991, 237–238). A key development was a huge expansion in the size of the army. The NRA, which numbered some 20,000 troops when it took power, by 1990 had already been scaled up fivefold. The need for a bigger army was justified on several grounds. The expansion allowed a certain rebalance of ethnic representation within an army that was principally manned by people from the south and southwest of the country. It also made it possible to absorb the former soldiers of the many armed forces that, in alliance or opposition to the NRA, had ravaged Uganda in previous years, including the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF), the Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda (FEDEMO), the Former Uganda National Army (FUNA), and the Uganda National Rescue Front (UNRF). In order to guarantee stability, it was essential not to leave too many unhappy armed or military-trained men around.28 The traditional tasks of ensuring internal order and defending territorial borders were taken very seriously, given the potential threats posed by both domestic and external instability. The northern part of the country had quickly become the scene of rebellions that needed quelling, while relations with some of Uganda’s five neighbors were at best strained and volatile. Uganda’s new army was also to be directly involved in developmental activities, which saw it transformed from a liability into a champion of progress and modernization. Security, after all, was a precondition for development. Not only would the army run or help with productive projects, but it would also provide staff for political schools and for the promotion of political socialization among the populace. Civilian-military cooperation included the formation of Local Defence Units (LDUs), especially in certain areas of the north; these units were recruited by local councils and trained and supervised by the army to constitute an aid to the army’s own activities (Brett 1994[a], 88). The overall aim was to “demystify the gun” by bringing it closer to the people and transform their perception of it into that of “an instrument of political-military liberation” (Mudoola 1991, 239ff.; Ondoga Ori Amaza 1998, 214ff.).

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However, the initial efforts at building a large army went a little too far, given the need to rationalize it and to contain its costs. Striking the right balance between size and resources became central to the modernization and institutionalization of the army. Military demobilization had been delayed until the regime had been stabilized, so as to reduce the chances of demobilized soldiers triggering uncontrollable increases in crime or rebel activity (Reinikka and Collier 2001, 23). By the early 1990s, however, the army had been successfully reduced in size, with most of the streamlining taking place in 1993–1994, and the numbers were more or less stabilized by the middle of the decade. Eventually, army personnel were reduced from 100,000 troops in 1990, consuming an exorbitant 40 percent of Uganda’s budget, to around 60,000 in 2003, representing 11 percent of national expenditure (Brett 1994a, 78; World Bank 2006). During the late 1990s, meanwhile, the process of upgrading the army was accelerated, with a significant injection of funds (see Table 2.1), and efforts were made to improve military equipment; this, in turn, led to disputes over allegedly corrupt procurement procedures. Over the course of time, attention was also paid to the training and education of officers; the result was a gradual improvement in the level of education among the military, which advanced the professionalization of Uganda’s defense sector. The establishment of a regular army was completed by the approval of the 1995 constitution—which renamed the military the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF), thus retaining the notion of a strict link with the population— and ten years later by the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces Act (2005). The latter law, however, embodied the ambiguous military developments under the NRM regime; the increased professionalization of the armed forces coexisted with the persistence and reassertion of certain unprofessional or noninstitutionalized aspects. Three elements of continuity with the past, in particular, hindered the full modernization of Uganda’s army: the official preservation of its historical political role; the persistent prominence of a nucleus of individuals within the army; and its continued highly personalistic leadership. First, official recognition of the military’s political role was perpetuated by the retention of a small number of army representatives in parliament. Under the NRM regime, men in uniform had been consistently deployed in political positions (e.g., as MPs, ministers, or district administrators), and they had even been allowed to participate in competitive politics, in what was initially “an attempt to fuse the politico-administrative and military institutions with a view to creating an identity of interests between the civilian and the military” (Mudoola 1991, 243). While they officially and unofficially took part in decisionmaking, the army largely respected the primacy of civilian rule and generally played only a marginal role in political debates and decisions (Brett 1994a, 88). Nevertheless, the lack of any complete separation from political life, which may have given soldiers the chance to continue to exercise a certain political influence, ended up by undermining their organizational development and strength.29

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Military Expenditure in Uganda, 1988–2004 1988

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

Military — expenditure (% of central government expenditure)

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

17.4

13.9

9.6

10.3

11.1

—

Military 3.7 expenditure (% of GDP)

3.3

3.5

3.1

2.1

1.8

2.2

2.2

2.2

2.1

2.4

2.6

2.3

2.1

2.5

2.5

2.5

Military 54.2 expenditure (constant 2003 US$, m)

68.4

82.8

76.2

51.2

58.2

72.8

82.6

88.2

84.6 110

122

113

117

140

151

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Table 2.1

159

Sources: World Bank, World Development Indicators Online, 2006; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Military Expenditure Database, 2006.

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Second, the founding members or so-called historicals—that is, the group of senior officers who had survived from 1986, or the roughly twenty names mentioned in the UPDF Act—were granted a lifelong right to sit on the top military bodies, namely, the High Command and the Defence Forces Council. This role as “founding fathers” was justified on the grounds that the army could benefit from their considerable experience. Yet, their cumbersome presence hindered and weakened the promotion of criteria such as merit, innovation, autonomy, and neutrality within the army. The third element, and the one that weighed most heavily against the more complete institutionalization of the army, was the president’s undisputed control over the same army. The creation of the NRA owed a great deal to the initiative of a single individual, Yoweri Museveni. During five years of civil war and the two subsequent decades of rule, the rebels-turned-army displayed unflagging loyalty to their charismatic leader. In spite of the expansion and transformation of the military, Museveni’s control over his troops went unchallenged. Institutionally, his doubling up as minister of defense justified his direct control of the armed forces’ daily business. Symbolically, his authority within the armed forces was furthered by the fact that he remained a soldier for eighteen years after he assumed power as president in Kampala. He relinquished the helm of the defense ministry in 2001 and retired from the army three years later, as part of a process aimed at more fully separating the army from politics, a process that was highly flawed, as we have just seen. However, from a constitutional point of view, he remained the commander in chief of the army, and being the leader of the “historicals,” he was a lifelong member of the army’s High Command. For some time, the High Command itself had lent the military a semblance of collective decisionmaking. For a number of years, key decisions— including, for example, the restoration of cultural kingdoms and leaders in the early 1990s—were given the green light from army organs. However, while the High Command’s role was officially recognized time and again, it gradually lost its capacity to share power with Museveni. The extent to which the army was single-handedly controlled by the president can be gauged by the fact that Uganda’s army was sent into Congo without the required authorization from parliament. The principal way Museveni exerted his authority over the army was largely informal, based on the personal loyalty of key military officers, with reshuffles at the top ensuring that they would be promoted or demoted according to their degree of trustworthiness. Personal loyalty, in turn, was consolidated by a predominant, if not exclusive, shared ethnic background. Over twenty years (1986–2006), five out of six army commanders were drawn from the president’s home area of Ankole (Elly Tumwine, Salim Saleh, James Kazini, Aronda Nyakairima, and Mugisha Muntu), and all but one (Muntu) belonged to the Bahima community, with two of them having close family ties

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to Museveni (Saleh and Kazini).30 Five out of six of the “historicals” within the High Command were Banyankole (the remaining member was a Munyoro), while no less than ten out of the fifteen additional life members of the Defence Forces Council were also from Ankole. Other key positions were also disproportionately assigned to individuals from western Uganda, despite the fact that overall the army had been ethnically rebalanced in favor of communities other than the Banyankole and the Banyarwanda, the two groups that had made up the bulk of the original NRA. Thus, personal loyalty rather than competence and merit was rewarded regardless of the problems this could lead to.31 The argument was even made that Museveni allowed corruption to spread among the top echelons of the army in exchange for the continued loyalty of those benefiting from it; military officers involved in corrupt practices needed the incumbent president as much as he needed them to safeguard his authority over the army. By the second half of the 1990s, the domestic legitimacy and the international credit that the Ugandan president had long enjoyed were beginning to decline. Dissident voices began to emerge from within the NRM circle, including well-known army men such as David Tinyefuza (who later backtracked), Kizza Besigye, Mugisha Muntu, and Henry Tumukunde. Although these men were systematically sidelined or they opted to quit the army, Museveni became aware that his grip over the army might not last forever. The question emerged as to whether the army could be “tamed” by Museveni or whether certain sections of the military would be able to mount a coup, and this doubt was destined to remain so. Thus, at the turn of the century, the president began creating a parallel army structure, or an army within the army. The Presidential Protection Unit (PPU) was formally elevated to the status of a brigade early on in 2003. The move to create a secretive Presidential Guard Brigade (PGB) was characterized by a substantial increase in its numbers, with rough estimates ranging from 3,000 to 14,000 soldiers (most observers settle for a figure of around 10,000). Most of the PGB troops reportedly hailed from southwestern Uganda. The gap between these elite troops—who were privileged in terms of resources, equipment, salaries, status, and so on—and the rest of the army widened significantly, and it had the potential to fuel discontent. The PGB, in particular, was handed control of the mechanized unit of the UPDF, that is, of the tanks and heavy artillery located at Masaka, not far from the capital, that were supposedly meant to fight the country’s wars, whether internal or external. The question of who really was being protected by the new brigade and by the armed forces at large—whether the president, increasingly anxious to retain power and not to get a bullet in the back, or the country—was being gradually exposed.

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3 The Political Economy of Support for the New Regime

UGANDA’S NO-PARTY DEMOCRACY, AT FIRST PRESENTED BY ITS creators as a transitional, temporary solution, lasted for much longer than initially expected. To examine how the system functioned and to fully understand how it lasted so long, we must first investigate the political economy of support for the no-party regime: Which were the domestic and foreign constituencies that granted their backing to the no-party regime and thus safeguarded its perpetuation? At a general level, a combination of internal and external factors helped sustain the Movement system of rule for a period of twenty years. On the domestic side, a sociopolitical coalition was cemented by the NRM’s unilateral military takeover, by Museveni’s undisputed charisma and presidential patronage, and by a southern-based ethnoregional alliance. At the same time, the external support received by Uganda’s political economy helped shield the new regime from foreign pressure for political reform and, in particular, for the institution of full-fledged multiparty elections that would have opened the way for a real challenge to Museveni’s position of power. The Ugandan president had powerful allies in the World Bank and other international donors, all of whom were anxious to see one of the reform-abiding African states develop into a success story. Countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which provided their backing to the reforms inspired by the World Bank, also offered key economic and political support aimed at strengthening a friendly state in a very volatile region. Four more specific aspects highlight the political and economic developments that enabled the Movement to gain and retain legitimacy for both its rule and no-party democracy. These four elements are the country’s substantial economic recovery, the benevolent role of external actors, the emergence of strong domestic constituencies with interests in the status quo, and the price that certain areas and communities paid in terms of political and economic exclusion. The

49

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argument of this chapter is that the above four aspects are strictly intertwined and can be summarized as follows. Uganda made substantial economic progress from the late 1980s onward. This progress was spurred by a set of reforms that the government not only officially adopted, but also strived to implement. Economic reforms represented the bulk of an exchange between Museveni and his foreign sponsors: donors would get Uganda to implement the structural reforms they believed were indispensable, while foreign patrons would provide generous political and financial support to the new regime. Economic reforms and reconstruction helped earn the support of key domestic constituencies—at both elite and grassroots levels—who took advantage of the dividends of growth as well as patronage distributions and corruption. Economic development, however, benefited certain regions of the country much more than others. Such regions constituted the regime’s main internal constituency as testified by the overrepresentation within government institutions of groups from these areas. By contrast, the northern regions—that is, the one-third of Uganda being ravaged by one of Africa’s longest wars—were not only marginalized in the new balance of political power, but also failed to benefit from the economic progress the country was making.

■

From Economic Renewal to Regional Imbalances

In taking over power, the Movement had labeled itself a force for revolutionary change. Key to the initiation and actual implementation of a wide-ranging reform agenda was the fact that “by not reaching a political deal with any of the previous regimes, the NRM was able to sweep away the old neopatrimonial clientelist networks, thus, leaving a political/social tabula rasa upon which to write the principles of a new polity” (Rubongoya 2007, 92). Right from the outset and over a sustained period, the NRM leader, Museveni, proved capable of transforming this initial political impetus into concrete policy action, starting and driving through a thorough program of economic and social reforms. Despite his radical background, and his fierce criticism of international financial institutions during the early 1980s, the new president was quick to retrack and embrace the policies suggested by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Hence an alliance was forged that was to strengthen the diplomatic support offered to Museveni, which would in turn significantly reinforce his international standing for more than a decade. During its first year in power, the NRM had embarked on a radical strategy for economic development and management, partly sustained by the help of friendly states such as Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, which had first supported the guerrillas and then provided some US$200 million in aid when they took

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over in 1986 (Bigsten and Kayizzi-Mugerwa 1999, 43). The NRM’s Ten-Point Programme explicitly advocated a mixed economy with a “government taking part in crucial sectors, while steering the economy . . . [and] avoid[ing] laissezfaire capitalism” (Museveni 1992, 282). As the difficulties and failures this initial strategy encountered became apparent, including soaring inflation—which by May 1987 had exceeded the astounding figure of 300 percent (Robinson 2006, 17)—heterodox economic policies were dramatically dropped, and the government’s interventionist approach was quickly abandoned. As happened in Jerry Rawlings’s Ghana, it was only after making a sharp political U-turn that Uganda found the path to economic reconstruction. The various problems encountered during the initial, radical phase had begun to tilt the balance among the NRM’s leadership in favor of an alternative, neoliberal approach to economic development. This was initially espoused in an instrumental manner—that is, as a way of accessing those opportunities offered by international financial institutions that both the country and the regime badly needed for their economic recovery and political survival, respectively. The reforms that the government had to implement to obtain international funding were thus not exactly welcomed but were reluctantly adopted, at least during the 1987–1992 period. The conditions attached to funding from the World Bank—which was primarily concerned with the modernization of the public sector and the liberalization of trade—and from the International Monetary Fund—which focused on financial and monetary measures as well as on the management of external debt—played a significant role in getting the reforms pushed through. In a country devastated by years of misrule and civil war, the new regime was unquestionably vulnerable to external pressures and had no choice but to come to terms, one way or another, with the need for and the presence of foreign donors. Yet, as the cases of several other African states have shown, neither external pressures nor large amounts of aid as such are normally sufficient for the effective implementation of agreed measures and for the promotion of economic growth. As well as such external pressure and aid, political leadership was also a key factor in steering through and ensuring the success of Uganda’s reform process. President Museveni himself took up the reins at the outset of the period of reform, providing “the highest level of backing for the new economic reforms” (Holmgren et al. 2001, 119; cf. Robinson 2006, 17), which was to prove indispensable in overcoming domestic and governmental resistance. His Presidential Economic Council was instrumental both in shaping the president’s own views and in forming the new policies during the early stages of reform. The commitment of the advocates of reform, as they engaged in educating and persuading the country’s elites and the public at large, was to be of equal importance. The government’s success in imposing its reform agenda was further favored by the no-party setup, which made it all the more difficult for an antireform opposition to organize, and by the fact that parliament as an institution

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was still at the construction stage, leaving ample freedom for the government’s own actions. It was thanks to these efforts that from around 1992, neoliberal reforms became more broadly endorsed by Uganda’s political elites, and the reform program was “owned” more directly by the country’s leadership. “The debate on the merits of liberalisation and structural adjustment had been won by reform adherents by the beginning of the 1990s” (Robinson 2006, 19); as economic results were achieved relatively quickly, and as significant benefits became evident, any political or social opposition to the reforms quickly deflated. The conditional terms of Uganda’s financial donors remained in place, but they now meant far less.1 The regime’s determination to back the reform program was thus the single most important factor underlying the latter’s degree of success compared to the numerous failed reforms seen in other African states (cf. van de Walle 2001). The quick adoption of the promarket strategy, and Uganda’s lengthy period of rule by a stable leadership, also contributed to the continuity and consistency needed to implement extensive economic reforms. It should be pointed out, however, that Uganda’s was a postconflict program of reform, and as such was based primarily on the restoration of a sufficient, albeit incomplete, degree of domestic peace. The size of the economy had shrunk by over 40 percent during troubled years from 1971 to 1986. Most of the progress that has been made since has been directed toward the achievement of pre-1971 levels of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) (Reinikka and Collier 2001, 15, 19, 31). Uganda’s economic reforms were jump-started in 1987 by the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP). This was a traditional structural adjustment package, agreed to in conjunction with the World Bank and the IMF. The ERP emphasized, on the one hand, the stabilization of the economy by balancing state expenditure with financial capacity, and, on the other hand, the structural reform of the economy through changes affecting sectors such as trade and prices (which were now liberalized), public enterprises (now privatized), the provision of social services (reduced to a minimum level), and the civil service (also downsized). During subsequent years, the World Bank provided the Ugandan government with repeated Structural Adjustment Credits (1991, 1994, 1997), while the IMF did the same in the form of its Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facilities (1994, 1997). The World Bank, for example, disbursed credits amounting to a total of over $1 billion in the key period between 1987 and 1992 (Robinson 2006, 18; cf. Dicklitch 1998, 64). One strategic component of Uganda’s reform policy was the liberalization of trade, with essential steps being taken in this direction between 1989 and 1992. In particular, crucial changes included the abolition of the Coffee Marketing Board’s monopoly; this centralized system had been inherited at independence and had discouraged the production of the country’s main export commodity by siphoning off too large a slice of the profits that would otherwise have gone to the growers. With the abolition of the monopoly, a number

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of private companies and unions quickly sprung up for the marketing and sale of coffee, thus creating a competitive environment in which peasant farmers were offered far better prices. Coffee liberalization was thus hailed as “a success both in terms of private sector development and in poverty reduction” (Reinikka and Collier 2001, 35). However, coffee exports continued to constitute a disproportionate share of the country’s total exports, meaning that the Ugandan economy was still very vulnerable to the frequent fluctuations in world coffee prices. Liberalization was not confined to one sector but constituted a much broader process affecting the country’s other key exports, such as cotton. Uganda’s international trade was also supported through a significant reduction in export and import taxes (the latter only after they had been initially increased to provide much-needed funds for the state’s coffers), thus reversing a previous trend and giving Kampala “one of the lowest tariff structures in Africa” by the end of the century (Reinikka and Collier 2001, 32). A second important part of the reform package was the privatization of Uganda’s numerous public enterprises (PEs). By the time the Public Enterprise Reform and Divestiture (PERD) Statute had been adopted in 1993, only the New Vision Printing and Publishing Corporation was making a profit, out of a total of 156 PEs that were largely the inheritance of development policies during the 1960s and 1970s, when a socialist-oriented ideology and a pragmatic recognition of the lack of an indigenous entrepreneurial class had moved in this direction (cf. Nsibambi 1994, 36; Tukahebwa quoted in Hansen and Twaddle 1998). Driven by the Divestiture and Reform Implementation Committee, composed of the finance minister, the ministers responsible for the PEs to be privatized, and the chair of the parliamentary committee for privatization, the process proved to be extremely costly. In fact, the costs were higher than the total proceeds from the sales. However, the state, and thus the Ugandan taxpayer, had been carrying the burden of the heavy losses that most of these PEs had been creating, and so the reforms, which privatized companies like the Agricultural Enterprises and the Uganda Fisheries Entreprises helped cut state subsidies from about USh 87 billion in 1997 to USh 9 billion in 1998 (Reinikka and Collier 2001, 37). The sale of state enterprises led to heated public debate, in particular over four interrelated aspects of this policy. The first problem concerned the way the value of Uganda’s state enterprises was being calculated, the fear being that they were being sold off far too cheaply, thus producing revenue that was in fact much lower than had been foreseen. Furthermore, the belief was that foreign buyers were getting more than their fair share—especially in the tourism and banking sectors—although this particular aspect of the process was clearly related to the lack of domestic capital for indigenous takeovers. A third criticism was based on the perception that members of the country’s political inner circle were also being unduly favored, either by allowing politicians to lay claim on valuable assets, or as a result of the corruption that seemed to taint the

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divestiture process. Finally, the question was raised as to whether it was right to sell off companies that provided important public services. The most controversial such case was that of the government-owned Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB), whose sale to Stanbic Bank raised fears among those farmers who had hitherto benefited from access to the credit and to the extensive territorial coverage of UCB branches (Tukahebwa quoted in Hansen and Twaddle 1998; Bigsten and Kayizzi-Mugerwa 1999, 72). It was partly for these reasons that, in 1993, the NRC parliament delayed the privatization process by asking government for clearer guidelines and greater guarantees. Besides withdrawing from direct involvement in economic activities, the Ugandan state’s administrative apparatus was also reduced in size. In view of rationalizing and restructuring ministerial bodies, the Public Service Review and Reorganisation Commission was set up in 1989. Based on the latter’s recommendations, reforms were implemented during the early 1990s, leading to, among other things, the streamlining of the Ugandan civil service. This also included eliminating “ghost” soldiers and workers, or staff that no longer, or had never, existed, who were still being paid salaries that were misappropriated by others. Due to their weak degree of unionization and their inability to mount any substantial resistance, public sector employees, who had numbered about 320,000 in 1990, were reduced to half that figure (150,000–160,000) within less than five years (Bigsten and Kayizzi-Mugerwa 1999, 64–65; Reinikka and Collier 2001, 27; Holmgren et al. 2001, 132). The numerous other measures that were adopted over the same period included the liberalization of the exchange rate through the legalization of foreign exchange bureaus (thus eradicating the flourishing black market, locally known as kibanda market); the restitution of properties that Amin had seized from the Asians in 1971 (a process that was completed in 1996); the adoption of the Investment Code, legalizing and simplifying procedures for foreign investment and ownership; and the establishment of the Uganda Revenue Authority as a semiautonomous agency outside the mainstream civil service system (Holmgren et al. 2001, 128, 132; Reinikka and Collier 2001, 26, 36). Improved monetary and fiscal management significantly reduced inflation, brought down current account deficits, and permitted an initial increase of private sector investment. Inflation, for example, was brought under control from the early 1990s onward, with a dramatic reduction from 230 percent in 1986 to –0.6 percent in 1993 (Dicklitch 1998, 64). Prudent economic management helped spur growth, and political stabilization together with the sustained expansion of the economy have been the country’s major achievements over the past twenty years. Economic growth took off immediately after 1986, with annual GDP growth rates raising from 4.0 percent in 1987 to 8.3 percent in 1988—slipping only once below 4 percent—and averaging an impressive 6.3 percent over the entire twenty-year period (1987–2005) (see Table 3.1 and Figure 3.1).

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55 Table 3.1

Annual GDP Growth, 1983–2005

Year

GDP Growth (annual %)

GDP per Capita Growth (annual %)

1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

5.7 –0.3 –3.3 0.4 4.0 8.3 6.4 6.5 5.6 3.4 8.3 6.4 11.5 9.1 5.1 4.9 8.1 5.6 4.9 6.5 4.4 5.6 5.6

2.5 –3.6 –6.6 –3.2 0.1 4.3 2.5 2.7 2.0 0.0 4.9 3.1 8.1 5.8 2.0 1.8 4.8 2.4 1.6 3.0 0.9 2.0 1.9

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2006.

Figure 3.1

Annual GDP Growth, 1983–2005

15 10 5 0 –5 –10 1987

1992

1997

GDP growth (annual %) GDP per capita growth (annual %)

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2006.

2002

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Despite the significant period of economic expansion, Uganda failed either to take any major steps forward in the modernization of the economy or to boost the government’s capacity to generate revenue. Concerning the first aspect, a substantial share of the economic growth was the result of an increase in agricultural output, which rose by some 62 percent between 1986 and 1998, whereas the manufacturing sector, by comparison, grew at a much slower average annual rate of 1.7 percent over roughly the same period (1989–1999) (Holmgren et al. 2001, 125). As for tax revenues, they gradually went up from about 5 percent of GDP in 1986 to 10.5 percent in 1998, and to 11.9 percent in 2003. State capacity to generate revenue, however, struggled to go beyond such modest levels, remaining below that of neighboring countries such as Kenya (25 percent) and Tanzania (15 percent), and well below the 20 percent average for sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, between the late 1990s and the beginning of the new decade, donor grants came to provide an increasing share of government revenues, up from 36.5 percent in 1998 to 57.5 percent in 2001, later falling back slightly to 48.0 percent in 2003 (World Bank 2006; cf. Reinikka and Collier 2001, 8; Bigsten and Kayizzi-Mugerwa 1999, 67; Eriksen 2005). The international credibility gained by the reformers helped Uganda become the first developing country to qualify for, and benefit from, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief scheme. It received relief from the IMF and the World Bank amounting to some US$650 million in 1998, followed by an additional $656 million under the enhanced HIPC Initiative in 2000 (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 2003, 64, 82; Holmgren et al. 2001, 111). While this kind of funding helped contain rising public debt during the late 1990s, it did not prevent this debt from gradually increasing from $0.9 billion in 1985 to $3.1 billion in 1995, and then to $4.5 billion, or 67 percent of gross national income (GNI), in 2004 (see Table 3.2). Following the new debt cancellation initiative undertaken by the G8 countries at the Gleneagles summit of 2005, however, the World Bank began writing off over $3.7 billion that Uganda owed its International Development Association, and foreign debt was thus expected to fall to about $1 billion.2 Did economic progress help consolidate the legitimacy of the no-party regime among Ugandans? To answer this question, one should look at the benTable 3.2

Public Debt and GNI, 1980–2005

Public and publicly guaranteed debt (DOD, current US$ bn) GNI (current US$ bn)

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2004

2005

0.54

0.89

2.16

3.07

3.05

4.50

—

1.24

3.47

4.23

3.93

5.78

6.68

8.54

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2006. Note: DOD = debt outstanding and disbursed.

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efits that the country’s elites derived from economic reforms and expansion— something addressed in a later section of this chapter—as well as the way in which political and economic changes affected poorer Ugandans. How structural adjustment measures affect the poor is a well-known issue that often topped the agenda of debates over the merits and drawbacks of reforms. In Uganda, as early as 1990, the matter was addressed by government policies, partly as a result of the criticisms raised by certain NGOs and bilateral donors. The first measure designed to deal with this matter was the Programme for the Alleviation of Poverty and the Social Costs of Adjustment (PAPSCA), launched in 1990 and funded by the World Bank. Over the course of the following decade, a strategy was developed to identify priority program areas and thereby to exempt certain social sectors from government spending cuts. This allowed public spending in crucial areas such as health and education to go up during the 1990–1995 period (Holmgren et al. 2001, 132–133). Gradually, the reduction of poverty became one of the explicit targets of reform. By 1997, Uganda led those developing countries trying to respond to the new strategies outlined by World Bank policies by drafting the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), a home-grown document that was endorsed by the Bank and the IMF in 2000 and soon came to set the standard “for the post–structural adjustment Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) required by the international community” (Piron 2004, vi).3 The PEAP made additions to a number of “social” policies that the government had introduced in the past. Since the early 1990s, for example, Uganda had led moves to counter Africa’s AIDS crisis. Kampala’s explicit commitment favored an unparalleled drop in the HIV/AIDS rate, which fell from 18.3 percent in 1992 to 6.4 percent in 2004, although it would seem that such gains may recently have eroded.4 The PEAP incorporated aspects of the government’s policy to stem the diffusion of the virus, not so much by introducing new measures as by adapting sectoral policies by taking the impact and implications of the epidemic into account. Similarly, the implementation of education policies also became an integral part of the PEAP. Prior to the 1996 election, for example, Museveni had pledged to introduce Universal Primary Education (UPE), and this pledge was duly honored the following year. UPE envisaged free primary education for four children per family (two of whom had to be girls in those families with two or more female children) and for all orphans. Primary school enrollment rates shot up rapidly, from 55 percent (1994–1995) to 98 percent (2001–2002), with the result that government expenditure on primary education doubled from 0.94 percent of GDP (in 1995–1996) to over 2 percent (in 1999–2000).5 The underlying logic and the implementation of the policy proved somewhat controversial, given that while the number of pupils rose dramatically, there was no equivalent increase in the number of teachers or in teaching salaries. Despite the fact that this inevitably raised problems during the implementation phase, the claim was made that the

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UPE represented “the greatest social service investment towards poverty eradication to date.”6 While poverty was only belatedly included among the targets of the reform package, and while the introduction of structural adjustments was far from free of social costs or controversy, in Uganda’s case the neoliberal economic approach led to a number of benefits for the country’s poor. As has already been pointed out, the liberalization of a crucial, labor-intensive sector such as coffee actually helped the plight of the coffee farmers. Thus, the proportion of Ugandans living in poverty was gradually brought down from 56 percent (1992) to 44 percent (1997–1998), and then to 35 percent (2000). This positive trend wavered slightly when the poverty level bounced back above 38 percent in 2002–2003, although it fell once again thereafter, reaching 31 percent in 2005–2006; this means that poverty has fallen all of 25 percent over a period of fewer than fifteen years.7 Despite the enormous growth in population from 19 million in 1992 to almost 29 million in 2005, the absolute number of people living in poverty has in fact regressed from 10.6 million to 8.9 million. Kampala also made some progress according to the human development rankings of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), moving up from 158 (out of a total of 174 countries) in 1992 to 145 (out of a total 177) in 2004 (UNDP 1995; 2006). The land reform enacted in 1998 also contained an important component of social progress, despite the problems it encountered during its subsequent implementation. Besides providing for the formalization of customary land tenure and for the upgrading of leasehold into freehold land—which purportedly made it “a revolutionary law, overturning a century of land relations in Uganda and laying the groundwork for the evolution of a market in land based on individual ownership” (McAuslan 1998a, 1; cf. Quan 2000, 204)—the new measures also altered the status of and the protection afforded to those living on the land (“land occupants”). The drive to provide security of tenure not only to landowners but also to poor land users who lived on the land and depended on it was openly backed by the Ugandan president. Point number eight in the NRM’s Ten-Point Programme explicitly referred to “people displaced by land-grabbers or through erroneously conceived ‘development’ projects,” “misuse of land,” and “an emerging problem of landlessness” as issues that the new regime was meant to redress (Museveni 1992, 281). Thus, plans for the redistribution of land were “explicit, and a strong motivation for fighters during the guerrilla war,”8 especially for people in western and central Uganda. From the political point of view, some form of land redistribution was instrumental in consolidating the alliance between Museveni and the peasants of Buganda and of parts of Bunyoro and Ankole. Ex post, the president was rewarding the poor farmers who had backed his rebellion during the 1980s, whereas ex ante, he was creating new ground for preserving his popularity into the new millennium.9

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Despite the country’s sustained growth and political stabilization, which had observers celebrate Uganda as a “turnaround state” (Robinson 2006, 14), a number of conspicuous internal disparities remained. Not all socioeconomic strata or geographical areas were affected in the same way. A disproportionate share of the benefits of two decades of economic progress, for example, went to the richest 10 percent of the population, and to urban areas in particular—most economic activities were highly concentrated in the Kampala-Entebbe-Jinja triangle—while rural areas remained the poorest regions. Most importantly, however, there was a clear geographical dimension to this phenomenon of economic exclusion. While political stability and economic recovery characterized about two-thirds of the country, the remaining part of Uganda continued to lag substantially behind (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 2003, 85–87; Hickey 2005, 997). The northern (and part of the eastern) areas of Uganda suffered considerable political instability due to the unrelenting activities of guerrilla movements in these regions. Not only were these regions basically excluded from the process of economic growth that the rest of the country enjoyed, but by and large they actually regressed in economic terms. Uganda was thus split between a central-southwestern region whose communities largely backed the regime and had made economic and social advances, and a northern region that was both marginalized by the regime’s lack of political interest in its problems and socially and economically devastated by a seemingly never-ending civil war. Before examining the question of how northern Uganda was sidelined by the new political order, the following two sections investigate the nature of the support that the regime enjoyed both abroad—through its relationships with external donors—and within Uganda itself.

■

Turning a Blind Eye: International Support for the Regime

At a time when the rhetoric of multiparty democracy promotion was coming to dominate the globe, Kampala’s no-party regime surprisingly managed not just to find a way of surviving in the shadows, but to actually garner an impressive amount of credit and of open international backing within the space of just a few years. This happened for two main reasons. First, since international donors and financial institutions were desperately seeking success stories to back their neoliberal approach to economic development, the country quickly came to be considered a champion of sound economic management and successful reform in Africa. Second, Uganda also established itself as a country of considerable geopolitical importance. Not only was Museveni’s government willing and able to exert influence beyond its own borders, but as a state neighboring Sudan in what is generally a volatile region, Uganda was perceived as a “natural ally” to the West, notably to the United States, and a

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potential bastion against Islamic penetration in a southward direction (Lynch 2006). The fact that in less than a decade donors had developed a strong vested interest in presenting Uganda as a showcase African state had two important consequences. The first was that, for a sustained period of time, there was a constant flow of substantial international funding. The second was that this generous aid was usually offered without too many political questions being asked about the Ugandan regime. Development aid had actually been on the increase since the fall of Idi Amin and the advent of the second Obote government in the early 1980s. However, it was in 1987, after Museveni’s change of mind had led to the adoption of more orthodox economic policies, that there was a sharp rise in international aid to Uganda. Funding arrived mostly in the form of loans from multilateral institutions, especially the World Bank, the IMF, the European Union, the African Development Bank, and the UNDP. Following established practice, this kind of lending was systematically provided on condition that certain specific requirements be rapidly met by the government, and this helped spur on the structural changes to the country’s economy. Besides the support provided by multilateral donors, economic recovery was also helped by substantial funding from bilateral patrons, consisting mostly of grants. Bilateral aid almost doubled during the early 1990s, rising from US$179.7 million in 1989 to $342.7 million in 1994 (Hauser 1999, 623). A hefty share of this came from governments in Washington and London—Uganda’s two largest national benefactors—although other advanced democracies, such as Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Japan, also made considerable contributions to Uganda’s coffers (Holmgren et al. 2001, 103, 106, 113). Economic progress had been both a cause for and a consequence of foreign aid. The financial support provided by the cited donors contributed to an estimated one-third of Uganda’s total growth during the 1990s (Reinikka and Collier 2001, 43). While the aid-to-GDP ratio fell temporarily after 1992, largely due to significant reductions in the financial flows from the World Bank, the IMF, and the European Union from 1996 onward (Holmgren et al. 2001, 103, 137–138; cf. Reinikka and Collier 2001, 39), it then rose once again at the end of the decade (see Table 3.3). Development aid, which averaged over $870 million a year during the period 2000–2004, came to account for about 40 percent of Uganda’s national budget in 2005–2007.10 Uganda’s high degree of economic dependency made it potentially very vulnerable to external pressures. To an extent, the country was partly able to limit the dictates from beyond its national borders. While US financial, military, and diplomatic support was of vital importance to Kampala, Museveni, who had developed close relations with successive US presidents and British prime ministers, was nevertheless able to maintain close relations with, or to claim to be inspired by, some of America’s and the West’s fiercest enemies, including

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Official Development Assistance to Uganda, 1990–2004 Official Development Assistance (US$ m)

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

— 566 725 707 753 805 684 840 471 590 819 783 637 959 1,159

Official Development Assistance (as % of GDP) 15.5 14.9 26.3 20.3 21.6 20.4 12.0 12.8 7.1 9.2 13.3 13.8 11.0 15.2 17.0

Source: United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Reports, 1990–2006. Note: The data for the period 1990–1998 refer to official development assistance (ODA) as a percentage of gross national product (GNP).

Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Cuba’s Fidel Castro (Oloka-Onyango 2004, 36). It is also partly true to say that the country “successfully resisted US leverage to act or refrain from acting in regional affairs while still remaining a natural ally to the United States” (Lynch 2006, 106, 114–116). Yet, Museveni not only largely followed “a pro-American line in his rhetoric,” but was actually instrumental in increasing the influence of the United States in countries such as Rwanda and Congo. Uganda shared some common enemies with the United States—notably Sudan, Angola, and Zimbabwe, which Uganda fought against in the Democratic Republic of Congo—and Washington developed a keen interest in this East African ally, as was clear from Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s visits to, and frequent praise for, the country. The “special relationship” between the two countries was further evidenced by Kampala’s participation in the “coalition of the willing” for the 2003 Iraq War campaign, alongside only Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea among African nations; by the 2006 dispatch of an advance US military unit in Kitgum, in northern Uganda, with humanitarian work tasks, such as building roads and bridges, allegedly as a result of Washington’s strategic concerns with Sudan and Al-Qaida;11 and by the fact that 1,500 UPDF troops were the first African Union peacekeepers to enter Mogadishu, in early 2007, following the US-backed Ethiopian invasion. The uniqueness of the development aid Uganda received, however, lay in the fact that it came with very few political strings attached, particularly with regard to domestic issues. From the early 1990s, donors had begun to pressure

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other African countries into opening the way to multiparty politics and promoting good governance by tying financial support to the implementation of political reforms. Early in the decade, for example, Kenya and Malawi were subjected to such pressures, although the result was ambiguous at best. In the case of Uganda, however, Western donors long remained almost uncritically supportive of the regime. This was in spite of the fact that the main breach of democratic standards was not, in this case, electoral fraud or corruption—a common problem in many countries that had formally introduced multiparty elections—but a much more overt constitutional ban on party-based political competition. The 1994 poll for the Constituent Assembly, for example, which was the first direct election of the new political era at the national level, was given the green light by electoral observers and foreign missions despite being run on a no-party basis. Foreign donors then went on to fund the 1996 presidential and parliamentary elections, raising only minor criticisms as to the political indoctrination courses staged by the government and pressing the opposition into accepting the results (Hauser 1999, 627–631, 623; cf. de Torrenté 2000; Human Rights Watch 1999, 152). By the time Museveni began to insist he wanted to amend the constitution and run for a third term, a decade later, donors found themselves in a difficult position; indeed when, after tough meetings between Western ambassadors and the president, foreign patrons realized how desperate he was to stay, they were afraid to push the issue too much and risk losing a grip on Uganda’s “success story.” Although they did not want Museveni to hang on to power, and they talked about his succession, they were nevertheless not sure that stability could be secured should he leave the State House. Over the course of time, the entity of foreign aid and diplomatic backing proved vital to the stabilization of the NRM’s rule. According to Andrew Mwenda and Roger Tangri, support from the outside helped the consolidation of the regime in three main ways (Mwenda and Tangri 2005, 453). First and foremost, in a country where public institutions had been shattered by political disorder and armed struggle, foreign aid played an essential role in rebuilding the Ugandan state and its capacities virtually from scratch. Second, the financial, political, and diplomatic support that the government received from the international community were systematically invested in the promotion of its domestic legitimacy. Finally, international funding also constituted a most valuable asset for the distribution of patronage, which over the years had acquired a substantial role in preserving support for the existing regime. In spite of externally promoted policies—to downsize the public sector and strengthen transparency and accountability—that were meant to reduce corruption and clientelism, the substantial foreign aid flowing into Uganda seems to have strengthened the patronage system. During the late 1980s and the better part of the 1990s, the strongly supportive approach espoused by Western patrons was translated into an essen-

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tially uncritical attitude toward the regime’s political record. Since the turn of the century, however, some donors have became increasingly concerned about the country’s mounting corruption and the restrictions imposed on democratic practices.12 The 2004/2005 budget was openly criticized not only on the grounds that public administration costs were too high, but also because there seemed to be a consolidation in the tendency to give the go-ahead to excessive annual increases in defense spending.13 The UK, Uganda’s principal donor, was the first country to cut its aid to Uganda. After suspending US$18 million the previous year in protest against increases in military spending, in 2005 the Department for International Development suspended $10 million of aid (about 10 percent of its total funding as direct budget support), on the grounds that no progress had been made in the democratization of the political system in view of the forthcoming presidential elections. The British example was closely followed by Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Due to mismanagement, Uganda’s section of the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis was also halted during this period. Overall, donors withheld an estimated $73 million in 2005 (Britain $35 million, Sweden $8 million, the Netherlands $7 million, Ireland $4 million, Norway $4 million, and the World Bank $15 million), creating gaping holes in the state budget, which by the end of the year “had already led to a partial shut down of some government functions” (Golooba-Mutebi 2006, 14). However, Uganda’s two largest financial backers, the World Bank and the IMF, had the greatest stakes in a regime whose emergence and economic success they had openly and strongly supported. Huge sums of money had been poured into the country, and both institutions feared rocking the boat. There thus remained a large question mark over the attitude that the international financial institutions (IFIs) would adopt, and in particular over the extent to which they were willing to follow the example of bilateral donors in mounting political pressure on the government in Kampala. The one consequence of the changing political economy of external assistance, however, was that the more such sponsors voiced their concerns and criticisms, the more the regime turned to its domestic constituency for support.

■

Domestic Constituencies: Ethnic Favoritism, Political Access and Corruption

The NRM’s no-party regime was established on the grounds that it would mark a radical change with past regimes by eventually uniting Ugandans on a nonsectarian basis. All of the country’s diverse political groupings, traditionally anchored in their respective ethnic areas, were to be brought together under the umbrella of a broad-based coalition government. During the first phase of NRM rule, a number of peace and demobilization deals were also struck with

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an array of small rebel movements, leading to the latter’s political and military integration in the new regime. However, the experience of the all-inclusive government set up by the Movement at the outset of its rule was only to last a few years. As the coalition began to fragment, it became increasingly clear that those in power were primarily concerned with promoting and defending the economic and political well-being of certain specific communities. Despite all the rhetoric, ethnic interests had been firmly in place since the days of the bush war. The decision to arrange the principal theater of armed struggle in Luwero was largely based on the expectation that the insurgents would be able to tap into Baganda resentment against Obote and the northerners and thus gain popular support for the rebellion (Kasfir 2005, 282). The very leadership of the NRM was, from the outset, dominated by people hailing from central-southwestern regions, and as the new regime was installed, it was instantly identified as the first one in Uganda led and supported by southerners, or Bantu speakers. Most support for the Movement was rooted in an alliance of Banyankole, Baganda, Banyarwanda, and, to some extent, Banyoro (Mamdani 1996, 208–209). It was from these areas that the guerrillas were principally recruited, and it was in these areas that the Movement subsequently built its electoral strongholds. Of the regime’s two key ethnic constituencies, the role of the Banyankole was relatively straightforward, as they always constituted the core of the Movement leadership group. By contrast, the link between the Baganda and the regime was much more complex. The history of Uganda demonstrated that the country could hardly be ruled in an orderly fashion without an agreement with the central region, but also that the rest of the nation was extremely wary of the latter’s dominance and of conceding too much to it. Thus, the government’s efforts to enroll the support of the country’s largest community involved a subtle exercise in offering them an important place on the boat, while ensuring that their massive weight would not capsize it. In a key move, Museveni successfully addressed a question deeply cherished by most Baganda—the restoration of the kabakaship, the most powerful symbol of their communal unity—sticking to a pledge he had allegedly made during the bush war. At the same time, as Green points out, the fact that the Kabaka was restored only as a purely cultural monarch (a solution that “was quite popular among the majority of Baganda who held a deep distrust of politics and politicians”), together with the establishment of constraints and controls over the kingdom’s finances, helped the government contain the risk of its overpoliticization and of reemerging secessionist claims (Green 2005, 124, 146, 180). While the Movement government remained broadly pro-Baganda, it also avoided answering to the two major remaining demands raised by the central region: the request for a federal status and the request for concessions on land tenure. Both issues were handled in such a way as to constrain the resources available to the restored kingdom. This was not a riskfree strategy. On the one hand, calls for federo (federalism), which were essen-

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tially culture-driven, had been further strengthened by popular dissatisfaction with the existing decentralization policy. On the other hand, the way the 1998 Land Act addressed the land issue “severely damaged relations between the kingdom and the central government.” Thus, by the end of the 1990s, a new phase appeared to begin in which the question of Baganda support for the regime would be much more problematic, raising the chances of anti-Museveni forces making inroads into the central region.14 In practice, however, the Movement’s electoral showings during the early years of the new century demonstrated that Buganda remained essentially loyal to the president and his ruling group.15 The consolidation of the NRM regime, as pointed out, largely revolved around the privileged access to power that it granted to a political elite hailing mainly from the central-southwestern regions mentioned earlier. This privileged access manifested itself in political overrepresentation, patronage, and corruption. A clear indicator of how specific communities came to dominate the country’s politics is provided by the ethnic composition of Uganda’s governments. The demographic dominance of the country’s two largest ethnic groups was transformed into disproportionate political dominance. Not only were the Baganda and the Banyankole overrepresented in top government circles, but such overrepresentation steadily grew over the course of time. As early as 1996, members of these two communities accounted for over 50 percent of ministerial positions, and this share rose to 65 percent (forty-one out of sixty-three positions) after a 1999 cabinet reshuffle. This meant that their share of top government jobs was about twice as large as their share of the population. There was also a qualitative dimension to the ethnic distribution of posts in government. If one excludes ministers of state, eighteen out of twenty-one cabinet ministers (i.e., over 85 percent) in 1996 were from southwestern Uganda, Buganda, and Busoga (Kayunga 2001, 44). Strategic positions, in particular, were increasingly granted to southwesterners. Thus, after the 2006 election, the presidency and the key cabinet portfolios for finance, defense, foreign affairs, internal affairs, and local government were all controlled by Banyankole. The army, as noted in the previous chapter, was run along similar lines. As Sallie Simba Kayunga aptly observed, “Failure to use merit in political appointments contradicts the notion of ‘individual merit’ around which the no-party system is constructed” (Kayunga 2001, 44). It was thus not surprising that those areas generally neglected by the regime—in particular, the northern regions of Uganda—were the ones where opposition forces remained constantly present, generating a regionalization of the opposition that, from the mid-1990s onward, was evident in the geographical distribution of electoral support. That the distribution of administrative posts was used to gain consensus for the ruling clique was also evident from the gradual, albeit inexorable, multiplication of political appointments. A regime that depended in part on the patronage system required an ever-increasing pool of resources with which to

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induce and reward political loyalty. Table 3.4 and Figure 3.2 show the continuous growth in the number of government and parliamentary posts, as well as the proliferation of local administrations. The huge size of cabinets, for example, is a typical indicator of neopatrimonial practices (van de Walle 2001, 264). Over the past two decades, Ugandan cabinets have grown increasingly larger. Since 1986, the number of members of the executive has virtually doubled, from 36 to 69. Under pressure from foreign donors, the figure was brought down to 21 in 1994, but it soon rose once again, reaching 56 after the 1996 election, 67 after the 2001 vote, and 69 following the 2006 polls, when the new government consisted of 25 cabinet ministers and 44 ministers of state. Eventually, even the constitutional provision that formally limited the number of cabinet members to 21 (plus a maximum 21 noncabinet ministers, which was not observed in practice, however) was scrapped to allow for the appointment of “a number of ministers as may appear to the president to be reasonably necessary.”16 A similar, though less dramatic, expansion in the number of political appointments was witnessed over the same two decades through the enlargement of parliament. While the National Resistance Council, which acted as the national legislature between 1986 and 1989, initially consisted of 38 members, the number of legislators was rapidly increased. It initially reached a total of 80 in 1988, then grew further to 130 in 1989, after which it more than doubled to 282 in 1996, and got closer to the 300 mark (reaching 295) in 2001. By 2006, the figure had risen further to 309, by which time the opposition was trying to capitalize on the issue by talking about the need to reduce the number of MPs.17

Table 3.4

1986 1988 1989 1990 1994 1996 1997 2000 2001 2005 2006

Growth in the Number of MPs, Districts, and Government Posts, 1986–2006 Cabinet Members

Parliamentarians

Districts

36 42

38 80 270

33

21 51

34 39 282 44 56

64

295

69

309

Source: Updated from Green (2007) and Mwenda and Tangri (2005).

70 77

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Growth in the Number of MPs, Districts, and Government Posts, 1986–2006 80

300

Number of MPs

60 200

150 40 100

Number of districts/ Number of members of the executive

250

50 20 1985

1990 Parliamentarians Districts

1995

2000

2005

Cabinet members

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2006.

The most extraordinary, most important proliferation of jobs within state institutions, however, unquestionably resulted from the creation of new districts, as was pointed out in the previous chapter. Local governments had been the cornerstone of the NRM system since its very inception. At the time of its coming to power in 1986, the new ruling group took over a country subdivided into thirty-three district-level administrative units. Given the communal fragmentation of the country, demands for creating new districts from existing ones were soon being raised by local groups. The president characteristically took it upon himself to respond to these requests as a way of gaining or retaining popular consensus. This was notably true during the run-up to the 2006 election, when the number of districts rocketed from fifty-six to seventy-seven (a 40 percent increase), many of which were of questionable sustainability. In fact, a classical link appeared to be established between the creation of new political units (districts), the fabrication of new jobs and related benefits, and the exchange of the latter for political support for the regime (Green 2007; Hesselbein, Golooba-Mutebi, and Putzel 2006, 18; cf. note 10, Chapter 2, this book ). As much as the incumbent president had been initially hailed as an upright, new young leader, embodying the will of many Africans to end the corrupt political practices of Africa’s postindependence era, he gradually allowed

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a form of soft “tribalism” (i.e., ethnic favoritism, rather than full-fledged ethnic repression) to emerge, while the spread of corruption gradually affected a large part of Uganda’s political system. The functioning of this system was thus distorted and the process of institution building significantly hindered. The very process of restructuring the country’s economy contributed to these developments, as reforms generated new opportunities for the expansion of corruption and patronage, rather than reducing them. As Andrew Mwenda reveals, for example, a process of state fragmentation was de facto sponsored by the donors and implemented through the establishment of numerous semiautonomous agencies that were functional to the economic and administrative reforms under way. By 2003, a total of ninety-five such bodies had been set up, whose aims ranged from improving taxation (Uganda Revenue Authority) to raising foreign investments (Uganda Investment Authority); from fostering decentralization (Decentralization Secretariat) to implementing privatizations (Privatisation Unit). These “microbureaucracies” represented new patronage tools, as they generated a whole new set of resources and comparatively wellpaid jobs. Similar developments also took place within individual ministries, where a plethora of monitoring and implementation units were established with the task of supporting the reform processes (Mwenda 2007). The joint effect of economic progress and patronage expansion was to strengthen the gradual emergence of vested interests and the integration of a considerable section of the middle class—including Baganda and Asian businesses—into the regime. As a result, by the early to mid-1990s, the ruling group’s social base of support and its ideology were adjusting to new pressures: a neopatrimonial class “was beginning to regroup and re-establish itself inside the NRM . . . [pushing the latter toward abandoning] its revolutionary character, and consolidation of power became an end in itself” (Rubongoya 2007, 102). Except for a few outspoken figures who increasingly criticized the departure from the original idea of fundamental change (the likes of Winnie Byanyima, Kizza Besigye, Mugisha Muntu, Augustine Ruzindana, Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, and, for a time, Eriya Kategaya), the Movement was becoming more and more conservative of the status quo. On paper, the constitutional framework adopted in the mid-1990s envisaged the establishment of nonexecutive public institutions that were meant to act as watchdogs, supervising and guaranteeing the transparency and upright nature of the country’s public life. Such institutions included parliament itself and the Inspector General of Government (IGG), a kind of ombudsperson (Tangri and Mwenda 2006, 112). The first directly elected, no-party parliament (1996–2001) made significant efforts to keep the behavior of top-level officials in check. The House, backing the initiatives of its Public Accounts Committee, which was given the task of investigating cases of financial mismanagement, passed a number of notorious censure motions, which led to a few ministers resigning or being dismissed. In 2000, two MPs were also jailed for corruption: Joseph

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Ekemu (former minister of justice and attorney general) and Mulindwa Birimumaso (former director of mass mobilization at the Movement’s head office). Similarly, the IGG also raised public concern over political and administrative malpractice. This was notably true prior to the constitutionalization of this office, when the IGG was Augustine Ruzindana, a prominent, resolute politician within the NRM. In the mid-1990s, for example, the IGG denounced the presence of nonexistent workers on public payrolls. The pressure of public opinion also helped expose other cases. In 2003, for example, a report produced by a UPDF High Command committee led to the court martial of almost 130 army officers, including former army commander James Kazini, for illegally pocketing the pay of soldiers who existed only in name. Rather than pushing for the establishment of incentives and sanctions against corruption, however, time and again the regime proved reluctant to fully punish the guilty parties. From 1996 on, the effectiveness of the IGG was largely undermined by the appointment of less independent-minded persons to this sensitive office.18 Many of the scandals that had already been exposed were soon forgotten, and proceedings, such as those against the persons involved in the “ghost” soldiers affair for which nobody was dismissed from the army or punished, were dropped (Tangri and Mwenda 2006, 118). Likewise, those ministers who had been censured by parliament and initially dismissed by the government were able to take up their places in the cabinet once again after a relatively short time. Brigadier Jim Muhwezi, for example, was back in government as minister of health barely three years after being denounced by parliament for abuse of office. It is no surprise then to learn that he was soon being prosecuted over the theft of cash from the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis in 2006. The government officially rejected the recommendation, advanced by the judicial Commission of Inquiry on the Global Fund affair, that Muhwezi be held politically accountable for what happened. His second dismissal from government reflected not so much the ruling group’s actual determination to fight corruption as a certain pressure from international donors, particularly the United Kingdom, for action to be taken.19 In the view of Mwenda and Tangri, the Ugandan leadership adopted a deliberate strategy of allowing corruption to spread among top-ranking officers as a way of ensuring their increasing dependence on the preservation of existing power relations, thus strengthening their loyalty and consolidating the regime. Part of the resources siphoned off, after all, were redirected into the funding of progovernment political activities. The level of fraud among high-ranking military personnel, and the fact that not a single officer or political leader was prosecuted or punished (Tangri and Mwenda 2003, 546), is clear proof of this trend. As the UPDF underwent modernization during the late 1990s, the growth in military supplies furthered opportunities for corruption. Among the best-known cases was that of the acquisition of junk helicopter gunships from Belarus in 1996—a transaction oiled by the bribes pocketed by Ugandan intermediaries—

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and the plundering of mineral and other resources from the Democratic Republic of Congo during the period when the UPDF was deployed in its massive neighbor’s territory. Other minor scandals included the purchase of undersized uniforms, malfunctioning tanks, and expired food rations. Investigations into these and other cases, particularly those carried out by the media and by international organizations, shed light on the apparent existence of “a corrupt inner circle of untouchable relatives” (Golooba-Mutebi 2006, 12). Prominent among the latter were Salim Saleh, Museveni’s popular brother, who had been sacked as army commander (1988–1989) for “indiscipline and drunkenness,”20 and James Kazini, army commander between 2001 and 2003, both infamously involved in military corruption. By tolerating and not punishing such sleaze, Museveni was directly responsible for creating a context in which similar dealings could continue to take place. Rather than acting to counter such tendencies, he rejected criticisms such as those contained in the 2001 UN report on the plunder of Congo, which openly mentioned the involvement of Saleh and Kazini, and watered down parliamentary attempts to improve control of mismanagement and corruption within the military.21 The development of a culture of institutional accountability within the military was hindered by the president’s determination to keep personal control over the army and thus to appoint relatives, or other figures of proven personal loyalty, to senior positions within Uganda’s armed forces. The spread of corruption to all levels of public life in Uganda did not go unnoticed. In terms of perceived corruption, Uganda was only the eighteenth least corrupt sub-Saharan country out of forty-one in 2006, coming not only well down the list below Botswana and South Africa, but also below countries such as Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Gabon.22 This was a rather disappointing result, after twenty years of rule, for a country that had long been hailed as a model “reformed” state, led by one of those new, principled groups of leaders that purportedly possessed the will to make a break with Africa’s past corrupt political practices.

■

Losing Out: The Marginalization of the Northern Regions

The major losers of the no-party democracy era in Uganda, and thus the hotbed of opposition to the regime, were indisputably the country’s northern regions. These regions were largely left out of the pattern of restored stability and economic growth that characterized most of the rest of the country under the NRM regime. Rather than making any progress in this sense, for over two decades the north has been characterized by increasing political instability, economic hardship, and social disruption. The worst-hit area has been Acholiland, the area bordering Sudan, which basically consists of the Gulu and Kit-

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gum districts (and more recently the newly created districts of Kilak and Pader). However, West Nile, Lango, and even Teso were also affected by the waves of insecurity that began spreading down from the north as soon as Museveni’s guerrillas captured the capital, Kampala, and tried to extend their control over the rest of Uganda. Northern areas quickly became not only the geographical but also the political periphery of the new regime. The integration of a multiplicity of communities within a single political system had proved to be problematic since the establishment of the colonial state. The country’s postindependence politics had rapidly caused relations between different ethnic, regional, and religious groups to degenerate, and the armed struggles of the early 1980s, in particular, were to widen the divide between southerners and northerners. The latter had ruled Uganda virtually without interruption for a quarter of a century. The NRM/A insurgency is widely held to have been the reaction by sections of the Banyankole and Baganda people to a long period of misrule and political exclusion at the hands of different coalitions and leaders from Acholi, Lango, or West Nile. A substantial part of the fighting between the guerrillas and the Obote government took place in the Luwero triangle. Here, during the course of socalled anti-insurgency operations, atrocious crimes were allegedly committed against the local Baganda population by the Uganda National Liberation Army. About 30–40 percent of UNLA soldiers were Acholi, and the Acholi were widely perceived to play a dominant role within the army (Gersony 1997, 6–7). When, early in 1986, remnants of the defeated UNLA fled north fearing retribution on the part of the newly established NRM regime, they tried to mobilize support among Acholi communities but failed. So they then regrouped in southern Sudan and, under the leadership of Brigadier Odong Latek, set up the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA). The original aim of the UPDA was to win back power in Kampala. However, they soon submitted more complex demands, including requests for a more explicit part in the new political arrangement for Uganda’s northeners, for a return to a democratic system based on multiparty elections, and for broader guarantees for the protection of human rights in all areas of the country (Branch 2005, 11). But the UPDA’s plans proved rather short-lived. By mid-1988, the rebels had reached an agreement with the government, and most of them were integrated into the expanding Ugandan army. Two separate insurgencies of a slightly different character, however, had emerged in the meantime. One came to be known as the Holy Spirit Movement (HSM), a popular uprising that followed a dramatic trajectory during most of 1987. Led by a spirit medium called Alice Auma “Lakwena,” the movement initially involved some former UNLA soldiers, who were to play a central role, as in the case of the UPDA. It then went on to gain the support of thousands of people in a tumultuous east- and southbound crusade that saw the charismatic Lakwena and her fighters defeated no more than a hundred

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kilometers east of the capital. With the advent of the HSM rebellion, the spiritual world, with its cults and rituals, entered the fray as part of Uganda’s antigovernment guerrilla campaigns. The legacy of the Holy Spirit Movement was taken up by another armed movement, similarly rooted in supernatural beliefs, but one that was to prove much more resilient and destabilizing, albeit less popular. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) was launched in 1988 by Joseph Kony, another spirit medium, and has since avoided all efforts to bring peace to the north. Like the UPDA and HSM before it, this third insurgency can also be traced back, at least partly, to exclusion from and aversion to the new regime in Kampala. Failing to gain popularity and raise local support for the insurgency, however, Kony soon shifted the target of the movement’s violence from government forces deployed in the region to the civilian population at large, whom he accused of collaborating with the government, partly as a result of the formation of civil defense militias and of the failure of peace talks in 1994. In a seemingly paradoxical twist of events, the Acholi themselves became the main target of an Acholi “rebellion.” Killing, maiming, and abducting became the hallmarks of an extremely violent movement that gradually lost what little legitimacy and passive popular support it had enjoyed during its early days. Over the course of the years, the dynamics of such insurgent violence began to follow an almost cyclical pattern. Successive attempts at negotiating a peace deal were undertaken, only to break down soon afterwards, leaving the way open to tougher UPDF operations and the increasingly brutal repression of the civilian population by the LRA. The enormous social and economic devastation that the LRA revolt brought upon northern Uganda is difficult to quantify. There are no reliable estimates for the total number of deaths caused by the war. UNICEF has calculated that as of 2001, some 28,903 people had been abducted (many were either released later or somehow managed to escape), about one-third of them children (quoted in Allen 2006, 62). By 2006, the area counted about 1.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in some 200 camps. Many of these people were initially driven from their villages as much by a terrible government policy aimed at rounding up the population in “protected camps,” as by the violence and terrorism employed by the guerrillas.23 The economic costs of twenty years of war in a poverty-stricken area have been estimated at some US$1.7 billion.24 The psychological damage suffered by those people who have been through a similar ordeal for two decades is simply impossible to assess. The sheer cruelty of the war makes two key questions all the more pressing: Why was the war being fought, and why did it last so long? These questions are essential to understanding the relationship between the no-party regime and armed opposition in the north. There are, however, no simple answers to such questions. As Anthony Vinci points out, the LRA was “a notoriously difficult organization to analyze . . . because it so rarely communicates

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with the outside world, has such arcane beliefs, and acts in a seemingly irrational manner . . . the LRA is admittedly not a typical armed group and the nature of the conflict is far from the norm in Africa or elsewhere” (Vinci 2006, 35, 41). The emergence of instability in the north was undoubtedly related to the military defeat and loss of power by sections of the north’s political elites and communities. Fewer jobs, fewer resources, less security, fewer power connections, and diminished status were made all the worse by the fear that the NRA regime would mete out retribution on northerners for their “collective” guilt (Gersony 1997). Marginalization and increasing poverty pushed a region whose economy had been historically sluggish further away from the rest of the country. In particular, the new no-party setup was perceived as excessively penalizing and, as such, was bound to exacerbate the exclusion of those communities that were peripheral to the NRM’s political base. In this view, violence was inevitable under a regime that had “closed all avenues of opposition” by banning political parties: “This system is a declaration of future war. When you close, where do you want them to go? They will go back to the gun, obviously” (John Livingstone Okello Okello, MP, quoted in Human Rights Watch 1999, 127–128). In a similar vein, John Ssenkumba observes that “the crux of the matter lies in the belated recognition by various forces which aspire to control the state that it is practically impossible to defeat NRM through constitutional avenues.”25 While from a chronological point of view the rebellions in the north did not appear to be a direct result of no-party political exclusion, it was possibly the expectation of exclusion that contributed to increasing insecurity. The paucity or narrowness of channels for political integration hindered the finding of a solution to the conflict and thus contributed indirectly to protracting the war. Yet, while the country’s return to multiparty politics in 2006 coincided with the beginnings of a new peace process that was to gain unparalleled momentum, this process was hardly the result of genuine domestic political change, and there was little to indicate that the LRA had taken note of or had any serious interest in the new multiparty constitutional framework. So what were the LRA’s demands? The very notion that the LRA ever had its own “political agenda”—or, in a broader formulation, that its violent actions had some kind of political rationale26—is a contentious issue. Clearly the goals of the rebels were made more difficult to ascertain by their reliance on supernatural cults and rituals (see Allen 2006, 39). However, the insurgents also advanced a number of more “conventional” or “secular” political claims, which may have made their demands and strategies more intelligible, coherent, and perhaps even “rational” (Branch 2005, 4; Allen 2006, 43). At different times, for example, the LRA’s leaders used manifestos or interviews to submit their requests for an end to the country’s “dictatorship” and to the repression of Uganda’s northern peoples. They even demanded secession from the south, designed to transform northern

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Uganda into an independent “Nile Republic.”27 Yet, the organization never spelled out any clear, realistic goals in a consistent manner, and one may conclude that the chief reason for the rebellion had long been that of mere survival (Vinci 2006, 39). An effective response to the LRA rebellion was made more difficult by the sheer weakness of the presence of the state in northern Uganda. As in many other parts of Africa (Herbst 2000), control of the territory in this region is made more difficult by the sparseness of the local population. In addition to this structural problem, questions have been raised since the 1990s as to whether the government really possessed the will to end the northern crisis. Over the course of recent years, it had become clear that instability in the northern regions did not pose a serious threat to the regime: the rebels never came close to militarily challenging Kampala in any way that might lead to a takeover; nor did the north have a political constituency important enough to threaten the continued legitimacy of the ruling group. In this sense, the NRM leadership appeared to have been able to play down, or even “ignore,” the situation in the north; that is, putting an end to instability was not a real priority. Some observers have gone so far as to claim that this was an intentional policy on the part of the government, sections of which were basically favorable to a continuation of the war. According to Olara Otunnu, a former UN under-secretary-general and special representative for children and armed conflict, a “secret genocide” had been taking place in northern Uganda (Otunnu 2006). After all, northerners were considered collectively responsible for the sins of past regimes, particularly for what happened in Luwero. Besides constituting a “well-deserved” form of punishment for the northeners, instability would prevent a serious political challenge to the regime from being organized. Some Acholi believed that the war was designed to let army or government people seize their land or rustle their cattle. The various conspiracy views were strengthened by evidence that, with army operations in the north justifying increases in military spending and recruitment, a number of army officers were put in a position to benefit from the conflict. In 2007, Museveni for the first time publicly acknowledged that some UPDF commanders may have wanted the war in northern Uganda to continue.28 At a time when the president’s own brother, Salim Saleh, was chief of the anti-LRA operations, for example, his private company allegedly received $400,000 every month to supply various goods to troops deployed in Gulu. Similarly, a personal bank account in Gulu was allegedly used by James Kazini, a distant cousin of Museveni’s wife and at one point the army’s commander, to divert about $750,000 a month of the money assigned to the military stationed in the north (Tangri and Mwenda 2003, 543). Renewed hope for the resolution of the northern Uganda crisis seemed to come with the peace deal signed by the Sudanese government and the rebels active in the south of the country—which more or less marked the end of

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Khartoum’s support for the LRA—and with the almost simultaneous opening of the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC), which soon began investigating the LRA case and putting further pressure on the leaders of the guerrilla war. From the very outset of the war in the north, Ugandan Acholi were instrumental in helping Khartoum counter the insurgency of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) in southern Sudan. As of 1994, this “functional fit” was transformed into the Sudanese government’s systematic backing of the LRA for the best part of the following decade. The LRA thus no longer had to raise support among civilians in the north, who were increasingly targeted by LRA violence. In exchange for fighting the SPLA, the LRA rebels received military assistance from Khartoum and the vitally important opportunity to use sanctuaries in southern Sudan to regroup and reorganize, whenever the need arose, well out of the reach of the UPDF. Predictably enough, Museveni, who had initially been careful not to antagonize Khartoum, felt compelled to react by backing John Garang’s rebels. The end result was two neighboring countries fighting “an undeclared war” by proxy (Prunier 2004, 359). In January 2005, the Sudanese government and southern rebels reached an agreement and signed a US-sponsored peace treaty. With the peace deal, support for the LRA came to an end, and the SPLA’s rule in the newly autonomous Southern Sudan made the area a less hospitable place for northern Uganda’s rebels. Relationships between Khartoum and Kampala had been changing since 1999. From 2002, Sudan allowed Uganda to chase rebels into Sudanese territory, opening the way to Operation Iron Fist I (2002), soon followed by Iron Fist II (2004). The rebels, who were increasingly isolated, were forced to shift their foreign bases to a remote forest inside the Democratic Republic of Congo. The second key development that forced the LRA into a new round of peace talks was the International Criminal Court investigations into the atrocious crimes committed in northern Uganda.29 The court had been established by a 1998 treaty with a mandate to end impunity for crimes of the worst kind, notably genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Coming into force on July 2002, the ICC took on the crisis in northern Uganda as its first case, following a referral in late 2003 by the Kampala government. In July 2005, after preparing the ground for almost two years, the court issued arrest warrants for five top leaders of the LRA, including Joseph Kony. However, while in the long term the warrants were meant to reduce the probability of wars and atrocities taking place, in the short term they made negotiations much more complex. When, between 2004 and 2005, the government of Uganda launched a new, on/off peace process, it was not legally in a position to guarantee that the ICC would respect the amnesty it was offering to lure the rebels into agreeing to a peace deal (as a matter of fact, an amnesty was offered to LRA rebels in 2000 and had been renewed annually ever since). Accordingly, rebel leaders

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became more skeptical about laying down their arms. As a result, peace became more elusive at the very moment when isolation made the insurgents most likely to accept it. How did the Movement succeed in building up support for the no-party system and thus prolonging for two whole decades what was originally meant to be a transitional arrangement? In answering this question, this chapter identified the Movement’s key political and economic constituencies and the reasons that led them to lend their consistent backing to the no-party regime, both domestically and internationally. An early and pivotal factor was represented by the economic expansion that the new government was able to ignite by adopting a series of structural reforms. Economic expansion generated a relatively broad set of actors and groups with important stakes in the system, including the ruling political and military elites, neopatrimonial beneficiaries, businesses, foreign donors, and even a relevant section of the peasantry of the rural areas. Which Ugandans benefited from the political economy of the Movement’s no-party regime was also determined by geographic and communal axes that quite evidently “divided” the country. The central-southwestern regions—notably Ankole and Buganda—were disproportionately favored in both political and economic terms. The marginalization of northern communities, on the contrary, was dramatically manifest in the fact that their territorial areas became home to violent opposition groups and in the ambiguity and inefficiency that, for the better part of twenty years, characterized the government’s responses to armed insurgencies.

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4 Museveni’s Political Trajectory

THE PIVOTAL ROLE IN THE CREATION AND MAINTENANCE OF NOparty democracy—as well as in its eventual dismissal—was unquestionably played by Yoweri Museveni, as seen in the previous chapters. Since the outset of the new political era, the Ugandan leader was seen as embodying the same kind of novelty and break with the past that the no-party system was meant to represent. The two appeared to follow parallel trajectories: Museveni’s rise to power was mirrored in the construction of the no-party political arrangement, while the consolidation of his rule was manifested in the stabilization of some essential traits of the new regime. Even at its last stage, the destiny of the no-party setup remained closely intertwined with that of Museveni, as the decision to discard no-partyism greatly helped the president further prolong his stay in power. This chapter examines the link between Museveni’s leadership and the politico-institutional development of the no-party system, from its original formation to its eventual dismissal. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part investigates how the Ugandan leader was able to rise to power in the early 1980s by adopting an “antipolitics” strategy that portrayed him as a political outsider and examines the no-party institutional setup initially created by the NRM. The second part focuses on the political developments that followed the introduction of a new constitution and direct national elections in the mid-1990s. It concentrates on the president’s tendency to reinforce his own power through plebiscitarian appeals and to reject any institutional constraints on that power, thus contributing to a gradual process of deinstitutionalization of the state.

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Antipolitics as a Legitimizing Strategy: The Making of a Political Outsider

When turning to armed struggle in 1981, Museveni adopted the language of the political outsider and made violent verbal attacks on the then political 77

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establishment in Uganda, particularly the political parties. His calls for an end to bad governance, and the disciplined behavior displayed by his rebels during the war, contrasted sharply with the corruption of Milton Obote’s regime and his unruly soldiers. The “resistance councils” set up during the bush war, moreover, were ostensibly designed to restore “the power of the people” by means of direct political participation at the local level. The antiparty philosophy espoused by Museveni during the guerrilla war did not remain mere rhetoric but was quickly transformed into a far-reaching policy. As the guerrillas entered Kampala in 1986, the first thing the NRM government did was to immediately ban all political parties (Legal Notice No. 1/1986). As mentioned in Chapter 2, while the ban reflected concerns regarding the actual support enjoyed by the NRM, it was justified by a specific interpretation of the country’s political history, where the emphasis was placed on the traditional link between political parties and politicized ethnicities and the destructive consequences that such a nexus systematically produced. Despite the radical attacks launched on the political establishment by means of a military campaign, unrelenting propaganda, and Uganda’s new antiparty institutional framework, Museveni himself could hardly be considered a political outsider. In fact, the Ugandan leader had been involved in politics since his high school days and in the 1960s had been a youth member of Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress. In the late 1970s, Museveni’s Front for National Salvation (FRONASA) helped overthrow Idi Amin, and for a brief period Museveni was Uganda’s minister of defense. After being ousted from the latter position, he led a small political party but was defeated at the 1980 elections, which were generally perceived as rigged. Thus, although he was not widely known to the general public, Museveni had already been closely involved in Ugandan politics. However, the decision to go to the bush and mount a guerrilla war in 1981 fundamentally transformed him into the figure of a political newcomer. From that moment on, he no longer pursued the standard career of the party politician. Indeed, the future Ugandan leader began to present himself as the “out-of-the-ordinary,” trustworthy person the Ugandan people needed to bring about a clear break with traditional politics and to usher in a new era of true democracy.1 During the bush war, Museveni was extremely committed to gaining popular support. Unlike many classic populists, however, his political rhetoric tended to be based on actual political achievements. He did not gain political office on the basis of insincere electoral pledges or a successful professional career (e.g., in business, sports, or television). When he came to power in 1986, he had already delivered what many Ugandans, twenty years later, still credit him for. Museveni appeared on the scene as a leader who had been responsible for an extremely welcome, sudden, dramatic shift—almost overnight—from chaos to stability. After years of violence and instability, he appeared on the scene to resolve the country’s most pressing problems, and he

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proved capable of ensuring the security of persons and property and of removing the fear factor from the relationship between the military and the people of Uganda. These were highly tangible achievements that benefited most ordinary people, and they constituted the necessary preconditions for the country’s future economic recovery. Yet, very few Ugandans really knew much about Museveni when he reached Kampala: “They only knew that there was a mysterious ‘bush man’ who had led the guerrilla war, and, suddenly, you had this youthful, articulate, uncorrupted intellectual who could speak the language of the common man.”2 Thanks to his formidable charisma, he instantly became phenomenally popular. His appeals to the myth of the bush war and to the revolutionary victory of 26 January 1986 continued to ensure him substantial popular support long after the country’s elites had begun to take the achievements of the NRM period for granted and to ask for more. National electoral pledges and the underlying politics of elections did not make their appearance until 1996, when Museveni had already been firmly in power for a decade. Prior to this, the president had not required direct endorsement by the voters and thus had never been seriously concerned about electoral campaigns. During his rise to political power, therefore, the media did not play the key role that they perform for many contemporary populists. In fact, at the time of the bush war, there were no private radio or television channels in Uganda and virtually no independent newspapers. What limited publicity Museveni received came from the foreign media, including the BBC’s shortwave broadcasts and, indirectly, from a cyclostyled paper called Munnansi that was circulated by the opposition Democratic Party. By the time Museveni took up office at State House, however, a number of private newspapers had in fact come into being. Most of these papers were from the outset very supportive of the new leader. This was the result not only of Museveni’s achievements, but also of his acknowledged natural charm in handling journalists during long, public press conferences.3 This positive media coverage, which was largely sincere rather than manipulated, helped strengthen the president’s position of power, which lasted until the second half of the 1990s. The Ugandan leader’s charm was not reserved for when he was called upon to address journalists or foreign diplomats. From the bush war onward, he had demonstrated a considerable capacity to strike the right chords when talking to ordinary people. One of his trademarks, for example, was his frequent use of metaphors and images, proverbs, and vernacular sayings that ordinary people could identify with. Unlike the rhetoric used by many other populists, however, Museveni rarely appealed to the people just by promising oversimplistic, unsustainable, or inapplicable solutions to the country’s problems. It is true that the no-party project partly turned out to be exactly that—an oversimplistic, unsustainable, and inapplicable solution to the problem of how to sustain democratic rule. However, on a number of occasions, the president demonstrated that he

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was willing to tell people things they probably did not want to hear. Museveni abandoned his radical economic views the moment he began to rule the country and thus never displayed a whimsical, undisciplined, irresponsible attitude when making decisions regarding Uganda’s economic policies. For example, he insisted that “patriotism demands that Asian property be returned” to those who had been dispossessed by Idi Amin in 1972.4 This was a farsighted move when compared to the xenophobic appeals that in recent years have contributed to the spread of violence throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, and Côte d’Ivoire. The broader neoliberal approach that included the return of Asian properties to their original owners did not, after all, run counter to the interests of the Ugandan people. Market reforms, which the government systematically embraced from 1987 on, were actually facilitated by the fact that many Ugandans benefited from them.5 While the privatization of public enterprises and the reduction in the number of state employees clearly affected certain sections of the urban population, the negative consequences of this policy were limited, given that the public sector had virtually collapsed by that time. Indeed, the reforms revitalized economic activities in urban centers, whereas measures such as the liberalization of coffee and cotton sales reduced government exploitation of rural producers. Poverty levels were substantially, if gradually, reduced. Contrary to what one may imagine, neoliberal policies appeared to be compatible with, if not functional for, the politics of leaders directly appealing to the masses. As was the case with Carlos Menem in Argentina and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, the initial revolutionary phases involving certain hard-hitting economic reforms helped to demonstrate a leader’s capacity to cope with economic crises and stabilize the economy to the benefit of large sections of the population.6 What may be termed a propeople, nondemagogic approach was also followed in the case of the 1998 land reform. Along with a number of other African countries, such as South Africa, Namibia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania, Kampala witnessed the emergence of domestic pressure to address the vitally important land question: “In all these countries, the pressure to act is, at least in part, the result of contested democratic politics and the perceived need to meet the concerns of rural voters” (McAuslan 1998b, 527). In Uganda’s case, in addition to the need for a process of rationalization (and especially for a clearer, more effective official recognition of land rights), there was a political move to reward those groups that had provided the bulk of support for the regime, and a historical quest for the settlement of disputes between landlords and tenants. The president wanted to reward the poor peasants of the central region for the support they had provided during the guerrilla years and to ensure their continued support. Finally, Uganda’s rural masses were squarely placed at the fore in the Resistance Councils’ decentralization plans. During the bush war, as mentioned in Chapter 2, the councils had been instrumental in reaching out to the popu-

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lace, mobilizing resources for the rebels and legitimizing their rule at the local level. At the end of the war, they formed the basis for a nationwide system of government founded on the concept of popular participation. Sustaining participatory democracy remained a key political and ideological goal of the NRM regime, a feature shared with populist governments such as those of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and of Jerry Rawlings in Ghana (Ellner 2003, 145; Nugent 1995). In the late 1990s, Uganda’s local government arrangements allowed for the participation of some 400,000 elected citizens out of the country’s some 9 million adults (Regan 1998, 164). While the government’s decentralization policy envisaged a degree of participation that in practice proved difficult to sustain (Golooba-Mutebi 1999)— thanks to the councils—according to some observers, ordinary Ugandans “practised democracy in their own communities far more intensively than in any other sub-Saharan African state, except possibly Tanzania” (Kasfir 2000, 76; cf. Kannyo 2004, 132, 135). To sum up then, Museveni, had come to power and cultivated widespread personal support on the basis of an unambiguous antiparty approach. Although he had become president of Uganda by military means, his propeople appeals, achievements, and policies—together with positive media coverage focusing on the president’s personal charisma—considerably helped to consolidate his political power. His antipolitical, quasi-populist approach strongly affected his governing style and the evolution of no-party democracy, as the next section shows.

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Museveni’s Governing Practice: Plebiscitarian Drifts and Institutional Clashes

When leaders such as Museveni advance demands for the restoration of “power to the people,” they are often voicing a certain disillusionment with how a representative democracy actually works, and they are especially expressing their rejection of legalistic procedures and bureaucratic routine. In putting similar demands forward, other charismatic leaders claim a near monopoly on political legitimacy by virtue of their close relationship with the masses. In stressing his diversity from the others, the charismatic, self-styled outsider undertakes to heal the country’s politically induced wounds, the result of a self-serving, antipeople, parasitic, corrupt political class. This approach was reflected in Museveni’s opening address, delivered in January 1986, when he pledged to bring about “fundamental change” based on the belief that “the sovereign power in the land must be the population, not the government” (Museveni 1992, 21–22). Jerry Rawlings’s first radio broadcast after his 1981 takeover was strikingly similar, except that it targeted social elites at large: “Fellow citizens of Ghana, as you would have already noticed we are not playing the national anthem. In other

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words, this is not a coup. I ask for nothing less than a revolution, something that would transform the social and economic order of this country . . . nothing will be done from the Council . . . without the consent and the authority of the people.”7 The establishment against which such self-appointed outsiders fight includes not only a nation’s political and economic elites, but also its governing institutions and organizations. The latter are identified as an enemy of the people since they tend to impede simple, direct, transparent political actions. The new leader’s main aim is to rebuild the foundations of democracy, through a trusted leadership and new forms of direct participation, including referendums and popular assemblies. However, as a result of the very aspiration to create the simplest, most direct link possible between the leader and the people, the authoritarian nature of the relationship is perceived as an indicator of true democracy (Tarchi 2003, 53–54). As Benjamin Arditi put it, The distrust for institutional procedures and the intricacies of the legislative process . . . might give way to a discretional adherence to the rule of law that slips all too easily into authoritarian practices. When in office, this multiplies conflicts with the judiciary and other state powers. . . . Populists can get away with undemocratic behavior as long as their actions are perceived to represent the will of the people. (Arditi 2004, 142)

Ugandan politics have often been characterized by illiberal attacks on state institutions since the new constitution was approved in 1995. Museveni, for example, harshly criticized MPs—as well as the country’s bureaucrats— for their tendency to hinder, or even paralyze, the country’s decisionmaking process.8 A few years later, he further tried to discredit parliament by attacking its financial requests and by portraying MPs as an antipeople bunch.9 As is shown in Chapter 7, while the sixth legislature (1996–2001) tried to achieve, and occasionally displayed, a certain independence from government, this was partly curbed by a tightening of government control over the same parliament. Thus, the seventh parliament (2001–2006) was not up to its political tasks; as a result, the previous legislature, despite its various limitations, came to be seen as “the golden age” of parliamentary politics in Uganda. Museveni’s intolerance toward any limitations to his power grew during the 2003–2004 period. His declared intention to open up to multipartyism was contradicted by his efforts to ensure the continuation of his own personal rule. Indeed, his campaign to amend the constitution and lift the existing two-term limit on presidential mandates was presented as a necessary adjustment designed to protect “the power of the people,” particularly the people’s alleged wish to see him remain president regardless of “legalistic restrictions” (i.e., constitutional term limitations). The so-called kisanja campaign shook the Movement camp so badly that a number of long-standing leaders of the NRM who had adopted a firm stance against this campaign left the organization and

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formed a new opposition group. However, such protests were not enough. The president had the maximum term of office removed by parliament in 2005, and as he had done in 1996 and 2001, he once again reneged on his pledge to retire and no longer run for office.10 The third-term issue saw Uganda join a number of other African states that had witnessed the introduction of multiparty politics in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Namibia, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Togo, Gabon, and Chad were among those countries whose presidents had their constitutions modified between 1999 and 2005 in order to prolong their stay in power (the heads of state of Zambia, Malawi, and Nigeria were ultimately prevented from doing so by the criticism such proposed measures received). The kisanja issue had originally been part of a broader range of proposals for constitutional reforms. The comprehensive white paper issued by the government in 2004 included certain provisions designed to enable the president to overcome parliament’s opposition and to increase his discretionary powers regarding the appointment of judges.11 More importantly, the planned reforms espoused an entirely plebiscitarian view of democracy when they recommended changes designed “to return power to the people” by establishing that the results of any referendum should be “binding on all organs and agencies of the state and on all persons and organizations.”12 One major target of the proposed constitutional reform was the courts, which had been seen to possess a certain degree of independence when ruling on constitutional and politically sensitive issues. In 2003, for example, the Constitutional Court declared that sections of the Political Parties and Organisations Act (2002) “impose unjustifiable restrictions on the activities of political parties,” “render political parties non-functional and inoperative,” “in effect establish a one-party state contrary to article 75 of the constitution,” and “are inconsistent with the constitutional provisions which protect people’s freedom to assemble and associate through political organizations.”13 The following year, the same court ruled that the Referendum (Political Systems) Act (2000), under which a plebiscite legitimizing the Movement system had been obtained in 2000, was also to be deemed “null and void.” Furious at the court’s decision, Museveni reacted in a bullying manner by declaring it to be “totally unacceptable that anyone should try to reverse this exercise. . . . The government will not allow any authority, including the courts, to usurp the powers of the people.”14 Such threats came just prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the government’s appeal, as did the antijudiciary demonstrations organized by Uganda’s resident district commissioners (RDCs), the local wing of the presidency. All this prompted a reversal of the Constitutional Court’s ruling: the Supreme Court confirmed the validity of the act on the basis of political considerations, noting that “to declare the referendum a nullity would have far reaching consequences.”15 The clash with the courts witnessed further dramatic episodes in the aftermath of Kizza Besigye’s arrest late in 2005. The opposition’s presidential candidate was briefly detained on his return from South Africa, where he had been

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living in exile for five years. Besigye, together with twenty-two others, were jointly accused of being members of a previously unheard-of People’s Redemption Army (PRA), a rebel group that was supposedly preparing an armed insurgency. One day in November 2005, at the beginning of judicial proceedings against the group, a mysterious collection of soldiers wearing black T-shirts, labeled “black mambas” by the media, was deployed in front of the High Court. This measure, which was clearly designed to intimidate the judiciary, was deemed unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, and Principal Judge James Ogoola referred to it as “the rape of the judiciary.”16 Its most immediate effect was the withdrawal of two judges from the Besigye trial. Little more than a year later, this particular episode had an even more dramatic sequel. The government had repeatedly declared that it would not accept any decision by the court to set the PRA suspects free. Thus, in March 2007, heavily armed policemen raided the High Court and illegally arrested six of the suspects who had been granted bail by the court. The judges reacted strongly by immediately going on strike for a week (lawyers also joined in) to protest against the raid, the infringement of the rule of law, and the lack of respect for judicial authority. The strike was an unprecedented event in the country’s history and the culmination of a standoff between the two arms of the state. Museveni expressed his regret and pledged to investigate any governmental wrongdoings; however, he also had a critical report by parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee withdrawn before it could be discussed in the House. In trying to find a link between the so-called Black Mamba I and Black Mamba II affairs, which saw the judiciary under physical siege, one acute observer pointed out that “these spectacular actions are designed to create the outer limits of what is possible . . . the ultimate goal of the Black Mamba shows is not the PRA suspects. . . . The campaign for the president’s 6th term in office was launched.”17 In the course of wrangles with other state institutions, Museveni repeatedly called upon the authority of the people and portrayed himself as their only true representative. It is worth quoting at length from a letter he wrote to the members of his cabinet, designed to dispel criticisms and to restate the undisputed primacy of his popular mandate over any constitutional constraint: I am writing to all of you so that you know my views in connection with certain aspects of the irrational and desperate efforts by those who, it seems, have been scheming for a long time to usurp the authority of the people and reverse the gains ushered in by the 26th of January 1986. . . . What is very wrong . . . is for somebody to argue . . . that there are certain areas of the Constitution that are no-go-areas for the people and only a monopoly of parliament. . . . To whom then does the country belong—to the people or to parliament? . . . When a constitutional or legal arrangement pays more attention to philosophically irrational procedures rather than the basic, genuine aspirations of the people, it loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people, it loses le-

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gitimacy and then it is ignored. . . . The people’s authority must be unambiguously in the saddle of Uganda’s State affairs. . . . [The judges] are a concern and, therefore, a responsibility of the people. If they so mismanaged their professional role, and some of them do quite often, the people, either directly or indirectly, could be called upon to resolve the impasse. . . . A crisis . . . will obviously be resolved in favor of the people. . . . The law, including the legal procedures, to be legitimate, must be in close harmony with the aspirations of the people. . . . The most beautiful article of the constitution is article 1(1): “All power belongs to the people.” This was the whole purpose of our carrying the gun for 13 years (1971–1979, 1981–1986). . . . Article 1(1) is above all the other articles. . . . This Constitutional Review process must clarify that. . . . Given the propensity towards diluting or even usurping people’s authority, the season for clarification, once and for all time, has arrived.18

The crusade of Uganda’s charismatic leader went hand in hand with his highly personalized perception of politics and with the extreme concentration of power that further narrowed the democratic content of the no-party system. The delegation of power inherent in institution building was completely foreign to Museveni’s leadership style. The president, who had little past organizational experience, preferred to personally dictate and micromanage all decisions, regardless of the institutional settings, norms, and procedures. Museveni habitually ridiculed and belittled whoever disagreed with him, and tended not to trust anybody but himself. No decision of any importance was made without his personal consent. This led many people in government to simply avoid taking any action, keeping quiet instead. Ministers and other officials who were nominally in charge of a policy area were hardly ever consulted and indeed often bypassed when decisions were being made on their areas of competence. This was notably the case in key sectors such as financial and economic affairs, defense, and foreign policy. The question of the organizational (under)development of the Movement and the matter of the highly personal manner in which the country’s armed forces were run by the president himself, both of which are discussed in other chapters, also testify to this personalistic attitude. Museveni’s overall aim was to maintain a degree of general instability, himself remaining the only stable point of reference, so that people would turn to him for guidance.19 According to certain members of the Movement’s inner circle, this phenomenon only gradually emerged.20 Until the mid-1990s, Museveni’s undeniable centrality had been tempered by a much more collective approach to decisionmaking. However, as state activities expanded and the decisionmaking process became increasingly complex, the president became increasingly less inclined to promote or accept delegation. His “cultic lust for raw, unbridled power” prevailed, leading him “to concentrate all core power around his personal protection guard, key relatives, and if necessary let all other institutions collapse in order not to produce an alternative center of power. . . . Nobody anticipated the dark, fight-or-die attitude of Museveni.”21

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The Ugandan leader’s broad attempt to tighten control over any alternative sources of power went beyond the official sphere of the state, involving the most influential media in the country. Over the course of time, the relationship between the president and the media had considerably deteriorated. Prominent journalists had long opposed the regime’s interference in what newspapers could or could not publish or what radio stations were allowed to broadcast. Two such journalists were summoned over their allegations that government dealings in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s included illegal gold trafficking. They were accused under section 50 of the 1998 Penal Code Act, which stated that “any person who publishes any false statement, rumour or report which is likely to cause fear and alarm to the public or to disturb the public peace is guilty of misdemeanour,” thus making journalists subject to criminal charges should they publish or broadcast anything deemed to be false or seditious. In 2004, a historical Supreme Court ruling upheld the right to freedom of information by deeming section 50 unconstitutional.22 The court asserted that “the right to freedom of expression . . . is not confined to categories such as correct opinions, sound ideas or truthful information. . . . A person’s expression or statement is not precluded from the constitutional protection simply because it is thought by another or others to be false, erroneous, controversial or unpleasant.”23 Yet, this did not prevent the executive-controlled Ugandan Broadcasting Council from shutting down the country’s major private radio station in August 2005 and briefly arresting its best-known journalist, Andrew Mwenda, on charges of sedition after he had broadcast views attributing to the Ugandan government the death of Sudan’s vice-president, John Garang, whose plane had crashed on its way back from Kampala.24 This came just after Museveni, furious at what he thought was the spread of conspiracy theories, had violently attacked, and openly threatened, the papers: “Now, any newspaper which plays around with regional security, I will not tolerate it. I will just simply close it, finish, the end.”25 The president’s increasingly uneasy relationship with the independent media prompted two further attempts to tighten control over the flow of information by shaping the development of its main vehicles. First, toward the end of 2005, the Uganda Media Centre was set up within the President’s Office. Directed by a journalist better known for his sycophancy than for any independent-minded opinion, the new center undertook to distribute government information and to maintain relations with the other Ugandan media and with foreign journalists in a more systematic, centralized manner. Second, the following year witnessed the sacking of the founder and managing director of New Vision, William Pike, who had transformed the state-owned newspaper not only into a profitable business, but also into a relatively balanced source of information, capable of publishing critical articles openly while still leaning toward the government. The change at the top of the country’s best-selling newspaper came after it claimed that the government was about to resume war with the northern rebels,

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a story certainly run at a delicate juncture, as peace talks with the LRA were beginning to falter. However, the real reason for Museveni’s decision—the president had made it clear that he wanted to streamline a paper that had “been very useless for a very long time”—was probably Pike’s opposition to his third-term bid.

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Political Leadership and Institutional Constraints in an African Country

The political transformation of Uganda over the past twenty years has been largely embodied in the charismatic person of its president. Museveni’s propeople rhetoric and policies, his no-party, participatory democracy projects, and his intolerance of any institutional constraints to his popular mandate were key factors that throw considerable light on the development of Uganda’s no-party system. The first period of the country’s postconflict political trajectory—that is, the initial phase of no-party democracy—goes some way toward substantiating the belief that crisis and collapse may play a positive “constitutive role” in state building (Di John and Putzel 2004). Indeed, despite the West’s tendency to condemn populist leaders, international donors never demonized the intellectually sophisticated Museveni, largely because he avoided the more stigmatized features of populism, namely demagogic economic reforms and xenophobic appeals. The policies that led to Uganda’s economic recovery were not driven by cheap, unsustainable pledges, but included a number of severe measures. The country’s politics was neither particularly unpredictable, nor was it characterized by the recurrent, erratic presence of street-level politics. At the local level, the participatory system became the basis on which “the foundations of a democratic culture” were being laid (Kannyo 2004, 135). At the level of the country’s elites, a liberal discourse unexpectedly appeared to develop not only out of the public debate conducted in the free media, but also through the parliamentary and judiciary battles that the opposition fought in an attempt to keep Museveni’s politics in check. However, while it is one thing for a crisis to trigger change or reform—as happened in the Ugandan case—this does not mean that the resulting political changes are going to be sustainable. Like Africa’s other “new leaders” who came to power in Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea during the early 1990s and who successfully rebuilt their countries’ political systems, Museveni and his country were faced with the challenging task of institutionalizing political authority (Ottaway 1999). As it was pointed out some forty years ago, “the vacuum of power and authority which exists in so many modernising countries may be filled temporarily by charismatic leadership or military force. But it can be filled permanently only by political organisation” (Huntington 1968,

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461). While the Ugandan president’s choice of a quasi-populist approach showed how the political openings of the 1990s increased African leaders’ interest in obtaining popular legitimacy, its most worrying effects were the president’s increasingly authoritarian, intolerant attitude, and his personal attacks on the development of the country’s political institutions. Museveni moved from his original goal of “fundamental change,” proclaimed at the time of his takeover, at first to a “no change” electoral slogan in 2001, and then to a controversial “no term limits” campaign in view of the 2006 presidential race: After all, he claimed, “staying around for long is also not a bad idea. In fact it is part of the fundamental changes, because in the past governments were collapsing after every five years.”26 In what may develop into a paradigmatic attempt to cling to power, the Ugandan leader’s antipolitical appeals were instrumental in his disregarding constitutional rule and creating conflict between the presidency and the country’s other state institutions. The outcome of his crusade to affirm the unlimited primacy of his popular mandate and to set “the power of the people” against parliamentary authority, court rulings, and constitutional norms would deeply affect Uganda’s chances of making real progress toward democracy. Ultimately, however, one must acknowledge that such personalistic politics—and their tendency to informalize politics and undermine political institutions— have been the norm in Africa since independence (cf. Jackson and Rosberg 1982a; Bayart 1993; Nugent 1995). In this sense, the antipolitical, neopopulist aspects of Museveni’s politics appear to be merely an unusual guise for the continent’s best-known political practice. A longtime political associate of the president, who subsequently became one of Museveni’s chief critics, firmly summed up the feelings of the opposition that emerged from within the ranks of the Movement: what was happening in early twenty-first century Uganda was “similar to what happened in the rest of Africa since independence. This is what is most disappointing: it was not meant to be like this, we were supposed to make a difference.”27

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5 The Movement: A Partisan Organization in Disguise

FOR TWENTY YEARS, MUSEVENI AND HIS GOVERNMENT CLAIMED to Ugandans that the Movement was a political “system,” a term that was also enshrined in the 1995 constitution. The conceptualization of the Movement as a system (i.e., a set of governmental institutions and relationships, including the terms of involvement in and access to such institutions) as opposed to a private political organization (i.e., a partisan association for the formal, regularized coordination of the political activities of its members and supporters; cf. Lanzalaco 1995, 105, 184) had crucial implications. These included those legislative measures designed to regulate “political organizations” (read political parties), which explicitly excluded the Movement from their ranks.1 Thus, the Movement, a new, all-encompassing “system” to which everybody was supposed to belong and be loyal, could make legitimacy claims that were simply not possible for a partisan organization. Uganda’s new constitution, however, went no further than abstract principles when defining what Movement democracy was all about. It merely specified that elections had to be based on individual merit rather than on party platforms. Other than that, the elaboration of this “new model of democracy” boiled down to vague notions of “broad-basedness,” participation, accountability, and accessibility. Indeed, parliament was left complete discretion to provide content to the concept through the adoption of a series of contingent, flexible measures. The approval of ordinary legislation was enough to “create organs under the Movement political system and define their roles; and prescribe from time to time any other democratic principle of the Movement political system.”2 Confused by this vagueness, even pro-Movement officials and politicians frequently contradicted themselves when describing the rationale and the workings of such a hazily defined arrangement. All Ugandans, as we have said, supposedly belonged to the system (i.e., the Movement), according to the constitution at least. However, declaring that everyone was part of the Movement was not enough to make them so in 89

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practice. While some Ugandans were movementists in their beliefs and behavior—these were the people lining up for the “Movement bus” in the 2000 referendum campaign posters—others were not and had no desire to get on board that bus. Indeed, its official form as a public arrangement could hardly disguise the fact that the Movement was a full-fledged organization aimed at the conquest and retention of state power by a specific partisan group. This is exactly what a party’s legitimate goal in any multiparty polity would be: placing and maintaining its avowed representatives in key government positions. This chapter, as well as contending that the Movement is best understood as a political organization rather than a system, suggests that its relationship to other political actors has been one of hegemony rather than monopoly, and that this hegemony was maintained in spite of the Movement’s traditionally loosely based organizational setup. Before subsequent sections examine the traits that the Movement acquired and developed under the no-party system, the next section focuses on its historical origins and structural evolution.

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From the NRM “in the Bush” to a Constitutionalized Movement

The National Resistance Movement was created in the early 1980s as the political wing of a guerrilla organization—the National Resistance Army—set up to overthrow Milton Obote’s newly established second government. The origins of the NRM lie with other organizational efforts previously embarked on by certain elements of its core leadership, such as the FRONASA paramilitary group and the Uganda Patriotic Movement party. To talk of full-fledged organizational continuity,3 however, is to overemphasize the permanence of a few leaders and to disregard changes in the institutional arrangements in question. As Gérard Prunier points out, for example, after Amin was overthrown in 1979, Museveni formally disbanded FRONASA, which only “remained as a network of friends” (Prunier 1997, 68). It is thus more appropriate to think of the NRM as an essentially new organization, heavily shaped by specific guerrilla experience and a unique form of no-party thinking.4 Based on the Maoist notion of the protracted people’s war, the NRM’s public image was one of a people’s organization of a nonpartisan, “civic” variety—a broad-based organization open to all Ugandan citizens, born out of a radical rejection of traditional parties and their “sectarian” divisions. This image was supported by the establishment, from the years of guerrilla warfare onward, of local Resistance Councils (RCs) throughout that part of Uganda under NRM control. The councils were instrumental in reaching out to the populace, in mobilizing resources for the guerrillas, and in organizing a broadly legitimate system of new government based on popular participation.

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With time, they would help the NRM extend its support to areas other than those where it originated. The RCs became part of a broader strategy to gain and reinforce popular support for the new regime. The key features of such a strategy were the antiparty stance that Museveni himself was gradually adopting, and the establishment of a purported broad-based government designed to bring together different groupings within Ugandan politics under a shared roof. All these factors contributed to consolidating a comparatively new organization that, when it came to power, was neither widely known nor particularly representative of the country’s populace. It was an organization, in other words, that “desperately needed a formula that would provide it with national acceptance. ‘Movement’ democracy provided part of the answer to this dilemma” (Kasfir 2000, 63). The no-party thinking, however, inevitably affected the NRM’s internal workings by justifying a hollow organizational setup. A loose central structure helped Museveni maintain undisputed, unrestricted control as much as it reflected the predominant antiparty, individual merit ideology. Indeed, while expanding its reach and its inclusiveness, the NRM developed a highly centralized, leadership-oriented modus operandi that made it heavily dependent on its leader’s personal charisma and patronage linkages. The fact that the NRM did not possess a national organization comparable to that of the UPC or the DP was as much the result of its comparatively recent emergence as of its carefully studied alternative strategy. The lack of a political organization was deemed to be a point of strength rather than a weakness. It was the looseness of the NRM’s structure that enabled it to claim the role of “home” to other organized groupings, parties, and tendencies. Thus, very little was invested in terms of time and energy, finance, and human resources—in creating a stronger organization (Brett 1989, 20; Mamdani 1995b, 237; Kasfir 1991, 255). The “Movement” label is often adopted in reaction to party politics and “implies the non-institutionalisation of an idea, a group, an activity. . . . [Political movements] aim at criticising all party organisations and stress their only partial involvement into institutionalised political life.” As predictably happens to movements of various types, however, they sooner or later face the question of the extent to which they can be politically effective with a loose organization: “They suffer the consequences of the unsolved tension between the conception they have of themselves and the constraints of political life, which implies the structuration, the creation of hierarchies, the acceptance of the rules of the game” (Pasquino 1990, 660–661). Not surprisingly, far from being a static arrangement, the National Resistance Movement repeatedly underwent internal transformations. Joe OlokaOnyango identifies three main phases in the NRM’s evolution. The initial phase was that of its first years in power (1986–1989), when a transitional broad-based coalition was in charge of rebuilding the basic framework of the

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Ugandan state. The second phase was 1989–1993, when the NRM became a permanent, exclusivist presence as a result of its gradual marginalization of the country’s other political groups. The third and final phase, 1993–1996, saw the Movement pursue consolidation by taking a series of undemocratic steps.5 Subsequent developments produced two additional stages. The adoption of the Movement Act in 1997 defined and legalized the process of setting up a partylike organization, in a situation where the operation of other parties was still officially illegal. By 2003, however, Uganda’s transition to multipartyism had got under way, leading to a new era for the ruling group. The National Resistance Movement Organisation (NRM-O) was registered, marking the beginnings of the formal “transformation” into a regular political party—albeit one that maintained its symbiotic relationship with the state—ready to run for election in a context about to be reopened to other contestants. These changes were all related to the NRM’s claims of inclusiveness, as well as to its organization. Genuine inclusiveness lost momentum after the broad coalition’s first years in power. The political leadership of the Movement was increasingly identified with its western Ugandan or Ankole origins. Simultaneously, internal change encouraged the NRM to tighten its organizational structure in spite of its populist condemnation of political organizations and the implicit dismissal of the latter’s relevance. The need to develop a better Movement organization had been repeatedly voiced.6 Organizational changes were brought about either through practice or by legislation; such initiatives ranged from certain loosely coordinated actions during election campaigns to the creation of the Movement’s parliamentary caucus and the setting up of local structures nationwide. The key aspect of the process of change was the dynamic relationship between the Movement and state institutions, both at central and local levels. At the national level, the original situation was one of fusion whereby “organs of the Movement were not separable from the state.”7 When the NRM gained power, its National Resistance Council (NRC) was installed as the country’s parliament. The NRC was then gradually opened up, first with the co-optation of ministers (including those of other political forces who had joined the broad-based government) and, after 1989, with the inclusion of indirectly elected representatives. This latter phase of expansion saw the creation of the National Executive Committee (NEC) as a standing body of the NRC.8 The resulting institutional setup was not based on separation but on the blending of powers, since the chair of the NRM—“the political body”—was automatically the head of both the Ugandan state and the NRC’s parliament. It was not until 1996 that the NRC and its chairmanship were replaced, respectively, by a separate, directly elected parliament and presidency. At the same time, the council’s politico-partisan functions, but not its legislative powers, were handed over to an expanded Movement secretariat and a restructured, more independent national executive committee.

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A parallel process of the gradual separation of state structures from Movement structures took place at the local level. The original functions of the Resistance Councils included, on the one hand, recruiting soldiers and providing food and other resources for the guerrillas and, on the other hand, performing administrative tasks such as resolving local disputes and distributing selected basic resources (Golooba-Mutebi 1999, 104–105). Following the end of the war, however, the councils increasingly came to resemble administrative organizations controlled by locally elected politicians, regardless, at least in theory, of the politicians’ political views and affiliations. In about 1987, for example, a large number of local assemblies were controlled by Democratic Party people (Kasfir 1991, 255). This process was further developed by the 1993 Decentralisation Statute, which renamed the councils “Local Governments,” on the grounds that the term “resistance” had to be eliminated “to distance them from the National Resistance Movement.”9 The implementation of the new constitution and of the Local Governments Act (1997) also went in the same direction, one that made local councils “more clearly part of the state and less part of the NRM” (Kasfir 1998, 55). Accordingly, the functions of partisan mobilization that had been previously carried out by the RCs were officially taken over by the local Movement committees established by the Movement Act. The committees were designed as a “political instrument” of the Movement itself, rather than an integral part of the state administrative apparatus like the local councils.10 The trend toward the separation of state and Movement bodies reflected recognition of the need to set up a strong, autonomous, more effective political organization; however, any consequent action was initially delayed by the NRM’s ideological aversion to party-like arrangements and its reliance on state institutions. The pressure on the NRM to improve its organization and to behave increasingly like a party was the result of a series of converging factors, including the increasingly sharp degree of political polarization, the official reinstitution of national elections, the resilience of old party affiliations, and the requirements of effective policymaking and legislation. Between the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, the partisan character of the NRM and the boundaries separating its people from non-NRM people had begun to be exposed. From 1989 on, the ruling group was sufficiently well organized to prevail at virtually every election held at all levels (Kasfir 1998, 58). By the time the 1994 campaign for the Constituent Assembly was held, the NRM had dropped its previous, deliberate lack of organization and had moved much closer to being a genuine political party, at least in the African sense of the term, African parties never having been particularly well organized or effective (Mamdani 1995b, 237; Kasfir 1994, 173). The results of the first direct election under the new regime were naively hailed by Museveni as a victory for the Movement’s candidates. This clearly revealed that, while all Ugandans were formally members of the Movement, there were in fact non-Movement

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candidates: “Before that, one could say that the NRM was different from political parties, different in that it had no organisation, only a headquarters. . . . With the Constituent Assembly elections, we are witnessing the birth of NRM as a political party. With that change, the Movement vs. party question is no longer a question of principle” (Mamdani 1995b, 237). The politics of constitution making allowed a clear, deep divide between movementists and multipartyists to emerge and crystallize. The constitutionalization of the Movement system prompted opposition parties to take a more radical stance in the face of the self-entrenchment of the ruling group. The culmination of the latter process was the Movement Act of 1997. This law, which reformed and potentially boosted the Movement, signaled a new awareness of and embodied the answer to specific organizational problems. By setting up less porous boundaries between the Movement and the “nonmovementists,” by identifying the organization’s constituency (i.e., the movementists), and by specifying a hierarchy of authority embodied in the political secretariat, the Movement Act defined the Movement more clearly as an organization. An international NGO stated that the new dispensation in fact replicated “the structures of a political organisation that [was] a party in all but name—the National Resistance Movement—as structures of the Ugandan state, creating a statesponsored political organisation disguised as a ‘political system’” (Human Rights Watch 1999, 59). What Kind of Movement? Its Bodies and Activities The Constitution entirely delegated the creation of the Movement’s governing bodies to parliament. Accordingly, as we have said, the Movement Act was passed in 1997, providing for the establishment of national representative and executive bodies as well as a complex hierarchy of local committees. The act closely resembled a party statute—some would claim that it was actually a party statute—even though Movement members adopted it in a public forum (parliament) rather than in a partisan, private arena. However, there were important aspects of the law that would not be normally found in the statute of a political party within a multiparty framework. For example, membership was related to citizenship: according to the Constitution, all Ugandans belonged to the Movement. Nevertheless, the idea of doing away with a boundary that officially distinguished insiders from the outsiders did not reflect political and organizational reality: in spite of the Movement’s inclusivist claims, what ultimately counted was whether there was a de facto distinction between those who behaved as members and those who did not. While the dividing line might have been blurred and more permeable in the case of the Movement than in other cases, it indeed existed. The country’s political folklore, for example, included reports of proparty activists or Movement supporters publicly crossing the floor to join the opposite camp.11 Yet, a

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formally all-inclusive membership, or the “compulsory nature of membership” (Human Rights Watch 1999, 58), carried significant implications. Nobody, for example, could be forced out of the organization. If expulsion was not an option, then the internal discipline required to promote a consistent political line—for example by pro-Movement parliamentarians during a House sitting—had to rely on alternative forms of sanction. Whether and which alternative sanctions were actually available was an open question. A second distinctive feature of the Movement Act was that, because the Movement was disguised as a public arrangement, its bodies recruited exclusively on a state officeholding basis.12 District Movement Committees, for example, consisted of local officials such as RDCs, MPs, district councillors, and chairs of county and subcounty councils. In other words, unless somebody already held public office, he or she had no chance of being on a Movement body. The almost total overlapping or interpenetration of state structures and Movement bodies contradicted previous attempts at separating the two. Yet, the recruitment mechanism, which was aimed at taking on board those who counted, did not prevent officials who were against the Movement from remaining outside the organization. The mayor of Kampala, for instance, was a prominent DP leader who openly “opted out.” Finally, the Movement received its funding directly from the national budget.13 The need for public funds was partly the consequence of an allembracing membership: so long as affiliates are not required to pay fees, any organization is going to need some alternative source of income. While state funding has gradually become the rule in Western multiparty systems, the key aspect of the Ugandan case was that only one organization was given access to such funds (this is not that different from multiparty polities where a hegemonic party enjoys unparalleled, illegal access to state resources, such as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional did in Mexico for several decades). While this made the Movement strictly dependent on parliament and the treasury for its funding, the granting of such funds was never seriously threatened. At the same time, as Kayunga argues, the NRM/Movement differed in other aspects from Africa’s best-known one-party experience, that of Tanzania (Kayunga 2001). In the regime established in Dar-es-Salaam between 1964 and the reforms of 1992, no party other than the ruling Tanzania African National Union was officially allowed to exist (except on the semiautonomous island of Zanzibar, where the Afro-Shirazi Party operated in conjunction with the national government until it merged with TANU in 1977 to form the new Chama Cha Mapinduzi [CCM]). In Uganda, legal room for the maintenance of a central office was essential for any opposition parties hoping to retain a minimum presence at ground level. One-partyism in Tanzania, moreover, was based on an idealized notion of traditional African societies as division-less. While the Ugandan regime was not always consistent on this point, it did emphasize the need to modernize the country and overcome Africa’s backwardness, including

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its sectarian divisions. The notion of belonging to the ruling group also had very different meanings in the two cases. In Tanzania, membership in the TANU/CCM was not indiscriminate but based on actual possession of a party card. In Uganda, in theory, being a citizen was tantamount to being a member of the Movement. The latter could not officially prevent anyone from running for election, nor could it select candidates to run on a partisan ticket. Vetting aspirants was only possible, in part, by using unofficial means. In Tanzania, by contrast, the party itself decided who would run for election, generally by selecting two members who would compete against one another for each parliamentary constituency. In the case of the party of Julius Nyerere and subsequently Ali Mwinyi, it was simply not conceivable that anybody could challenge the serving president or the official candidate; the Ugandan presidency, on the contrary, was officially open to anybody who could win sufficient votes. The Movement Act represented a turning point, given its considerable potential for strengthening the ruling organization. By mixing top-down cooptation and bottom-up elections, a vast structure was formally set up.14 Most national and local officeholders were going to have an internal electoral mandate, capable of encouraging participation and renewing legitimacy. First, from mid-1998 onwards Movement committees were set up at district, county, subcounty, parish, and village levels, and these closely mirrored the local governmental hierarchy. The introduction of the committees proved extremely controversial, not only because they consisted of co-opted state officials, but also because it was difficult to distinguish them from the (prohibited) party branches. Then, shortly after the election of local committees, a five-day national conference was ostentatiously convened, gathering about 1,300 delegates from various territorial or functional organs of the Movement and of the state.15 The conference, which had the task of allocating the full range of national leadership positions, was a relatively lively affair, characterized by the political confrontation between the “historicals,” the more moderate movementists, and the Young Parliamentarians.16 Yet, it was hardly surprising that no major internal democratic contest was eventually allowed to emerge. The leading posts of Movement chair and vice-chair went, predictably enough, to Yoweri Museveni and Moses Kigongo, both of whom already covered the same posts within the NRM. Both candidates were unopposed. Initially, the struggle for the position of national political commissar (NPC), to be elected by the 100-strong National Executive Committee, appeared to be much more open. It was here that the old and the new guard crossed swords. Yet, Museveni, who had the statutory power to select up to three candidates for the post, forced a compromise choice by fronting a little-known female politician, who eventually stood down, as the only other candidate standing in the way of James Wapakhabulo. The latter, a former Constituent Assembly and parliamentary speaker and probably the single most widely respected politician in

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the country at the time, thus became the operational head of the organization by winning the purported “election.”17 Wapakhabulo’s first task was to revamp the secretariat, which had originally been set up during the days of the bush war, in 1981, and subsequently formalized in 1986–1987 with the creation of internal directorates and of the NPC office. By avoiding any mention of it, the constitution had for some time sent into abeyance an informal structure that lacked both funding and a leader (notably since Eriya Kategaya, the former NPC, received a ministerial appointment).18 The new, reformed secretariat consisted of six directorates led by political officers accountable to the National Executive Council.19 By and large it retained its previous 220-strong staff,20 including eighty so-called “mobilizers,” of which another 200 or so were to be found in the districts, attached to the RDC’s offices. A rationalization exercise was undertaken in the middle of 1999, in keeping with the general restructuring process, whereby all members of the central staff were required to reapply for their jobs. The purpose of this was to produce a full record of the people actually employed by the secretariat and then to move more of them out into the districts, where there was a greater need for mobilizers, and to downsize the whole structure to improve both salaries and efficiency.21 The secretariat had a line of direct input and scrutiny in government and parliamentary activities, mainly because Museveni was officially its chair (although he was rarely involved personally in any of its activities), because the NPC had the habit of taking part in cabinet meetings and because the directors, most of whom doubled as MPs, were normally invited to meetings of the Movement’s parliamentary caucus. Not only were debates and actions involving the secretariat and the NEC often the source of cabinet plans and actions, but the latter bodies and their personnel played an important part in mobilizing support for government policies. For example, the two bodies were allegedly responsible for the expansion of the NRM’s program from ten points to fifteen points, while the NPC played a key role in directly resolving sensitive issues such as the parliamentary approval of controversial referendum legislation and the formulation of Uganda’s foreign policy during the Congo crisis.22 The main reason for the involvement of the secretariat was to appraise the political implications of prospective government policies. Its capacity to estimate reactions to the measures that were being discussed at the time hinged on its grassroots connections. The secretariat officially stood at the head of a nationwide structure. In earlier times, its grassroots influence was exercised primarily through the then district administrators (DAs), who were subsequently renamed resident district commissioners. These local representatives of the national executive were responsible for the creation and supervision of local resistance councils, for example, which is something they always did without trying to conceal their

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strong political identification with the government. Later, they were officially integrated into the civil service, and their previous mobilization functions were theoretically transferred to the new Movement committees, designed to establish systematic party-like links and improve the local effectiveness of governmental action. The aim of the new organs was to raise awareness and support among local communities with regard to the policies that the government was trying to implement—for example, the adoption of universal primary education, the establishment of new local government structures, or the passing of an amnesty law—and to let local people know how they were expected to behave when faced with similar novelties. Accordingly, considerable emphasis was placed on top-down communications. The committees’ “principal activity [was] to keep the population informed”23 rather than gathering local information and referring back to the top leadership. However, the new committees largely failed in their tasks, for a series of political, financial, and bureaucratic reasons. District committees normally held little more than an inaugural meeting, after which a considerable length of time was allowed to pass before a second meeting, if any, was called. Moreover, these initial meetings were only procedural—that is, they were largely concerned with assigning formal responsibilities through internal elections— and did not help in any way to firmly establish the district-level committee or the Movement offices, let alone those at lower levels. Local leaders pointed to the lack of facilitation as the cause of the generalized scarcity of activity. Organizing a meeting was certainly no easy thing, as each committee included not only local district councillors but also members of parliament and chairs of lower-level councils, who were scattered all over the district. “Lack of facilitation,” however, mainly referred to the fact that Movement officials were unpaid, and as is generally the case with voluntary work, progress came to depend entirely on individual commitment, capacity, and resources. Local committees received virtually no funding except for minimal allocations to Mchaka Mchaka political education courses (see next section) or for some indirect financial support provided by the local RDC. Thus, while levels of activity reportedly varied significantly from one place to another—“the maximum of activity is in western Uganda, and central Uganda, then east, and last in the north,”24 according to a leading officer—such activities were mostly limited to Mchaka Mchaka, which did not depend on the proper functioning of the committees but merely on the enterprise of single individuals such as the committee chair or the district commissioner. In the absence of meetings, there were few opportunities left to divulge the policy information that the Movement’s district heads occasionally received from the secretariat; conversely, the secretariat only received very scant feedback. Thus, the official activation of these local organs changed very little or nothing at all, and Uganda’s RDCs, who responded directly to the President’s Office, remained the pivotal figures in fostering political support and obstructing opposition at the local level.

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The Movement paid for the discontinuous, disorganized attempts at expanding its support at the grassroots level, which was something that parties initially did better despite the ban. Even the new local structures introduced by the Movement Act never quite got going at the grassroots level, except at election time when funds controversially became available.25 The Movement Act, as we have mentioned, envisaged the co-opting into Movement bodies of state officials such as MPs and local councillors. This merely clouded the previously established distinction between state and Movement bodies.26 The cumbersome presence of MPs on the Movement’s national executive, for example, reintroduced a degree of overlap between the Movement organization and the legislative assembly, something that earlier reforms were designed to eliminate. This overlap not only meant that the “neutrality” of national and local politico-administrative structures remained in doubt (not only politically, but also legally speaking), but also that the actual workings and the capacity of the Movement’s organs became rather more problematic. The overlap, which was instrumental in getting influential people involved in Movement politics, somehow backfired. The organization maintained its strong dependence on the state, rather than strengthening its own independence. This, in turn, created the problem of overload, with various demands for mobilization falling on the shoulders of the same people. As already mentioned, Movement district committees included, by statute, all the councillors from the district administrations (together with other officials, such as MPs from the area). These Movement committees tended to elect the head of the district administration as their chair. Thus, two-thirds of the heads of district governments doubled up as chairs of Movement committees, and as such found it difficult, and somewhat unrewarding, to devote time to Movement meetings. This was also partly true of other members of the Movement committees who already met in their role of local councillors. Neither did the act resolve the problem of clarifying organizational boundaries. The most vocal multipartyists could still access an illdefined organ such as the Movement parliamentary caucus.27 This ambiguity and “openness” meant that the Movement was “not always able to deal properly with ineffective elements within its ranks.”28 The bottom line is that any organization aiming at effective action requires internal coherence. As is predictable within “a loose multi-ideological aggregation with unrestricted entry and exit” (Ssenkumba 1997, 17), the Movement found it difficult to tolerate either internal dissent or the critical voices of people like Winnie Byanyima, Wandera Ogalo, Kizza Besigye, and Bidandi Ssali, which could be heard from the mid-1990s onward. Marketing Movement Ideas: The Mchaka Mchaka Courses Mchaka mchaka is a Swahili onomatopoeic term for the sound that jogging boots make during a military march. In Uganda, the term has long come to

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indicate a prominent instrument of political socialization conceived by the Movement at the time of the guerrilla war in the early 1980s, namely, political education courses: The Mchaka Mchaka have been organized since the bush days, in the army, for training civilian groups in arms and ideas. [They taught] basic things, for people not in the front line. Then, when we took power, the program was that people—especially their leaders—had to be trained as leaders through politicization programs. A political leader needs elementary knowledge on security. For example, on the gun—to understand and not to fear it. . . . It’s like scouting. . . . It’s a situation of common discipline to which these people are exposed for the first time.29

Initially, the Movement’s policy of indoctrination targeted secondary school heads and influential civil servants, with university students being added to the list after the Makerere strikes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, such courses were held in Entebbe, then in Namugongo, and later on at the newly created National School of Political Education in Kyankwanzi. The school taught national-level courses and was strategically designed to produce cadres with the task of “marketing Movement ideas” among the people.30 Civil servants, teachers, local councillors, university students, and other influential people supposedly helped to further spread the Movement’s gospel. Courses, decentralized from 1992–1993 on, focused primarily on local opinion leaders and then extended to the broader, often eager participation of common people (wananchi). Lasting two or three weeks, the programs taught subjects such as Ugandan history, decentralization, and military science. At the local level, they were coordinated by RDCs, who were later joined by the chairs of Movement committees. While the secretariat played a role in promoting the implementation of these programs, it was only when the largest groups were being trained that it provided some kind of support, such as the presence of a few mobilizers. A little funding came from the center, while other funds were raised from among the “volunteers” attending the courses. Other than that, the courses were entirely flexible and decentralized and could be organized virtually at all levels (parish, county, etc.). While Mchaka Mchaka were frequently presented as completely voluntary exercises, attending politicization programs was essentially mandatory for anybody who cared about their “career” or broader opportunities for social advancement (Dicklitch 1998, 71). Early on, a director for Mass Mobilisation made this clear by stating explicitly that those members of the Resistance Councils “who are not willing to undergo political education courses should resign because they will not be able to lead in [the] future. . . . In future, people who will not have undergone political education training will not be elected to any RC office.”31

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Between 1993 and 1997, the Mchaka Mchaka were formally suspended as a result of both internal and external pressures. Western donors and Ugandan parties repeatedly expressed concern that these teaching and training programs were being manipulatively used as indoctrination exercises and campaigning tools with a clear antiparty, pro-Movement bias. Open calls were made to end “political education programs, which advance the view that political parties are responsible for Uganda’s past troubles and serve to justify violations of civil and political rights” (Human Rights Watch 1999, 10). Such pressures, combined with a lack of funding, led to the courses being discontinued at the time of the 1994 Constituent Assembly and, then again, for a couple of years, between 1996 and 1998. The regime was questioning the utility and the implicit risks of the diffusion of basic military knowledge that it had previously supported as a kind of “democratization of the means of violence” (Kayunga 2001, 90). However, the fact that “political education was also a very effective way of winning support for the Movement” was also openly admitted in NRM circles.32 Thus, it was not surprising that the courses were restored as the referendum on political systems approached. When the Movement’s organs were constituted in 1998, Mchaka Mchaka were once again revitalized, and they took on an increasingly compulsory character. Although no record of the courses was held at the secretariat, it is alleged that over 100,000 people attended the courses between 1998 and 2000 alone.33 Mchaka Mchaka, like all other activities and projects of the Movement, were primarily sustained by relatively generous contributions from the country’s Treasury. A state-sponsored organization, the Movement received for its first 1998/1999 budget USh3.4 billion (US$2.2 million). This was increased to about USh6.9 billion ($4.5 million) for the fiscal year 1999/2000, thus doubling in the space of one year alone (the figure was slightly reduced to USh6.7 billion [$4.4 million] for 2000/2001).34 These were substantial amounts of money by Ugandan standards, as evidenced by the comprehensive refurbishment of the new Movement headquarters, the sizable building that previously housed the Uganda Development Corporation and that is strategically positioned right in front of the parliamentary building. Yet, most of the budget went into wages, while less than one-third was allegedly reserved for “activities,” with Mobilisation and Information obtaining the largest shares and the other directorates following at some distance. Moreover, it was also pointed out that state sponsorship made the secretariat entirely dependent on the Treasury, implying that “when the money doesn’t come, when there’s no money, we are affected as any other ministry.”35 In 1998, for example, there were some alleged financial problems with a budget that did not provide for specific funding, and thus the only funds available came from a small mobilization department in the President’s Office.36 Two additional sources of funding were also available, one of which was private donations. Despite the ban on private contributions to political parties,

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the act allowed the Movement to receive donations from Ugandan or foreign individuals or bodies; such donations simply required official approval from the Ministry of Finance. There is no official evidence of any such donations actually materializing. Movement members certainly benefited from money donated by businesspeople, notably at election time, but such donations were not normally of an official nature and probably went, in the main, directly to individual politicians. The second way the Movement tried to diversify its funding was to turn to commercial enterprise. In the early 1990s, the NRM had already taken this route by establishing a trading company, known as Danze, that was meant to generate income for the organization. Danze was said to have substantially funded the election campaigns in the mid-1990s. However, this infamous company dealt a severe blow to the Movement’s credibility when the company was found guilty of tax evasion. Nevertheless, the Movement Act reconfirmed the legality of business involvement. Thus, around the year 2000, the creation and operation of a second commercial company, the Heritage Foundation (which was owned by the Movement), was revealed to the public and as such sparked a certain degree of controversy. Following a procedure that other freight forwarders claimed to be irregular because of the lack of any proper, open tender, Heritage Terminal (HT), part of the Heritage Foundation, was handed the management of the Nakawa Inland Container Depot, as “caretaker” on behalf of the Uganda Revenue Authority, replacing another private company. HT then pushed for the cargo terminal to be transformed into an inland port at which all cargo arriving in, or passing through, the country would have to be checked. The fact that the Movement was using “state assets to generate money for its operations” created suspicion and resentment. In particular, it led to protests from competitors who claimed that the Heritage Terminal—whose directors included prominent politicians such as Eriya Kategaya and Kintu Musoke—was being unfairly privileged, and that requiring all goods to be channeled through one specific depot was both illegal and counter to the spirit of the government’s liberalization policies.37 Continuity or U-Turn? The Movement “Becomes” a Party In October 2003, the NRM-Organisation (NRM-O) was the first officially registered political party in Uganda in what was to mark the beginning of a new era in the country’s politics. By generating a transition within the transition, both the Movement—which was meant to remain in force until pluralist elections took place—and the NRM-O lived a parallel existence between 2003 and 2006, when the old secretariat was eventually dismantled.38 By the time an interim executive of the party assigned leadership positions, no efforts were made to disguise the fact that the “transformation” from system to party implied little or no change at all. Pending internal elections, the same people occupied key offices in both or-

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ganizations (for example, Museveni and Moses Kigongo were, respectively, the chair and vice-chair of both; at a lower level, somebody like Ofwono Opondo doubled as the director of information at the Movement secretariat and as spokesperson for the party, and so on).39 As an observer pointed out, it was simply a shift “from Museveni to Museveni . . . the infrastructure is the same.”40 During the period when the two organizations lived parallel, overlapping existences, the NRM-O was in reality being funded through the state budget (Kiiza, Svåsand, and Tabaro 2005, 6). Resources were employed, for example, for a recruitment drive that, by distributing free party cards, allegedly enrolled 12 million members, a figure that reportedly included a significant number of minors.41 Given that the party constitution puzzlingly stated that “every person who subscribes to the ideals and principles of the Movement at the time of registration of NRM shall automatically be a member of NRM unless that person opts out,”42 and given that all Ugandans had formally been members of the Movement, the membership of the new party should, in theory, have included every single citizen except those who explicitly renounced membership. The party gradually built up additional basic bodies by forming a parliamentary caucus in early 2005 and then going on to establish, at least nominally, countrywide local committees. As the Movement had done, the NRM-O relied heavily on state structures, particularly on the loyalty of most personnel within local government. By the end of the year, and shortly before the elections, the party held its national conference at Mandela National Stadium in Namboole. The huge gathering, in mid-November 2005, saw the presence of some 8,000–10,000 delegates, including MPs, district councillors, and also party representatives elected at district level during the previous month. At least some of them were paid to attend; for example, youth delegates were reportedly paid a per diem. The general meeting of the party was the occasion for Museveni, who had already “received” his nomination from the NRM interim NEC, to present his seven-point election program, which included a pledge to introduce Universal Secondary Education (USE).43 As the conference proceeded to assign leading positions, Museveni and Moses Kigongo, not surprisingly, retained office unopposed. The newly created post of secretary-general, which replaced that of national political commissar and was perceived as being strategically vital for those hoping to succeed the incumbent president, was one of the most hotly contested. Amama Mbabazi collected a massive 2,958 votes, thus winning out over his main contender, the secondplaced Cryspus Kiyonga (969), who was allegedly (although not openly) Museveni’s choice. Ngoma Ngime (313) and Kahinda Otafiire (267) trailed some distance behind.44 However, it soon appeared that, like Wapakhabulo when he became NPC in 1998, Amama Mbabazi had also been “sold a dummy.”45 As with the Movement, the NRM-O remained a poorly organized party that was only favored by the fact that the opposition at that time was even weaker. The internal primaries organized prior to the 2006 election, for example, were

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reportedly a sham. Neither Museveni nor the party were able to fully discipline internal politics. During the course of its history, the Movement had never developed any degree of internal democracy. Many politicians, used to individual merit politics, were not ready to fit in with the requirements of an organization. Several of them did not accept the outcome of the primaries and went on to run as independents. Eventually, seventeen of the approximately thirty-six candidates that made it to parliament without a party platform later agreed to lend their support to the ruling party.46 Divisions also plagued the Movement’s central organs. An undercover struggle soon emerged between the new secretary-general, Amama Mbabazi, and the vice-chair, Hajj Moses Kigongo.47 The former, supposedly in charge of the organization, hardly ever set his foot in the new headquarters, a modest building at 10 Kyadondo Road in Nakasero; this led to rumors that he was running a kind of parallel office. The vice-chair, for his part, was reportedly controlling activities at the headquarters, which at this point lay somewhat moribund. Money had become increasingly scarce, and the little that there was continued to be personally controlled by Museveni, who had earlier declared the Movement secretariat “dead” and the NRM-O “infiltrated.” The party’s own interim leadership was only convened by the president about one year after the NRM-O had been launched, confirming the view that Museveni did not actually want the NRM-O “to function as an institution,”48 since it may have developed into a platform for some potential challenger, perhaps Amama Mbabazi himself. The party was more or less starved, to the point where creditors raided its central office to demand payment for outstanding bills allegedly amounting to between $200,000 and $400,000.49 Lack of any independent funds was made worse by the fact that no fees were charged for party membership. Some senior officials resented this total reliance on Museveni’s control of the purse strings, which slowed down party activities or rendered them extremely intermittent, when not entirely impeding them. At the same time, people in the higher echelons of the organization probably expected to get part of the money that was to trickle down for “mobilization” purposes. Thus, in early 2007, the 500 or so NEC delegates pointed their finger at the secretarygeneral, requesting that he stop doubling up as a minister or else quit his party post. This was presented as an attempt to make the party more efficient or, rather, to revive a party whose central office was crippled and whose few local branches often had to be closed for lack of money.50

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Neither Monopoly nor Pluralism: Uganda’s Hegemonic Party System

The reform process the Movement underwent over the years and its impact on Uganda’s broader political landscape have been interpreted in different ways.

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In particular, there are conflicting views over the room that was actually granted to organized opposition. Some observers suggested that the NRM “permitted a de facto, though unacknowledged, form of party competition to become the basis for the actual practice of Ugandan electoral democracy” (Kasfir 1998, 58). In spite of the ban, the argument went, the country “in reality operate[d] more or less as a three-party system, with the NRM increasingly taking on most of the characteristics of the other parties”—that is, the DP and the UPC (Ssenkumba 1998, 179). However, very different interpretations have also been advanced, suggesting, for example, that it was difficult to look at the arrangements introduced by the Movement Act “except as a form of partisan party structure normally associated with one-party states” (Human Rights Watch 1999, 58); indeed, it could be argued that the “new” Movement was merely “a state-supported political organisation—a single-party in all but name” (Oloka-Onyango 2000, 55). Both these interpretations contain elements of truth. This is why Uganda’s no-party experience is best conceptualized as something similar to a hegemonic party-state system. That is, it is neither a full-fledged one-party state (i.e., political monopoly) nor a three-party system (i.e., political pluralism), but a situation in which one organization exercises political supremacy, with smaller opposition groups incapable of mounting any serious challenge to this dominant organization. Two assumptions underlie this argument. The first is that, as already noted, the Movement was always a partisan political organization rather than a “system” as claimed by its leaders. This partisan organization aimed to place its people in positions of power and keep them there. No mantra about an all-embracing “system” could hide this basic fact. The notion of a hegemonic party system also implies that if party systems are defined as “the set of patterned interactions in the competition among parties” (Mainwaring and Scully 1995, 4), a key distinction is the actual degree of competition that characterizes such interactions. On the one hand, monoparty systems display a complete lack of such competition; on the other hand, genuine two- or multiple-party polities are expressions of pluralist competition. In what remains an unsurpassed understanding of parties and party-like political organizations, Giovanni Sartori provides the best synthetic description of the features displayed by hegemonic party systems. Such systems belong to a variety of arrangements that are one-party centered and yet display a periphery of secondary and indeed “second class” minor parties. . . . [The latter] may be an empty façade . . . [or else] may be relevant in some substantive respect. . . . The pattern can be described as follows. The hegemonic party neither allows for a formal nor a de facto competition for power. Other parties are permitted to exist, but as second class, licensed parties; for they are not permitted to compete with the hegemonic party in antagonistic terms and on an equal basis. Not only does alternation not occur in fact; it cannot occur, since the possibility of a rotation in power is not even envisaged. . . . No real

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sanction commits the hegemonic party to responsiveness. Whatever its policy, its domination cannot be challenged. . . . A hegemonic party system is definitely not a multiparty system, but is, at best, a two-level system in which one party tolerates and discretionally allocates a fraction of its power to subordinate political groups.51

Przeworski similarly refers to “hegemonic systems” as those regimes “in which some or even all opposition would be allowed but the ruling party would not be threatened with losing office” (Przeworski et al. 2000, 26). The well-known Freedom House classifications of political regimes adopt the term “dominant” rather than “hegemonic.” The underlying concept, however, is quite similar to Sartori’s: “Dominant party polities are systems in which the ruling party (or front) dominates government, but allows other parties to organise or compete short of taking control of the government.”52 Ultimately, hegemonic and dominant party systems are best understood as analytically different categories, where the first indicates a noncompetitive regime, while the second points to a scarcely competitive one. Yet, both systems may reveal a situation whereby the governing organizations’ “political survival is to a large degree due to the fact that even prior to the founding election they had staked a strong claim to represent the new nation (or regime, or dominant racial/ ethnic group) with its particular historic project, and had managed to occupy a strategic position of power” (Giliomee and Simkins 1999, 2). The instrumental role played by no-party elections in securing the Movement’s hegemony in Uganda compares strikingly with the emergence of dominant-party systems in Mexico, Taiwan, Malaysia, and South Africa. In the latter countries, initial decisions concerning the kind of electoral system and competition had a profound impact both on the nature of the emerging ruling group and on its control over its own members, the opposition, and society at large (Giliomee and Simkins 1999, 13). In Uganda, the individual merit principle granted the system a degree of legitimacy by enabling the Movement to partly co-opt a fragmented and largely neutralized opposition: “The idea of personal merit is all embracing because no one is denied the right to vie for political office,” and even people who did not believe in the concept of personal merit, for example, could still become members of parliament.53 For the country’s opposition parties, the reality was a rather mixed bag. Parties were restricted by the constitution. While constitutional limits had the status of a fundamental law, exactly how breaches of such general norms were actually to be prosecuted was for a long time not specified, as the statutory law that was necessary to implement the word of the constitution was only passed in 2002. Thus, for example, there was no definition of the punishment to be meted out to a party leader organizing a public rally. This lacuna allowed parties occasional scope for action. Yet, repression was often practiced at the hands of government bodies, especially by the powerful RDCs. The police

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themselves were at times deployed to forcibly break up political gatherings. Margins for party political action varied from one region to another, thus reflecting the stronghold that government had over different parts of the country, at times as much as the discretionary powers of local authorities. Parties were allowed more room for maneuver in the northern districts, for example, whereas they faced a much stricter regime in areas such as western Uganda. One clear exception was Kampala, where they were relatively free to conduct parapolitical activities such as seminars. In the capital, candidates linked to the opposition even managed to win two consecutive mayoral elections. By and large, however, the limited organization that parties had enjoyed in the past virtually disappeared throughout the country. What was left were the so-called kakuyege activities, or informal and secretive, mostly one-on-one, politics. Not surprisingly, the true extent of restrictions fully emerged at election time. Both at national and local levels, political competition was supposed to be based on individual merit rather than party affiliation, but the NRM—and at times the parties themselves—entered the field and bent the rules on more than one occasion. In both the 1996 and the 2001 national election campaigns, discrimination and manipulation by the ruling group were widespread; so much so that initially parties reacted to the rigging of the presidential race by boycotting the subsequent parliamentary election. Under no-party politics, therefore, the Movement’s hegemonic status derived from two main factors. First was the very absence of any seriously organized competitor—that is, the broader context of unorganized politics that the principle of individual merit generated. Second, the Movement could still count on a privileged, if ambiguous, relationship with the state, which further reinforced its advantage over all other political organizations in terms, for example, of access to patronage and funding or of the manipulation of the opposition. In this sense, the effectiveness that the Movement organization retained despite its scarce interest in resolving internal organizational problems (and the fact that the structures established by the Movement Act never became fully operative) was the result of exogenous factors rather than any reflection of the Movement’s own organizational strength. In other words, it was strictly a relative or contextual effectiveness. Hegemony and organizational fragility coexisted in the Movement. The latter remained entirely identified with the figure of Museveni, since it lacked virtually any institutional forms. Its organizational effectiveness remained questionable even after the internal changes implemented by law. In the words of one long-standing observer of Ugandan politics: They have invested little energy in building a vibrant Movement. The NRM’s National Secretariat is a moribund organisation with little sense of direction. . . . Why don’t they create a political party and challenge the opposition? . . . Part of the answer is that they failed to use their time in power to create a strong organisation . . . the hollow shell that the NRM has become would become apparent to everyone. (Kasfir 2000, 75–76)

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During the 1996 and 2001 election campaigns, as well as the 2000 and 2005 referendum “crusades,” Ugandan politics clearly revealed those features highlighted in this chapter. A part of the population was mobilized to support a relatively well-defined, undoubtedly partisan Movement. Museveni’s campaigns relied on the well-entrenched hegemony of the ruling organization. Yet, mobilization of local support still largely hinged on ad hoc measures and presidential patronage, together with the improper use of local authorities, rather than on any well-established, independent political structure.

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6 The State of the Old Parties in a No-Party State

WHEN, IN 2005, POLITICAL PARTIES WERE INVITED TO REGISTER FOR the upcoming multiparty elections—the first in Uganda for over twenty-five years—the old parties initially “refused to register on the grounds that they were long-standing organizations whose existence was beyond dispute” (GoloobaMutebi 2006, 4, emphasis added). Yet, what kind of existence had they led over two decades of no-party rule? The clever institutional setup established by the National Resistance Movement was designed not only to restore electoral politics, but also to neutralize other political organizations without entirely alienating them. Thus, while Ugandan political parties were severely limited in what they could or could not do, they were not outlawed. Several of the most prominent members of the old parties were initially offered cabinet positions and were co-opted into the NRM “broad-based” government. This was notably the case for the leadership of the Democratic Party: the likes of Paul Ssemogerere, Robert Kitariko, Zachary Olum—to mention but a few—all held ministerial posts for a number of years. The same goes for the small Conservative Party, whose founding father Jehoash Mayanja-Nkangi was for years in charge of the important Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs. Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress constituted a somewhat different case. This party bore the stigma of the hated, defeated, yet unrepentant enemy—the former president himself lived in exile until his death in late 2005—and neither the government nor the UPC showed any wish to compromise. Nevertheless, despite the UPC’s repeated calls to boycott elections, even senior party leaders actually stood for election to local councils, to the National Resistance Council (acting as the country’s parliament for a decade), to the Constituent Assembly, or to the directly elected no-party parliament that legislated from 1996 to 2006.1 The so-called broad-based government, however, became increasingly less inclusive, and Ugandan politics entered a new phase of its history in 1994. 109

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The Constituent Assembly was instrumental in entrenching the no-party design in the new constitutional order. This clearly showed that such an arrangement, and the “Movement” itself, was being gradually institutionalized rather than simply constituting a temporary setup to be shortly dismantled. Political forces became more polarized, with the DP joining up with the UPC in the opposition camp and a movementists-versus-multipartyists divide becoming increasingly apparent. Uganda’s constitution confirmed the no-go areas for political parties: the key article 269 listed delegates’ conferences, public rallies, local branches, and the sponsoring of candidates for election as those areas where the presence and involvement of political parties was prohibited. However, the no-party framework still allowed existing parties to maintain their central headquarters as well as other assets such as party publications. Nor was party membership formally outlawed. This was the background against which the actual involvement of the political parties in Uganda’s no-party politics, and their impact on such politics, is investigated here. As a first step in this direction, the present chapter identifies the strategies and the organizational forms pursued by Uganda’s two “historical” political parties—namely, the Democratic Party and the Uganda People’s Congress, which are considered to have been the cornerstones of opposition to the no-party system for almost twenty years.

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The Organizational Strategies of Opposition Parties

Political parties under the no-party system were constrained legally and institutionally. The kind of organization that opposition parties had to rely on during the NRM years may be explained in terms of the strategic choices they were faced with at that time. Generally speaking, such opposition parties had three broad options: integration, boycotting, or violence. The first possible course of action was to join the system in full, which would provide party members with the opportunity to work from within core institutions (whether at the central or local level) with the aim of either pushing for change or merely monitoring the working of such institutions in the most effective manner. For example, being elected to parliament enabled opposition MPs to closely scrutinize government policies, to have a say in their making—notably through the influential parliamentary committees—and even to lobby Movement MPs for support on specific issues. In some cases, party politicians could even be made ministers and thus become most directly involved in the process of policy formulation. This Trojan-horse strategy, however, was criticized by some, as it would lend legitimacy and credibility to a regime to which multipartyists were ideologically opposed. Furthermore, integration was a risky move in that it could favor the government’s attempt to

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co-opt its opponents, especially in the absence of any electoral or parliamentary parties binding individual members of the opposition together. Second, a compromise option between integration and the recourse to violence was a cohesive, substantial boycott. This would put political and moral pressure on the legitimacy-seeking efforts of a government that claimed to be democratic, participatory, and broad-based. Boycotts were quite common even among those African countries that embraced multipartyism during the 1990s. In Uganda, the evident drawback of such a strategy was the potential loss of influence on the institution-building process that had begun, as well as on specific government policies, particularly as long as the regime could count on a strong degree of international legitimacy. In other words, the risk of a boycott was that it could imply the loss of any remaining channels for constructive input and could leave the country with an even worse, unreformed system. The third alternative was that of armed struggle. With the NRM itself providing an example of the rich rewards of military success, the threat of “going to the bush” became a recurrent feature of the opposition’s rhetoric. Former president Milton Obote himself occasionally called on the people to find a military leader for a general insurgency.2 The two rebel movements that have ravaged the north of the country since Museveni took over power—Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement and its successor, Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army— demonstrated the incapacity of the NRM to completely prevent armed struggle from emerging or surviving. However, the people’s general unwillingness to see the country plunged into yet another civil war and devastated further by armed factions represented a substantial hurdle to the organization of any guerrilla takeover. Moreover, the healthy economic performance of the regime provided it with significant consensus among broad sections of the population, and by the end of the 1990s, a substantial part of the political class had “a stake in stability.”3 If anything, the average age of the DP and UPC leaderships meant that the two parties were an unlikely vanguard of the armed struggle, with all the sacrifices and commitment that the latter would require. Besides the legal restrictions in place and the strategic options available, political parties were also influenced by noninstitutional factors when it came to choosing and developing their organizational strategies. Such factors included the legacy of past conflicts, the availability of international and popular support, the resource gap between Kampala and the rest of the country, and the sheer benefits of “joining in.” The reasoning and motivations of Uganda’s party leaders and supporters were shaped by deeply rooted historical conflict, whether ideological, communal, or politico-partisan. This was especially true of the uncompromising attitude that saw former president Milton Obote’s UPC opposed to the NRM, which, as will be seen, heavily influenced the internal evolution of the UPC. As concerns international support, parties tried hard to lobby proMovement donors to change their minds and increase external demands for the

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opening up of the system to multiparty elections. The strategy of the Democratic Party was profoundly affected by the availability of indirect funding from a German NGO in favor of political reform. The UPC, by contrast, was repeatedly refused funding from a similar NGO that it had previously had close ties with during the 1960s and 1980s. The constraints on resources outside Kampala constituted a further factor. This inevitably created a huge gap between the capital and other parts of Uganda in terms of existing and potential activities; the strategies adopted for the urban center of the country were hardly applicable to most rural areas. The prospect of benefiting from joining the system also played an important role here. This is true both in terms of individual gains, such as the influence and salary that an opposition politician could obtain by becoming an MP, and in terms of collective benefits, such as the steering of government resources toward loyal areas (or the use of such resources to pacify strife-torn regions). Finally, opposition parties had to appraise the extent of their own popular backing. People were generally more supportive of the opposition in northern Uganda than in the west, for example. They had to consider the positions taken by other forces (for example, the boycott of the 1996 parliamentary election would have had a very different outcome if it had been afforded unconditional support by all opposition forces). Furthermore, political parties depended on the changing inclination of the Movement to co-opt, cooperate, or compromise with opposition groups. In short, the organizational development of Uganda’s political parties depended primarily on: (1) legal or institutional restrictions, (2) noninstitutional constraints, and (3) overall strategic choices. Given the framework of constraints and options, what we need to discover is the nature of the actual organizational strategies adopted by the two most prominent parties—the Democratic Party and the Uganda People’s Congress—in trying to retain influence and gain power. The Democratic Party had been the closest ally of the NRM since the latter had taken over power. By the late 1980s, however, there was a gradual, steady reduction in the number of DP ministers, and a short time later, the Democrats insisted on ending the interim period by completely lifting the ban on party activities. The Constituent Assembly and the presidential and parliamentary elections prompted a complete U-turn by the party leadership. First, the DP moved from being a government partner to being the “semiofficial” opposition when Paul Ssemogerere submitted his candidature for the presidency in 1996. The subsequent boycott of the parliamentary election meant that the DP shifted toward becoming an extraparliamentary opposition force. However, the DP had nowhere to go after it had opted out of the parliamentary election. The boycott strategy adopted by Uganda’s opposition forces had been incomplete, particularly given that a faction of the UPC went on to join

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parliament. However, “going to the bush” was never on the agenda of an organization with a nonviolent tradition. Thus, by the time of the 1998 local elections, the DP had retracked to some extent. This was apparent in the two successive Kampala mayoral contests, in 1998 and 1999, which were won by members of the DP. By the time of the 2001 and 2006 presidential and parliamentary elections, the party strategy avoided any call for boycotting the polls. However, the Democrats were also pursuing a second, related strategy. The socalled rejuvenation of the party scheme was planned, and partly implemented, by a youth wing, an ancillary NGO, and what may be termed the politics of kakuyege (see next section). It was through these three channels that for a number of years the DP displayed a certain liveliness and unity of purpose. Internal divisions, however, loomed on the horizon. The Uganda People’s Congress, after its experience in the Constituent Assembly, saw the emergence of two distinct factions within its leadership. The presidential poll of 1996 was a severe test of party unity because of the dispute over the issue of supporting Ssemogerere as a common candidate for all believers in multipartyism. When it was alleged that the election had been rigged—or rather when it was perceived and said to be so—the UPC’s leaders failed to agree on whether to continue with the parliamentary election or to restore the party’s long-standing strategy of boycotting the new regime. This political difference immediately led to a split in the party. Obote and his closest allies in Kampala (the Rwanyarares and Odakas) brought Uganda House (UPC headquarters) back to a position of no-compromise with “the Movement’s constitution and parliament.” The secretary-general, Cecilia Ogwal, and other younger or more independent-minded members (like Ben Wacha and Omara Atubo, Aggrey Awori, and the late professor Akiiki Mujaju) challenged the party president, tried to obtain the backing of the party to enter parliament, and thus forced a rupture in the party. The division was one between an ideological and symbolic opposition and a more pragmatic—though hardly less radical—approach. As a result, the UPC developed two separate leadership bodies, although this subdivision was only partly reflected at lower levels, where such divisions were not always understood. Given the limitations on party activity at that time, it would not have been easy for the party to redouble the scant organization that it occasionally managed to put in place. The remainder of this provides an analysis of the organization of the UPC and the DP under Uganda’s no-partyism. The underlying assumption is that even in a situation of formal repression, parties were still able to develop underground organizations and activities, at least in theory. Thus, apart from the constitutional or legal restrictions on party activity, an empirical investigation may shed light on the effective presence of Uganda’s political parties at the grassroots level and on the actual degree of organization that they managed to preserve during the long years of partial political repression.

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Continuity and Lack of Formalization in the Democratic Party

During the decade 1986–1996, the Democratic Party gradually redefined its role in Uganda’s politics from being the closest partner of the NRM in government to leading the opposition. Key to this move was the experience of the Constituent Assembly, which changed the general perception of what the “broad-based Movement government” was about and of how the DP and its members could relate to this government. The advent of the NRM saw the DP lose a substantial number of members, partly because of the DP’s eventual decision to join the NRM and its government. This was initially meant to be a temporary measure; however, in the mid-1990s the new political arrangement was constitutionalized, thus making it clear that it was no longer a transitional situation. Many of those DP members who had not fully embraced the Movement resented being forced to join it at a time when the actions of their own political organization were being restricted: “The contrast between the two, the fact that one had to be either NRM or DP, became more evident.”4 This somehow stimulated the renewal and strengthening of party identification. By the 1996 presidential election, the party leader Paul Ssemogerere, who had been a government minister up until the previous year, was now challenging Yoweri Museveni on a pro-multipartyism platform. The DP’s decision to boycott the subsequent parliamentary election, officially on the grounds that the Movement had rigged the presidential contest, marked the most important rupture with the regime. Two years later, however, the party was to some extent back in the game, as it successfully ran two consecutive mayoral campaigns in Kampala. Despite having an extremely weak—at times hardly detectable— presence, the DP was for many years the most prominent and best-organized political force in Uganda other than the Movement. The question remains, nevertheless, as to the actual substance of the Democratic Party within the noparty framework. The DP was a Catholic-based party dating back to the mid1950s, and one that had been “institutionalized” in the minds of many Ugandans. In this sense, the party included and represented a significant segment not only of the opposition but of the population as a whole, to the same extent that it did during every single one of Uganda’s postindependent regimes. In concrete terms, the Democratic Party consisted of a poorly furnished, severely underfunded office in central Kampala (in the late 1990s, one would be told the telephone line had been “recently cut off”), a well-known party leadership, thousands of supporters in town, and the people who every day came and went from its City House headquarters. In addition, the party had a largely inactive, poorly informed membership (either officially affiliated or quietly supportive) in the countryside that hardly ever interacted with the party’s central organs.

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Given the very weakness of political parties under the “no-party democratic regime,” the struggle for a full-fledged, competitive multiparty scenario proved extremely difficult. Quite understandably, the leaders of the Democratic Party devoted much of their attention, energies, and efforts to this single issue. Two complementary lines of action were pursued to achieve this objective. On the one hand, the party pressured the then powerholders to open up the political process to non-Movement organizations. This they did by lobbying the international community, boycotting elections, issuing antireferendum press releases, organizing seminar speeches, promoting interparty coalition building, making occasional policy proposals, and other activities. At the same time, an undercover strategy was devised to revive party structures—or to “rejuvenate” them as the DP itself defined this process—without waiting for parties to be legally free to do so. This strategy included questioning the party leadership, organizing underground (and at times open) campaigns, reestablishing central and local organs, making use of parallel organizations (such as the Foundation for African Development and the Uganda Young Democrats), and occasionally fielding candidates. It is this second aspect that this chapter is directly concerned with. Predictably enough, the central bodies of the Democratic Party fared slightly better than their ineffectual counterparts in the Ugandan countryside. However, although they were successful in maintaining a tenuous organizational presence, the party headquarters and central organs suffered an extreme paucity of funding, and their meetings were generally sporadic or nonexistent. The last time the party convened a Delegates’ Conference was back in 1980, when Ssemogerere was elected party president. Several explanations have been given for the fact that this party organ failed to meet for over twenty years to relaunch party organization and internal democracy of the DP. During the period 1981–1984, the party became so constantly harassed by Obote’s government that organizing a conference seemed to be impossible without provoking the regime’s violent reaction. When restrictions were subsequently introduced in the late 1980s, it was initially the DP itself that, in view of the disruption brought about by civil war, basically accepted the NRM’s idea of an interim period under a broad-based no-party government. By the early 1990s, when the Democrats had begun to question the professed intention of the NRM to free political parties, Museveni created a climate in which the full restoration of party organizations was institutionally repressed and did not enjoy widespread support from Ugandans. The party statute, which required such a conference to be convened every two years, clashed with the country’s new constitution, which explicitly prohibited such general meetings. Some party leaders emphasized the danger, the sheer impossibility, of convening such a conference under existing circumstances. When, for example, a self-styled “Mobilisers Group” emerged from within the party and twice tried to convene a public rally in central Kampala in 1993, it was forced to call it off because of the security

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crackdown implemented by the regime (Human Rights Watch 1999, 38). Other prominent members of the party, however, pointed to the lack of sufficient political will or financial resources to hold the conference. When voices within the DP demanded that the party persevere with its conference plans, Ssemogerere himself came under attack for blocking the only forum that could have ended his mandate and replaced him as party president.5 In the absence of a full-fledged conference, the party retained a degree of internal coherence and effectiveness through its smaller organs, such as the National Executive and the National Council. While the National Executive Committee was the intellectual and moral cornerstone of the DP, the National Council stood somewhere between the NEC and the Delegates’ Conference. In a situation where delegates could not be heard in full, the Council’s approval provided some broader legitimacy to the actions and the decisions of the party executive. From 1994, the National Council met on a very irregular basis, and never more than twice a year. The council consisted of the thirty-six members of the executive and an additional forty-five representatives, one from each district. Compared to the NEC, this organ’s meetings clearly required extra logistic and financial means, as the majority of its members came from the Ugandan countryside. At a meeting held at the beginning of 1999, an uncertain number of district representatives (somewhere between two and fifteen) were still missing. Meetings of the National Executive Committee were somewhat more regular, especially after 1995, when its officials got together every one to three months. Nevertheless, the NEC itself was severely depleted for a considerable time. Defection, inactivity, death, and retirement had reduced effective membership to around fifteen. At a meeting of the National Council held toward the beginning of 1999, the executive was fully reconstituted by electing to each vacant office one of three candidates nominated by a specially appointed “credentials committee.” The relative formalization and complexity of this procedure would seem to indicate that the DP’s inner circle had retained a certain organizational capacity. A similar capacity also appears to be substantiated by the fact that aspiring members still had to go through an informal screening process. The importance of recruitment criteria had been highlighted by several observers. It has been suggested, for example, that the stricter a party’s membership requirements, the stronger the psychological commitment and militant involvement of its members (Janda 1970, 111; Panebianco 1988). The Democrats tried to keep the affiliation process under control to avoid manipulation on the part of the regime or self-interested individuals. It was not unheard of, for example, for people to adhere to the party only to quickly resign en masse to attract the attention of the executive and be rewarded for crossing over to the Movement. Alternatively, young people would allegedly be bribed to buy cards, commit some visible act of vandalism, and then be exposed by the government as Democrats.6

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However, this partial control over the effective functioning of the party did not extend much beyond party headquarters. After the political polarization fostered by the constitution-making process, the DP reaffirmed a clearer notion of party membership. The party accordingly began a registration exercise, but it lacked the very structures needed to carry out the exercise countrywide. Thus, the only membership figures available remained those from 1980, and no party official dared estimate the actual number of party members. Some district party leaders did show an awareness of the need for counting heads, and they made attempts at providing lists of local members.7 A complete registration process never took place, however, both because of the disorganization of the party and because of the dangers resulting from Uganda’s antiparty regulations. Selling party membership cards was seen as a hazardous way of exposing followers to discrimination by government and Movement authorities. Fear was also increased by the confusion surrounding the very legality of selling or holding party cards. While most party leaders were aware that there was no official ban on such activities, the common perception at the local level was that cards were simply outlawed.8 Under a prevalent climate of fear, only those few who were not intimidated actually bought party cards or renewed their party membership. Therefore, with the exception of the central organs, the party activities that remained were permeated by informality. In part, this reflected the weak degree of institutionalization and the substantial reliance on individual leaders that characterizes African parties even where conditions of more complete political freedom prevail. In Uganda’s case, however, the scant formalization of party activities was exacerbated by the need to remain undercover, by the decline of inactive party structures, by the recourse to surrogate forms of political action, and by the sheer lack of funding. These elements are worth addressing one by one. The Informal Politics of Kakuyege The presence of local branches at the regional, district, or lower levels should be the main sign of the state of health of a party’s organization—that is, of its nationwide capacity to be present at the grassroots level. However, there was very little information about the situation of local party branches in Uganda. Parties were allowed to maintain a central office with leadership organs, but local branches were banned by law. It was relatively easier to carry out political activities in Kampala, so they were more open and frequent there. On the contrary, parties at the local level were faced with considerable resistance from a government that, far from the watchful eye of foreign missions and backed by Uganda’s illiberal laws, clamped down heavily on the movements of party activists and followers.

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A long period of scant activity and recruitment, together with repression at the hands of Uganda’s resident district commissioners and other local authorities, defection to the Movement, and a severe lack of funding combined to produce a situation in which the Democrats no longer had full-fledged branches in several areas but only individual members. Local party branches had been decimated. Indeed, they had almost disappeared, with positions left vacant and only a handful of activists trying to meet secretly.9 Nevertheless, this pattern had regional variations, due to the greater traditional presence of the party in certain districts, to the whims of local authorities, and to the capacity of local party leaders. In some of the regions in which the Democrats had stronger roots—such as the West Nile and Gulu—political activity was less of a risk than in those areas where the regime had its strongholds. In West Nile, for instance, the commitment of a prominent member of the party guaranteed a better, albeit poorly organized, party structure and helped ensure a huge electoral majority for the opposition. One prominent feature of the low degree of formalization of the DP’s politics was what party officials referred to as “doing kakuyege.” The word kakuyege is a diminutive form of the Luganda word nkuyege, meaning “termites,” thus suggesting “small termites.” In Museveni’s words, “enkuyege are very small ants which operate in huge numbers. Once they invade an area, they are able to cover a large piece of ground, penetrating through every crevice in the grass.”10 Thus, just like ants that “typically array themselves in a line as they travel around hunting for food,” small groups of individuals would engage in secretive, often door-to-door campaigning (Tamale 1999, 181). The politics of kakuyege thus consisted of “quiet work, like that of the termites: nobody notices it, but the job gets done.”11 Kakuyege was the secretive politics of furtive individual contacts, word-of-mouth messages, small nightly gatherings. However, it was also the shrewd use of all social occasions and events—parties and seminars, funerals and weddings, public and even government functions—as a pretext for meeting other members and followers. In this way, local members were somehow capable of keeping up their activities, finding ways of getting messages across in any situation in which party members could interact and reach out. In this sense, organizing a meeting would no longer necessarily be a problem. A family birthday party would do—“you create the occasion.”12 The very aim of doing kakuyege was to awaken the party’s “silent membership,”13 to get messages across, to reach out to those followers still eager to talk politics but who were unable to do so in an open manner—all without identifying with the Movement. A fragile, rather intermittent underground network was thus created, linking the party’s leadership with the grassroots, Kampala with the countryside. In this sense, kakuyege was both in addition to, and a substitute for, more orthodox, formalized, open, and official politicking. Because party organs at the time were hardly functioning at all, kakuyege

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proved of vital importance to the DP and its people, as it greatly helped them keep going. Party Surrogates: The Foundation for African Development and the Uganda Young Democrats The porous nature of interorganizational boundaries and the mixing of roles were further signs of the largely ad hoc character of party arrangements. This was clearly illustrated by the skillful use the Democrats made of the Foundation for African Development (FAD). The FAD was created in 1980 along the lines of German political foundations such as the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), which had been operating in the country since the 1960s. While the FAD was a registered NGO, and thus officially independent from the Democratic Party, its founders were prominent DP figures such as Paul Ssemogerere and Anthony Ssekweyama. As the latter explained, in 1980 the “DP hadn’t been revived yet: parties were not allowed, so we founded an NGO.”14 Party leaders themselves consistently characterized FAD as “not independent of the party,” “a DP organization,” or even a “quasi-organ of the party.” “It’s the NGO of the party, it has its roots in the party.”15 Although any obvious overlap between the office bearers of the two organizations had been avoided in the past, in 1998, the DP’s publicity secretary was appointed head of the FAD. The relationship between the Democrats and the FAD was a political and financial one; although politically the FAD depended on the DP, financially it was largely the other way round. The Foundation for African Development did have a substantial budget (roughly DM350,000, or $200,000 a year), which it received entirely from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Thus, through the intermediation of the FAD on the Ugandan side and the KAS on the German side, the Democratic Party was indirectly connected to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the political referent of KAS. This linkage could be explained on the basis of a common Christian conservative background: as D. A. Low had pointed out, the DP itself was “a Christian Democratic Party.”16 The stated objectives of the FAD included the promotion of civic education regarding democratic values and developmental issues. However, educational activities were largely aimed at DP members. Party cadres, for example, were the ones who were systematically invited to development workshops and political seminars, and they received free copies of The Messenger magazine or other written material on political issues published by the NGO. Political seminars, in particular, were so skillfully used as to become a surrogate—a weak surrogate, but an important one given the circumstances at the time—for party branch activities. This reflected the basic idea that “when you don’t have the branches to do the job, you need something else in place to do it! As a matter of fact, FAD has always organised seminars to call and gather party members.”17 A similar apparatus was

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all the more relevant since church networks appeared to play an increasingly marginal role in Ugandan politics. Thus disguised, party meetings would be held in the countryside to brief and educate party followers as “sort of branch meetings.”18 Technically illegal party gatherings would be turned into technically legal seminars, in the attempt to revive the party’s presence at the local level. Seminars were systematically planned, with a number of national meetings being held in Kampala and then smaller ones in the rest of the country, ideally covering each district. This allowed DP leaders to meet people they would not otherwise be able to meet and, in fact, campaign for the party. While speeches to a seminar plenary would be used to get the party line across, the focus would largely be on the collateral contacts, briefing, recruitment, and branch-building opportunities that the forum provided. Two organizers describe a typical seminar: We make sure that some of our members are invited, though not exclusively. Of fifty people that are invited on average, two-thirds might be party members. And then at the seminar we talk both formally and informally. Formally, for instance, a paper might be presented. And we are very selective in recruiting presenters, to make sure that the message gets across. And informally, we talk during a break, mainly person-by-person, or even in somewhat larger groups, especially when it’s an overnight seminar.19 At the end of the seminar we often hold what we call a “debriefing,” a meeting, a discussion for members only. Especially if there is some specific issue to be discussed, such as if we have to elect district representatives. So, after the seminar, you would have the district structures established.20

The instrumental use of the FAD for the purpose of creating party cadres allegedly became even more systematic between 1998 and 1999, when a comprehensive, nationwide program of “training-of-trainers” seminars was set up in view of the 2000 referendum on the political system. The aim was to select a few dozen individuals who would attend tutorial meetings on key issues such as democracy, constitutionalism, human rights, and their relationship to the referendum itself. This would make them grassroots “trainers” able to meet and educate other local party followers. The selection was carried out by district party leaders who were in a position to pick the right people with basic language, educational, and communication skills. These activities had an important impact, both educationally and psychologically: [These activities] increased awareness among our leaders. Local leaders had lost enthusiasm, they had bought the Movement propaganda about the evils of parties. But now they are awakening, and, psychologically, it’s very important for them to see that even non-NRM cadres can go and talk politics, speak out their minds! And they now make a difference between pluralism and other systems. They now begin to understand that the referendum is not on “political performance” but on political rights.21

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In addition to those seminars arranged by the FAD, others were organized by the DP’s partners, such as the Friedrich Ebert and the Konrad Adenauer Foundations, and these were also helpful in keeping the party alive. In the case of the latter meetings, postseminar party briefings would still be held, although there would be less control over the issue discussed at the seminar and over the choice of a DP audience. In addition to workshops and seminars, the circulation of pro-DP publications proved useful in reaching out to the DP’s members. This practice was introduced at the time the FAD was created, when The Citizen and Munnansi were printed and distributed throughout the country, and was subsequently revived during the late 1990s with the circulation of The Messenger throughout Uganda’s various districts. The help provided by the FAD was not only strategic but also prominently financial. The difficulty associated with discovering the sources of party funding lies less in an understandable discretion surrounding the issue than in the mere weakness and volatility of such sources. This was reflected as much in the dilapidated state of the party’s central office as in the admission by party officials of the huge difficulties in realizing the budget as planned. Membership cards, as mentioned, were not widely sold, and those that were sold were distributed only from about 1997. As such they were more a symbol of the survival of institutionalized party identities rather than any significant source of income for the party coffers. Most of the little funding that was available to the party came from domestic donations by “individuals who want [the party] to be strongly organized.”22 Friends and businesspeople, “people of good will,” were called upon by party leaders to provide help. Foreign sponsors provided support in an indirect fashion only. Apart from the FAD/KAS, the Westminster Foundation, the British Labour Party,23 the European Parliament, and the South Africa–based Union of African Parties for Democracy and Development all helped fund conferences and seminars. At the local level, funding was practically nonexistent. In fact, the real issue was often how to finance a local meeting. Members who lived outside Uganda’s town centers simply may not have been able to afford the fare to get to a meeting. Cases of party leaders visiting a district branch and “financing” a meeting by covering the cost of transport, accommodation, food, or merely sodas for those attending were indeed rare. In general, local party members were entirely left to their own devices, while district leaders occasionally claimed that they had personally funded a meeting. One very important aspect of the “rejuvenation project” that the party began to realize after the national constitution had been passed was the creation of a youth wing, known as the Uganda Young Democrats (UYD). Again, the drive to form the UYD purportedly came from a constitution-making process that had disappointed those who were looking forward to an opening up of the political system. The youth within the party felt that they should protest against the regime’s efforts to indoctrinate people and turn them

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against political parties. As often happens with such youth organizations, the UYD initially emerged from within the country’s universities, particularly Makerere and Nakawa Universities. Set up between 1995 and 1996 as an offshot of the Democratic Party, “to by-pass government restrictions and harassment, the UYD was organised as a formally independent pressure group, a semi-autonomous organisation.”24 However, the youth wing’s independence went somewhat beyond its official status; the youth wing’s leader was a member of the DP’s executive, but the UYD as such was not required to consult the party before taking actions, and it indeed generally acted on its own initiative. An excessive dependence of the young democrats’ actions on the party’s will would probably have stifled their dynamism, particularly under the restrictions imposed by the no-party regime. The DP leadership, aware of how important it is for the party to penetrate Ugandan society and to network with youth, confined itself to encouraging, rather than determining, the activities of the UYD, the only requirement being that whatever they did should not go against the DP’s constitution. The radicalism and energy that is so characteristic of such youth organizations made the UYD a key element in the broader attempt to revive the party. The minimal capacity to reach the populace that the DP had managed to retain depended largely on the activism of the UYD. First and foremost, the youth were very important for quick electoral mobilization. They were the ones who did the advance groundwork for Ssemogerere’s presidential campaign in 1996 and who later provided the teams for the Kampala mayoral elections. Much like the FAD and in keeping with the broader kakuyege party strategy, the youth wing’s activities focused on seminars, door-to-door campaigning, and community outreach. Public seminars held in places as far away as Tororo, Gulu, or Luwero would be combined with much more visible national meetings addressed to a wider audience. At the same time, small, discrete private gatherings of perhaps only a handful of people would be used to reach out to the populace. A special emphasis was placed on contacting, and getting the support of, influential people. The party was a direct beneficiary of UYD seminars, which, much like those organized by the Foundation for African Development, were used “as a cover.”25 Networking, the dissemination of information, and training were the main goals. People would address and become familiar with public issues, learning to discuss them and to promote the party’s views. The government was well aware of the risks of a manipulative use of socalled seminars, and on specific occasions in tightly controlled areas, it reacted quite strongly.26 Nevertheless, within the space of a few years, the UYD had established itself as a committed force whose advocacy of the “reactivation of the debate on pluralism” often gained the attention of the media. The young democrats claimed over 50,000 members, most of whom were concentrated where the party itself was stronger—for example, in Kampala,

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Gulu, Arua, and Mbarara—together with a certain presence in the east of the country and a much scarcer presence in sections of western Uganda, mainly because of government repression (and probably because western Uganda had never been particularly supportive of the DP). Members were said to have been recruited on the basis of their “commitment” (“first, a would-be member has to do something for the organisation, to show his commitment, then he is registered!”),27 and then organized into branches that were closely connected to the local party sections. Their activities were partly funded through private donations (including those of businesspeople and party leaders, such as MPs, who depended on the UYD for contribution to election campaigns). Some projectrelated financing came from NGOs traditionally close to the DP (such as the Foundation for African Development and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation) or other partner organizations. However, finance was just as much a problem for the youth wing as it was for the DP. After issuing The Democrat during the presidential campaign, the UYD launched and published two periodicals for a few years: a Luganda paper, Munnansi, and the Microscope, in English, the circulation of each publication reaching some 3,000–5,000. The publication of both papers was suspended in late 1999 due to funding and management problems. The kakuyege strategy and the help provided by the Foundation for African Development and the Uganda Young Democrats enabled the Democratic Party to address the survival issue and to coordinate its activities to a certain degree and thereby actively constitute an opposition force in the Movement era. Several of the activities attempted by the UYD and FAD, notably the seminars, were often met with repressive reaction by the authorities.28 As weak and irregular as it was, the DP long remained the best-organized force among Uganda’s modest non-Movement opposition. Turbulent Times: Factional Squabbles over the Leadership Question A substantially different phase of the Democratic Party’s history began around the year 2000. Not unlike what had been going on for several years within the UPC, the DP witnessed the emergence of a generational gap between two factions—the one fighting to maintain the historical party leaders, the other trying to get them replaced.29 Renewal of the party leadership had been a latent issue for quite some time. At the turn of the century, Ssemogerere stated that his post was now vacant and then declared that the process of electing his successor was under way; however, he subsequently dragged his feet, hindering the smooth completion of the process and even using the courts to prevent a new head of the party from being elected until a proper delegates’ conference had been convened. The leadership issue ended up as a wrangle between two factions, labeled by some as the “progressives” and the “conservatives.”30 A mainstream group

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was led by the party president himself and included other prominent figures from the old guard, such as John Ssebaana Kizito and Damiano Lubega. This bloc had a significant southern component, notably among the Baganda, and was backed by the youth wing of the party. Retaining control of the party’s central bureau and its official political line, they embraced Kizza Besigye’s independent bid for the Ugandan presidency in 2001 and fielded the newly elected party leader in the 2006 presidential poll. A second, breakaway faction consisted of a younger generation of party cadres, including some well-known northern members of the DP, such as VicePresident Zachary Olum and Secretary-General Mariano Drametu, as well as most of the party’s MPs. In 2001, this faction chose the former secretarygeneral, Francis Bwengye, as party leader and fielded him in the presidential race, when no party label was officially required or allowed. Bwengye, however, managed to win only a dismal 0.3 percent of the people’s votes. As Uganda began moving toward a multiparty election, the two quarreling groups again clashed over the registration of the party. Initially, the two factions agreed to hold an internal election and try to revive the party, but this was soon clouded by a series of further disputes.31 The splinter faction tried to gather support (including that of many MPs, with the exception of most of those from Buganda) for the registration of the party, while Ssemogerere again responded by asking the registrar general not to issue them the registration papers. The two groups officially made peace in May 2005, when a court told them they would not be able to register unless they sorted out their differences (Kiiza, Svåsand, and Tabaro 2005, 4–6). A historical National Delegates Conference was thus held in November 2005 at Mandela National Stadium in Namboole, on the outskirts of Kampala, the first such meeting since 1984. The crucial item on the agenda was the election of the third president of the fiftyfour-year-old DP, to follow in the steps of founder president Ben Kiwanuka, and of Ssemogerere’s twenty-five-year grip on the top job. As expected, seventy-one-year-old Ssebaana Kizito carried the race with 688 votes, beating three contenders—Norbert Mao (326), Alhajji Nasser Ssebaggala (198), and Richard Ebil Ottoo (115)—thus automatically qualifying as party candidate for the national presidency. A Protestant, Ssebaana was to become the first non-Catholic head of the party, which underlines the diminishing role played by religious factors in Ugandan politics. The populist, and highly popular, Hajji Nasser Ssebaggala, a Muslim with a large following among Kampala’s urban poor, also did well in the contest. Control of the party remained firmly in the grip of Baganda politicians. The only northerner contesting the leadership, Mao, despite backing from several MPs, was defeated in his view as a result of an internal campaign run against banamawanga (foreigners).32 The rigging of the internal election was also claimed by Ssebaggala, who announced that he would nevertheless run for the Ugandan presidency.33 Although the two groups officially rallied behind Ssebaana Kizito’s nomination

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(Mao himself, who had been supported by many in the breakaway group, became his campaign manager), the split was not really resolved, and they soon began quarreling once again. These divisions, together with the uninspiring elderly leadership, represented by Ssebaana Kizito, contributed to the party’s extremely poor showing at the 2006 election. The Democrats’ presidential hopeful scored a meager 1.6 percent, and only eight parliamentary candidates, or 2.5 percent of all MPs, got elected on a DP ticket. The party admittedly suffered from the strong candidature of Kizza Besigye. Not only had they endorsed Besigye in the previous campaign, but a number of Democrats had defected to his new party, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC). More so than ever in the past, the DP was being supported by the Baganda and was not able to secure a single seat outside the central region. After the election, the party tried to regroup by addressing the related issues of its poor electoral result and of internal rivalries and organizational troubles. A Strategic Plan 2006–2011 was produced in which six main goals were identified: to revise the party constitution; to increase the recruitment and retention of members; to reestablish party organs; to develop party communications and media; to improve research; and to assess and secure funds.34 Twenty years of trying to remain afloat, through kakuyege, party surrogates, and legal battles, appeared to have yielded scarce electoral payoffs.

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Conflict over “Working Methods” Within the Uganda People’s Congress

Since the late 1980s, external restrictions and political developments within the party together rendered the organizational setup of the Uganda People’s Congress somewhat intricate. Several factors led to the turning upside down of those formal structures prescribed by the party constitution. These factors include the divisions within the national leadership, the creation of several extraconstitutional organs, the unresolved relationship of party members with state institutions, and the fact that Milton Obote, the party leader until his death in 2005, remained in exile in Lusaka, Zambia. When the NRM regime was established, the UPC denounced it as illegitimate and illegal, claiming that the party would not take part in coercively imposed, self-serving structures: the UPC “cannot co-operate with a system that does not want UPC to exist!”35 When the UPC was offered token participation in the constitution-making process, for example, Uganda House refused to appoint the two delegates that major parties were entitled to, and would not acknowledge as representatives of the party those UPC members who had been elected to the Constituent Assembly (about forty). The same went for the parliament elected in 1996. It was written off as the “Movement parliament,” a

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“partisan organ with no moral authority.”36 The fifteen or so party members who had become MPs were themselves dismissed as “people who claim they are UPC” but “are only there on an individual basis” or, at times, even as people who “have nothing to do with the party.” The original position officially adopted by the party was neither to oppose nor to support those party members who decided to run for elected office: “You cannot say we are boycotting parliament, as, in fact, there is no room for parties to participate. And we could not swear allegiance to the NRM—which everybody is required to do before taking office—as a UPC member cannot swear allegiance to another political organisation!”37 Abiding by the above position in a consistent manner, however, proved too difficult for the party leadership. Diverse ideas gradually emerged regarding the role of the exiled president as well as that of the party itself, resulting in a state of internal factionalism. Several UPC members, at all levels, blamed this on the NRM regime, arguing that the latter kept a lid on parties “so that members can eat each other like ensenene [grasshoppers] inside a sealed bottle.”38 There was an increasing conviction that convening a delegates’ conference would solve all disputes by restoring internal democracy and party unity. While this was possibly true, it was actually a combination of ideological, strategic, and generational factors that ignited the internal struggle leading to a semiofficial split in the party that lasted for the entire 1996–2006 period at the very least. A group of younger leaders in their forties and fifties, led by acting secretary-general Cecilia Ogwal, had gradually come to reject the policy of passive resistance adopted by the old guard which, under Milton Obote, had governed Uganda in the 1960s and again in the early 1980s.39 A strategic difference—described by a prominent member of parliament as concerning “the method of work”—separated the two factions. As we have already mentioned, Obote’s group was always very reluctant to participate in any of the new institutions. This reflected the party’s lengthy history of uncompromising, confrontational politics. The UPC was originally created as an anti-DP, anti-Baganda organization, and the history of the party was substantially shaped by events such as the 1966 Buganda crisis and the contentious election of 1980. Moreover, the congress was ousted from power as a result of the guerrilla war waged by the NRM, which made the new ruling group unpalatable to most UPC leaders and activists. The party leader’s lengthy exile was reason enough for UPC members not to be conciliatory toward the NRM. To make things worse, the clever propaganda Museveni employed to legitimize the new regime attributed to the congress responsibility for virtually all of the political wrongdoings blighting Uganda after independence. The president’s 1996 campaign posters, for example, played on the public’s fear of the return of Obote, notably in the central region, by showing pictures of hundreds of skulls, the result of the massacres carried out by the army in the Luwero triangle during the early 1980s.

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The elderly nature of Obote’s faction made it an unlikely candidate for future rule, and the group itself ostensibly refused to believe in the possibility, under restrictions existing at the time, of having any kind of impact on policymaking. Those party members who had been elected to the National Resistance Council parliament, in 1989, had contested their seats despite an official party boycott of the election (although the party agreed not to take action against them as long as they did not claim to represent the UPC). When the Constituent Assembly was elected, in 1994, the prospect of shaping the new institutions and reinstating political freedom caused the party to waver between calls for a renewed boycott and more supportive statements. During this period, Cecilia Ogwal progressively established herself as a pragmatic, reformist leader. After her experience as a CA delegate, she spearheaded the formation of the Inter-Political Forces Co-operation to campaign jointly with the DP for the 1996 presidential election. She then went on with a few other members to contest and win a handful of parliamentary seats. This younger wing of the party, which included a number of MPs and was closely linked to many others, was more oriented toward pragmatically acquiring power and shaping the country’s future: “We want to be involved in active politics. We are keeping Uganda running: telling them do this, do that. We can’t wait for somebody [i.e., Obote] coming back.”40 While it was suggested that the generational gap was the result of the country’s own history, as neither the 1970s, the 1980s, nor the 1990s—and notably no-partyism—had proved an appropriate time to develop new cadres,41 the UPC’s problem was not that of any lack of younger political talent, but rather how to enable such young members to take over the party leadership. The divergence between Obote and Ogwal proved critical in precipitating the actual split, which took place between the two 1996 elections: presidential and parliamentary. However, this fundamental divergence had been developing over a much longer period: “Normally these issues are not determined by a single happening: it boils over time until it cracks. Basically, the problem was that the president was not in the country.”42 Many party leaders were unhappy with the idea of the party being run for so long from outside the country. The capacity of the absent party leader to actually read Uganda’s evolving political landscape and take appropriate, effective decisions was increasingly questioned. Moreover, some felt that Obote was no longer the principal asset but the main liability for the UPC; this was used by the Movement both to scare people about a possible return to the past and to lay the blame for that past on Uganda’s political parties. Obote’s “remote-control” leadership had been exposed since the death of the party vice-president in 1991, after which the leadership question was raised time and again in Kampala by prominent UPC people very close to the exiled president, such as Sam Odaka, Patrick Rubaihayo, and Otema Allimadi.43 The position of Uganda’s ex-president was indeed unclear. Was he to direct the

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party from abroad, as he did when he set up the Presidential Policy Commission (PPC)? Or was he merely to have the power to veto decisions made in Kampala, as he did when he rejected involvement of the UPC in the 1996 parliamentary elections? Or was he only to advise the party (his appointments to the PPC, for example, were an ex post reflection of agreements reached at Uganda House)? As Obote’s executive leadership and external control over the party were increasingly questioned, the internal division of the party became ever more evident and difficult to mend. Differences also concerned the question of whether to amend, bypass, or observe those provisions of the party constitution preventing any change of leadership without a delegates’ conference. Obote’s words in a message to party officials in the year 2000 vividly convey his anxiety over maintaining his grip on the UPC presidency: I must warn you . . . that the Uganda dictatorship and agents of governments in the older democracies will do anything, including bribery, to get you to accept . . . the Movement system. . . . You will be faced with a campaign that, since the party leader is not in the country . . . he must be replaced. The Christians among you know how the snake pretended to be friendly to Eve and made her to eat some fruit . . . when God had forbidden them not to eat that fruit. The result was the fall of man from the Grace of God. In the case of the UPC, the deposition of the party leader is not forbidden by a command from God. It is even allowed by the Constitution of the Party, but must be done, if it is to be done, only as provided in that Constitution. If it is done in any other way, the action ceases to be against the party president and becomes a gross derision of the Constitution, which, in turn, will lead to disintegration or dissolution of the UPC. . . . You will be faced with the voice of the snake or Satan.44

These issues gradually degenerated, and a real stir was caused when Ogwal, the actual party leader in Kampala, decided to run in the 1994 election for the Constituent Assembly. Despite her claim that—in accordance with the individual merit principle—she was not representing the party but only her own constituency (that is, Lira municipality and the Langi people), Ogwal was in practice questioning the official party line of not taking part in the “illegitimate NRM institutions.” Other UPC members who also decided to run for the CA were disappointed by Obote’s initial opposition to their plans. The party president’s change of heart caused a delay in launching and organizing the campaign, making it more difficult, in the short time remaining, to run an effective campaign and even to short-list constituency candidates.45 The party president also opposed the creation of the National Caucus for Democracy—the alliance of multipartyist delegates operating within the CA—as he was afraid of establishing too close a tie with the Democratic Party and losing control over his own organization. When the UPC in Kampala agreed to support the DP’s Paul Ssemogerere as a joint presidential candidate for the multiparty camp and to form joint electoral teams called Inter-Political Forces Co-operation (IPFC), Obote originally vetoed the idea, claiming that it

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would amount to betraying the party. After reluctantly agreeing to the party’s participation in the presidential race, the exiled leader welcomed allegations of electoral rigging and pushed hard for the party to pull out of the subsequent parliamentary election. In fact, after the alleged manipulation of the May 1996 presidential poll, the IPFC decided that they would not take part in the parliamentary election to be held in June. On the same day that decision was taken, however, the UPC leadership held a separate meeting at Uganda House, at which Cecilia Ogwal questioned the strategic wisdom of withdrawing from the contest even in those areas under UPC or multipartyist control—which in general meant the north of the country—and of abandoning local party people to suffer the consequences of the regime’s political repression. The Presidential Policy Commission thus agreed that, while the party would abstain from the race, individuals were free to run. On this point, versions differ as to whether only lower cadres, or leaders as well, were meant to run. However, a prominent member of Obote’s camp, Patrick Rubaihayo, concedes that Cecilia Ogwal “had an understanding with us, that she would resign as soon as she got elected. So we kind of protected her, to the extent that this was possible, by telling Obote that she was ‘on leave, pending resignation.’ But then, two days before the election, Obote wrote her the letter to suspend her.”46 This letter was delivered by a two-man delegation—James Rwanyarare and Darlington Sakwa—returning from Lusaka. While Rwanyarare immediately replaced Ogwal as chair of the PPC, Sakwa was later appointed a member of the PPC and chair of its financial committee. Ogwal and her followers, however, challenged the decision, and after Rwanyarare’s refusal to have the issue discussed by the PPC, they convened the National Task Force, which condemned the party president’s decision and endorsed the creation of an Interim Executive Council (IEC) which “would still hold Obote in an advisory capacity.”47 The division was physically sanctioned by a struggle for occupation of the traditional, symbolic headquarters of the UPC, Uganda House. Although Ogwal’s supporters initially took over the office, the latter was eventually retained by the Rwanyarare faction by virtue of Sam Odaka being the head of the Milton Obote Foundation (MOF), which legally owns the building. The former group, which included over half of the people originally working at the UPC headquarters, moved to the private office of one of the members. From Ad Hoc Leadership Organs to a Moribund Grassroots Party The disagreement within the leadership helped modify the UPC’s original principle of staying away from the regime’s new political institutions. Ogwal’s group, in particular, consisted largely of MPs who were either party members or were simply close to the UPC, and these MPs were informally invited to attend

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the Interim Executive Council’s meetings. Thus, the breakaway faction of the UPC chose to work from within the new regime, in the hope of gradually reforming it; this strategy implied a more open approach toward the NRM: “We have done so much for this country, we have achieved a lot, but by working with our friends in the Movement camp.”48 Mainstream UPC members, by contrast, took only extremely modest steps in this direction. For a few years, for example, Uganda House had only informal contact with one MP, who was not even allowed to sit on the PPC, and it limited its official involvement to initiatives such as sending its own submission to the parliamentary committee that was dealing with legislation on the status of political parties. These divergent strategies were reflected in changes affecting the party organs. As much as the notion of “rejuvenating” party structures was recurrent in DP language, UPC leaders often talked of “improvisation” (cf. Anakur 2005). This implied that, given the inhibiting context, the rigid provisions of the party statute had to be continuously circumvented through the creation of ad hoc organs. Unofficially, however, this term stood for the party’s need to adapt its organization to two key internal developments: Obote’s absence from the country on the one hand, and the resulting split in the party on the other. Obote himself had started the whole process of improvising new arrangements when, under pressure to appoint a new vice-president after Paulo Muwanga’s death in 1991, he came up with the idea of the Presidential Policy Commission. Claiming that “he had found an opening, a window of opportunity in the party constitution,”49 the exiled president was in fact setting up a provisional executive that in theory and in name allowed him to retain full control over the party.50 Improvisation of extraconstitutional organs thus started well before the divide emerged—in fact, the term improvisation was used by both factions—but after the split, the process went that much further. The National Task Force, which had been created in 1995 as a provisional structure in view of forthcoming elections, one year later became the permanent district representative body for Ogwal’s faction and was instrumental in legitimizing the latter’s Interim Executive Council. In the other camp, Rwanyarare’s group responded by gathering district delegates to form the Party Representatives Council (PRC) in 1997. These ad hoc delegates were selected by party constituency and district representatives to national executive organs, as listed in an old register from the early 1980s (though in certain cases they were directly handpicked by the center). In the process, an additional, updated register was created. The first meeting of the PRC, in turn, provided the nominations from which the party leader appointed an expanded Presidential Policy Commission. It was not until almost three years later, however, that the new PPC was actually convened (until then, the original PPC had been meeting on an irregular basis about ten times a year), and at the same time the second PRC meeting was held.

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A first attempt to revive the party’s local branches was apparently made between 1991 and 1993, with veteran party members reorganizing district and local bodies throughout the country by holding internal elections and setting up ad hoc committees. At the beginning of 1993, after launching a new platform known as Agenda 21 to revitalize the party, Cecilia Ogwal toured the country, visiting districts such as Tororo, Arua, Mbale, and, in particular, Lira, where at times she would address small political rallies despite warnings from the government not to do so. Indeed, on a number of occasions, Ogwal was briefly detained because of these activities.51 A breath of fresh air got branches moving once again, and their gradual, if very partial, reactivation helped the party’s relatively successful campaign for the Constituent Assembly. However, this initial momentum was soon followed by a slowdown in the revival of party activity, and this was exacerbated, a couple of years later, by the impact on local-level organs of rows within the national leadership: “In 1996, with the directive issued by the party president, many areas simply gave up. It created confusion among the people: we were speaking with two different languages. Fewer and fewer branches were active, even now.”52 The weakness of party branches itself, however, helped minimize the spread of divisions at the center to the grassroots and the impact that such divisions had at the local level. Little of what happened in Kampala was either fully understood at the grassroots level or led to local divisions. When and where local structures actually existed, they tended not to split to any substantial degree or in any systematic manner. Only in some cases, such as in the district of Mukono, were attempts made to share local members, leading to the duplication of the party. By mid-2000, a further appeal for the relaunching of local branches and party membership “at any price” was signed by Obote and circulated by Uganda House. Admittedly, however, there were no plans yet on how local party activities were to be revived in practice.53 What remained, if anything, of the local UPC existed at the district level. However, even the few existing district committees were entirely detached from the grassroots, lacking as they did lower-level branches that could reach out to the local members.54 A fluid, indeterminate situation prevailed in which at best the party leadership tried to mobilize certain activists by appointing people at the grassroots. Nevertheless, in most cases the very presence and nature of party local organs would be described as “dormant” or “in dead silence,” “casual” or “occasional,” “nonformal” or “ad hoc,” and so on. Rather than properly organized groups, there were small networks of people that would occasionally arrange meetings attended by a handful of members, without any regular contacts with the party leadership.55 The UPC representatives from Arua, Mukono, Mbarara, and Gulu districts reported the presence of mostly nonoperational structures and nonexistent activities, at least from the 1996 election campaign

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on, and in some places from before that time. Members occasionally mentioned meeting people “on individual merit” (“they visit me or I visit them, one by one”), but rarely could local leaders truly claim that party activities in their district were organized on anything like a regular basis.56 Again, however, the situation varied not only from region to region but also from one district to the next. In the party’s northern strongholds, such as Lira, the UPC was allegedly quite free to meet. In other circumscribed areas, the party was present to a certain extent—for example, on occasions it was able to hold primaries for the selection of candidates to the Constituent Assembly and parliament—but the party could be said to have been operative in only a very small part of Uganda.57 Party membership suffered as a result of such limitations and from restrictions placed on local branches. Although some party officials mentioned brief attempts to register members in certain districts around 1996 or 1998, membership was in fact entirely informal: there was not much more to it than showing an old card or merely claiming to be UPC. Not even this was very common, given the perception that the sale of cards was illegal and those exposed as members or supporters of the UPC were invariably harassed as a result. As with the DP, the last membership figures for the UPC date from the mid-1980s, when the party allegedly had some 4 million members, but the documentation in question went missing during the short-lived Okellos regime.58 No regularized membership meant no regular subscriptions. This had obvious implications for party funding, which came to depend entirely on the MOF and occasional private contributions. As a party leader put it, “We only get money by luck!”59 when some party supporter, from the countryside as much as from the diaspora, makes a cash donation or a contribution in kind to the cause. The lack of regular funding meant that the money actually received by the party was well below its planned budget, which could be as high as USh350 million (US$240,000) per year.60 As Ogwal put it, the budget was “flexible” and “task-targeted,” and except during electoral campaigns, when more substantial private donations were made, it barely covered basic administrative costs. Not surprisingly, local branches did not see any cash from Kampala for a long time, and this further hindered the organization of essential party activities locally. While the presence of the MOF, external branches, and perhaps the party’s MPs meant that the budget of the UPC’s central office was possibly larger than that of the DP, the party had nothing like the FAD to guarantee some basic resources for local activities. It is difficult to assess the extent to which this lack of funding jeopardized party operations. While financial constraints were unquestionably a hurdle, political will may have been just as great an obstacle. Uganda House, for example, was granted funds by the MOF to organize the long overdue second meeting of the broad-based Party Representatives Council, which in the end was never convened.61

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In addition to the scarcity of funds, there was also the systematic rebuttal of UPC requests for foreign assistance by organizations such as the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the British Westminster Foundation, or the USbased National Democratic Institute and Fund for Democracy and Development. This had more to do with the UPC’s controversial past than with the reasons advanced by the party itself, namely the legal ban on party activities. In fact, the DP did get some form of direct aid from similar institutions. As the director of the social-democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation put it, the UPC “used to be our natural, logical partner up to 1984. [But] we took very seriously what happened under Obote II: that killed our potential co-operation. As long as Obote is there, there is no room whatsoever for us to work with them. Though I still get a call every second week by UPC or MOF. They say ‘Hey, Hajo, we used to work well together, why don’t we do this and this.’”62 The tarnished image of the party not only made it harder to collect resources, but it also exacerbated the existing practical difficulties encountered when trying to organize certain activities: “I’m telling you: however developmental the idea, if I initiate a programme, the government wouldn’t allow me. I have tried several times, especially to associate the youth for development. But they told them not to associate with that man.”63 The UPC was certainly penalized by the regime more than Uganda’s other political parties. In theory, the MOF could have played a role similar to that of the FAD in promoting surrogate activities for the UPC. However, the close links between the MOF and the party went beyond the connection between the DP and the FAD, if anything because of the name the MOF bore. The UPC did not even try to organize anything of the kind, opting to keep a low profile out of the well-substantiated conviction that the government was willing to allow the Democrats much broader scope for maneuver than concede to Uganda’s former ruling party. Indeed, one UPC official complained that “actually, I believe they might even allow them any activities if we were not around.”64 This last point may explain certain strategic and organizational differences between the UPC and the DP. The Democrats, as we have said, managed to replace their parliamentary role with their access to alternative forums and opportunities for giving voice to the opposition (such as the activities of the youth wing and those of the FAD). The UPC’s lack of similar options (a much weaker Youth Congress was only launched in 1998, for example) may well have contributed to the UPC’s decision to go to parliament, as well as its decision to use party branches situated outside Uganda (probably consisting of a few members with access to the Internet) in places such as Toronto, Nairobi, and London. The UPC from Obote . . . to Obote Toward the end of 2004, Uganda’s changing political situation appeared to give the UPC the chance to reunite. The return to multipartyism may not have

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mended previous internal party differences, but it gave the impression that such differences were at least going to be brushed under the carpet in view of the long-awaited “UPC’s third coming.” A Constitutional Steering Committee (CSC) was appointed and assigned the task of bringing the party back to its internal constitutional order. Accordingly, all “improvised” organs—notably the PPC and the PRC—were disbanded in March 2005. The composition of the CSC, dominated by Obote’s staunchest followers, showed that it was little more than a new guise for the National Organising Committee (NOC) set up one year earlier. The latter had tried to reactivate the party’s congress and in doing so had controversially disregarded several existing elements of the party (MPs, district councillors, local leaders, active branches, etc.); moreover, it had weak links with the grassroots and few or no delegations, relying heavily on a small number of people from Kampala and on the hope of setting up a series of virtually new District Organising Committees.65 By the early months of 2006, party branches had at least been nominally reestablished in some fifty-six districts out of seventyeight (this process was incomplete partly because of the creation of new districts). However, the operational capacity of the congress was only regenerated in an embryonic way; the party’s ruling elite proved incapable of mobilizing local people, and the management of branch elections and primaries in the runup to national polls was extremely controversial. Ironically, the party convened its first delegates conference for over two decades just one month after Obote died, on 10 October 2005. Once again, the long-standing generational divide took center stage, although for once it was officially expressed through the proper institutional channels. With a majority of 280 votes, the conference gave Obote’s seventy-year-old widow, Miria, a mandate to lead the party, choosing her ahead of Patrick Mwondha (147 votes), the main candidate representing the younger generation, and Aggrey Awori (12 votes). The perpetuation of “Oboteeism” was seen by some as a chance to reunite the party, a highly unlikely event given that fractures had emerged over the legitimacy of the former president’s own hold over the party (Anakur 2005, 7). Relations quickly soured after the conference. The selection process of parliamentary candidates again left out some prominent party members, such as Okulo Epak, Ben Wacha, and Cecilia Ogwal. These members initially challenged the regularity of the party primaries and then went on to run as independents. The divide was most evident when Cecilia Ogwal and James Akena, Obote’s son, stood against each other for the same parliamentary seat (won by the latter). In the aftermath of the former president’s death, moreover, a new issue emerged involving the custody of the Milton Obote Foundation, and Sam Odaka’s unwillingness to surrender his control over it, which furthered the precarious nature of party resources.66 Fraught with internal rifts, dominated by nepotistic succession, faced with an unpromising leadership, and controlled by a clique with virtually no expe-

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rience of electoral politics, the UPC, once Uganda’s ruling party and one of the most powerful political forces in Africa, won only a handful of seats (nine) in the February 2006 election. As with the DP, the UPC was severely hit by the electoral success of the newly created FDC, which by then was at the forefront of the struggle against the NRM regime and as such proved capable of making significant inroads into UPC strongholds and to carry four times as many constituencies as the latter. Despite the dismal result, the UPC managed to form a parliamentary caucus, and the party that had led the country to independence was officially, if only marginally, back in business.

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The Fragile Survival of Organized Opposition Forces Within a Hegemonic System

There has been little research into the actual role of parties within Uganda’s noparty framework. As a first step toward filling this lacuna, this chapter has focused on the organizational nature of political parties under Uganda’s no-party system. It comes as no surprise that the organizations of both the Democratic Party and the Uganda People’s Congress were prevented from operating effectively by the legal restrictions imposed on their activities. The organs of both parties were virtually dysfunctional or, at the very best, highly informal, improvised structures. Funding was extremely scant and precarious, and regular meetings were really held only at the party executive level. Official membership and local branches remained, for the most part, distant memories. What is particularly interesting are the specific organizational strategies and forms adopted by Uganda’s two major political parties. Both parties were able to respond to existing constraints by adapting their organizations to ensure their minimum political and institutional existence. This was evident, for example, in the rupture within the UPC leadership as well as in the ancillary organizations the DP relied on. The tough clampdown on the Uganda People’s Congress by the NRM government contributed to the split of the party leadership. On the one hand, Obote’s mainstream UPC continued to completely reject the new regime; while the former president was in exile, his group in Kampala remained outside parliament. On the other hand, a breakaway wing of progressive UPC leaders decided to adopt a different “method of work” and to enter parliament. A weak but highly vocal parliamentary opposition was designed to provide a way to voice the party’s opinions without exposing party members throughout the country to repressive government action. The Democratic Party, by contrast, capitalized on the legacy of a largely cooperative, nonconflictual past relationship with the NRM and enjoyed the advantage of a relatively softer form of governmental control. The party was thus able to use its youth organization and the Foundation for African Development to keep alive a skeletal organization and to advance the cause of multipartyism. It was

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only after a period of many years that the DP itself succumbed to internal factional rivalries. The UPC and the DP managed to strike a fragile balance between disputing the legitimacy of the regime and rejecting the more extreme ways of going about this, especially that of resorting to armed initiatives. This granted political stability to some parts of the country at least, while leaving the existing system constantly on the edge as a result of its alleged illegitimacy. In light of such organizational developments, an investigation into the actual impact Uganda’s political parties had on key political processes, such as elections and parliamentary activities, is now required. For example, did the UPC’s MPs provide the party with a legislative bridgehead? Did the support of extraparliamentary organizations help the DP in coordinating its electoral activities? These and other issues are examined in the following chapters.

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7 The Electoral Politics of No-Partyism

THE INDIVIDUAL MERIT PRINCIPLE WAS BASED ON THE NOTION that ethnic diversities in communally divided societies should not enter politics by becoming the basis for the formation of political parties. The claim was that if that happened, intergroup antipathies would exacerbate political conflict and generate a spiral of political exclusion and violence. Therefore, to avoid the consequences of party-based political competition in ethnically or religiously divided societies, individuals were to participate in politics exclusively on the basis of individual merit. Under Uganda’s no-party framework, political organizations were not to be present when an individual decided whether to run for election (selection process); they were not to be present when a candidate canvassed for popular support (electoral campaign); and they were not to be present when elected representatives cooperated in, or quarreled over, the formulation of national policies (parliamentary politics). In general, the presence of independent parliamentary candidates and MPs is something to be valued. However, the presence of only such candidates and MPs implies the complete atomization of the political framework, which is bound to lead to a series of practical problems. Elected representatives are part of a state’s political links with its population and a crucial component in the process of aggregating diverse political interests. To provide such connections in an effective manner, MPs need institutionalized linkages with their constituents. A candidate may campaign as an independent, setting up an ad hoc electoral machine to get through the election process; once that process is over, the electoral machine gets disbanded. Both during and after an election campaign, however, the assistance of an established organization is an important asset in reaching out to constituents and communicating and exchanging information with them. The same goes for parliamentary politics. It is one thing to have a number of independent opinions within parliament, but quite another thing to have a legislative assembly whose independent members are forced to constantly 137

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search for contingent ways of interacting. In the latter case, as each issue arose, each individual MP would have to: work out what the debate is about and what the options are; go back to constituents to hear their opinions and interests; learn of the position of every other MP; lobby other MPs for support on a one-to-one basis; and so on. Such activities, however, require some form of coordination. This is why in those countries with multiparty systems, political parties normally play a focal role in electoral and parliamentary politics. Therefore, if Ugandan parties were prevented from being actively involved in these processes—something that itself demands empirical investigation— other organizations may reasonably be expected to have stepped in, either on their own initiative or because they were solicited to do so by individual politicians who had to perform the stated activities. In other words, atomized politics directly turn the spotlight on the dilemma of collective action, as those politicians supporting the notion of individual merit were soon to find out. Both in 1996 and 2001, Uganda held direct parliamentary elections based on 214 single-member constituencies under the plurality principle, whereby the candidate with the most votes in any one constituency got elected.1 Several Ugandans decided to run in these elections, with a 9.3 percent increase in their numbers between the two elections (see Table 7.1). Indeed, between the two elections, there was a clear fall in the number of candidates who were elected unopposed (down from twelve to three) as well as in the number of one-to-one contests (down from fifty to twenty-nine), while there was a corresponding rise in the share of seats that were contested by three or more candiTable 7.1

Number of Candidates per Parliamentary Constituency, 1996 and 2001 Number of Constituencies

Number of Candidates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total candidates Total constituencies

1996

2001

12 50 56 37 16 17 16 6 2 2

3 29 54 51 36 19 15 6 1 –

808 214

883 214

Sources: Based on data from the Interim Electoral Commission (1996, p. 79ff.) and the Electoral Commission (2001a, Appendix 9B).

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dates, up from 71 percent to 85 percent. In 2001 alone, constituency seats were contested by a total of 883 candidates, representing an average of slightly more than four candidates for each seat at stake. This chapter focuses on how these supposedly independent candidates were selected, or how they decided to run, and on the specific campaigning approach they subsequently adopted. Chapter 8 then examines parliamentary activity to determine how, and the extent to which, MPs who were unable to rely on party networks managed to interact with each other. Elections are hereafter conceptualized as a twofold process, with each of the two phases in question implying a separate, potential relationship between individual office seekers and sponsoring organizations. The first phase consisted of selecting the candidates running for office, a process that is in itself an essential element linking the electorate and the policymaking process (Gallagher 1988, 2). The initial assumption is that, in making their decision to run for election, individuals were influenced by the availability of organized support. Depending on the extent to which they relied on such support, potential candidates may either have gone through a genuine selection process (resulting in their informal “nomination”) held by an existing organization, or have decided independently to run (to be referred to here as “self-selection”), with a number of options falling halfway between these two extremes. The second phase consisted of the actual canvassing for voters’ support, which was something that virtually every candidate had to do regardless of whether he or she had been “nominated” or was self-selected. Canvassing may have entailed seeking the help of organizations either involved in, or available to take part in, electoral competition, or it may have involved the creation of the candidate’s own electoral machine.

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Who Decides Who Is to Run?

Despite the no-party rules’ clampdown on political organizations, the fact is that Uganda’s election process was bound to involve some kind of interaction between candidates and existing organizations. When it came to establishing which candidates were to run for election to the national representative assemblies, the process whereby each individual came forward tended to follow one of four possible patterns. The first pattern was the one where the Movement, while officially proclaiming the individual merit status of elections, in practice exerted pressure on certain individuals to run, or indeed to withdraw their candidatures. The second pattern was seen when opposition parties, despite being legally banned from taking part in elections, in fact managed to field their own candidates. Third, other organized groups or associations—such as local government organs, churches and other religious institutions, and councils of elders— may have decided to step in and field, or support, certain specific candidates. Finally, in keeping with the individual merit rule, individuals decided to run on

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their own, without much regard for organizations or any other form of external pressure. As a party-like organization, the Movement had a keen interest in seeing supportive candidates, rather than anti-Movement ones, run for, and obtain, office. Managing the country’s affairs invariably made any political force sensitive to the character and orientation of those individuals constituting the legislative body. Individualized elections, in the unlikely case that everybody abided by their underlying principle, may in theory have meant that there was no need to identify winners and losers in terms of partisan groups. However, this did not diminish the government’s reliance on a degree of coordinated support from MPs, and thus on the composition of parliament. As a consequence, two interrelated objectives guided the Movement’s leadership: first, securing a parliamentary majority and, second, ensuring the internal cohesion of such majority. Under a plurality election system based on single-member constituencies, for the Movement to win the majority of seats, it had to keep to a minimum the number of “movementist” candidates running in any one constituency; splitting the progovernment vote among several candidates often implied losing a seat to a multipartyist candidate. Movement leaders were fully aware of the need to coordinate pro-Movement candidatures so as to avoid unnecessary electoral defeats: the distribution of potential office seekers was regularly monitored and appraised, constituency by constituency. In the run-up to the election for the seventh legislature in 2001, Museveni plainly stated that he needed “MPs who will help him implement his manifesto,” and “advised” that, in those cases in which several Movement candidates wanted to run against a single multipartyist, they were expected to step down in favor of the strongest among them.2 On exceptional occasions, the opposite strategy was apparently followed. In 1996, for example, the decision was made to have a second Movement candidate running in Bungokho constituency, in Mbale district, to help out the Movement’s favorite contestant. The dummy candidate won a share of the vote in Nakaloke county—thus directly eroding the multipartyist candidate’s support base—and thus favored the success of the candidate that the Movement wanted to see through, who received his or her votes from a different area (i.e., Makonde county) within the same constituency (Mujaju 1996, 2). However, the Movement’s interest in the candidates’ selection processes was not designed only to promote the election of the largest possible number of pro-Movement MPs. In Uganda, as elsewhere, influencing the nomination process was also the key to shaping the cohesion and trustworthiness of the majority bloc that was expected to emerge in parliament (Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999, 6; Carey 1997). Thus, keen to keep their undue interventions away from the spotlight, Movement leaders frequently made evident efforts to select candidates themselves. The most loyal candidates were given encouragement

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and promised support at the expense of others, who were discouraged and marginalized because of their weaker pro-Movement credentials. During the 2001 parliamentary campaign, the president repeatedly met with the Movement caucus in the outgoing parliament in an attempt to veto “undesirable” Movement candidates.3 The encouragement, or marginalization, of different candidates, however, largely involved private meetings and unofficial pressures, rather than any open selection process: You have a natural tendency to support somebody who talks well about the Movement, who speaks the same language, and so we quietly campaigned on his side. But not openly, because that would go against our principle. But the Movement might quietly come in and say: “Look, there are too many of you, too many Movement candidates in a single constituency. This way none of you is going to get elected. Would you let this guy go on? We know he can make it.” But we only advise people.4

Besides informal pressure and intervention, the Movement also provided selective funding to certain candidates over others; this not only affected the balance of the various different contests, but it also influenced potential candidates in their decision to run or not. Proven loyalty to the Movement’s cause was the principal asset for a candidate seeking financial and other help. The Movement’s most effective instrument with which to control candidatures, however, was the most intangible, least visible one and one that directly affected an individual’s readiness to run: intimidation and harassment, which were a constant, well-documented reality within the no-party system. For example, the regime abused the use of pretrial detention and of treason charges against members of the opposition (Human Rights Watch 1999, 130ff.). The resulting climate of fear affected all those who were not fully prepared to stand up against such intimidation. Opposition politicians, especially at the local level, were frequently worried about being exposed as multipartyists. Many people preferred not to take the official opportunity to run for election, as this would have exposed them to harassment by the ruling group. As a result, most of the candidates who did put their names forward were relatively committed movementists—that is, people who were not jeopardizing their own tranquility by expounding their ideas. In many cases, however, the Movement often appeared to be caught in between its professed ideal of elections based on individual merit—that is, elections involving no interference from political organizations—and the practical difficulties of imposing its own choices on would-be candidates. Prior to any election, “recommendations” were made, but “many refused these advises and went ahead. Some of them won, some lost.”5 The implications were quite evident. The important Kampala mayoral election of 1998, for example, was lost to a multipartyist because the pro-Movement vote was split among different candidates, because not all of them had accepted to step down. The following

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year, a by-election for the same political office highlighted the dilemma that the Movement leadership so frequently faced: There were those who felt that the Movement should present one candidate, while others took the view that there was very little that divides the candidates and the Movement should keep out. To satisfy the first group, consultations were carried out with the candidates professing movement politics so that one of them remains in the race. These consultations were not successful. The position of the latter group was therefore preferred.6

Overall, the capacity to “nominate” people and thus control candidatures was neither as systematic nor as effective as it might have been for a fullfledged party organization. Not only did direct interference in candidatures need to be somehow disguised, but also no real sanctions could be brought against those individuals who did not abide by the directives or the “advice” they were given. In several cases, too many progovernment candidates insisted on running, failing to agree on a single candidature, and the Movement could do little more than vaguely threaten to withdraw its support from the constituency in question.7 Opposition parties were inhibited from fielding candidates for a series of reasons. First, there was the long-standing official ban on party activities. This not only weakened the parties’ presence on the ground, as a result of the ban on public rallies and local party branches, but it specifically prohibited parties from sponsoring any individuals running for office. Indeed, up to the Constituent Assembly election of 1994, it was accepted that elections would be run more or less on an individual basis. Party activities and partisan support were not entirely absent, but, in a situation where politics had not yet become as polarized, they were kept to a minimum. The subsequent 1996 parliamentary election, on the contrary, was approached by the old parties in a much more active, antagonistic manner. They were better prepared, better organized this time round. The key question was whether different parties could agree on individual candidates for each constituency who represented the broad multipartyist camp. This was of critical importance since, under plurality election rules, any division in the opposition vote within a given constituency greatly increased the chances of being defeated by the Movement. Thus, the DP and the UPC agreed to share the electoral constituencies to minimize the chances of a multipartyist-against-multipartyist contest, while attempting to field candidates in most constituencies. However, one month before the first direct parliamentary election under the Movement system was due to take place, the Inter-Political Forces Co-operation alliance, set up by the DP and the UPC, decided to boycott the election after alleged election rigging during the recent presidential election. As a result, parties regressed to a state of virtual inactivity once again, and many of their candidates withdrew from the race.

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Beneath the surface, however, things were ultimately more complex. Despite their official boycott of the election, the DP and a faction of the UPC left it to individual members to decide whether they would run or not. Thus, there were several examples of areas where multipartyist candidates eventually decided to run, notably in northern districts such as West Nile, Lango, and Acholi, as well as in Kampala. Opposition to the Movement had been traditionally strong in such areas, and antiparty measures were more loosely enforced there than in other parts of the country. Given the legal restrictions and the boycott of the election, decisions regarding the DP’s candidates were taken in a semiautonomous, decentralized way at the local level: “The party depended very much on the local leadership then in place in identifying and encouraging members of the party, capable members of the party, to be involved.”8 In those areas with a basic organizational structure, the local party gathered together people interested in running for election at semiclandestine meetings, where party members would express their support for those willing to run; it would be recommended that those potential candidates lacking sufficient backing should not run. In other words, such “informal primaries” were held in some parts of the country, although it was entirely up to the individuals in question whether they would accept the resulting “recommendations” or not: “There was no way of stopping them.”9 The situation was rather similar in the case of the Uganda People’s Congress, where analogous informal primaries had also been secretly organized in some places.10 After the IPFC agreement to boycott the parliamentary polls, several of those who had been preparing to run withdrew their candidatures, and in large parts of the country—notably in the west, the south, and the east— no members of the UPC eventually ran for election. As we have mentioned, however, Cecilia Ogwal and other candidates did eventually run—on the grounds that the Movement was not to be allowed to make inroads in traditional UPC strongholds—and as a result, the party won a few seats in the northern constituencies, where it had remained somewhat more active. However, their candidatures had no official or unofficial backing from party headquarters and generally did not involve the local party executive (where such existed). The boycott meant that the 1996 parliamentary election was not substantially different from the subsequent, 2001 parliamentary election; in both cases, the weak attempts made to influence the selection of candidates by opposition parties generally failed to produce a joint multipartyist nomination, and at times failed to produce even a single UPC or DP candidate (although the problem of the two parties’ respective candidates running against each other was witnessed in only a limited number of constituencies, as each party tended to have candidates in its strongholds only).11 When opposition parties tried to nominate candidates, they could only do so in a very informal manner. Since there was no DP or UPC badge to struggle for, it proved impossible to

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limit the number of rebellious multipartyists running for office in a given constituency, and the resulting multiplication of such candidates further favored the Movement’s election prospects. Both the opposition parties and the Movement had considerable difficulty in trying to influence the “nomination” process, as was evident in the fact that several MPs, and particularly those with close links to the old parties, stated that their decision to run was an entirely “personal” decision, which at times they defined as an “individual merit decision” or a “self-initiative.”12 Other MPs claimed that they were explicitly requested to run by their own “community,” by “the people,” or by “local opinion leaders,” and they accounted for their decision to run for parliament as a responsible, almost unavoidable answer to such calls. In certain cases, specific associations that were somehow perceived as representing a candidate’s own community, such as the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council, were claimed to have requested that candidate to run. The direct, if unofficial, influence of the local community was seen in the cases of those individuals who based their decision to run on requests advanced by the elders, particularly in many northern districts: Already before the 1980 election, the elders in Kitgum wanted me to stand. But I declined, I did not feel I was ready. . . . Then, again, before the 1996 election, the elders came to me to ask me to stand. . . . They told me they had already done the ground work. So I took a leave and made some preliminary consultations and I decided to run. It was clearly the elders who pressed me to stand. They probably wanted me because of my role in the government, because of the contacts I had, especially for my experience in the land commission. I had helped many people to get their land.13 Before the 1994 Constituent Assembly election, some elders— representatives of all the elders—came home and said “You must stand.” These were the same people who had said no in 1989, when I then lost the election! So I said myself “No,” and gave them a list of 20 graduates from the constituency for them to go and seek for a suitable candidate. But they came after a week and said “You have to stand.” You know, it was the community who was asking it, the community where I was raised.14

While bottom-up requests to run were certainly influential in a number of situations, in most cases the “calls” to run were little more than the opinions, suggestions, and feedback from an array of locally influential people such as village elders, priests, local councillors, and teachers. Not surprisingly, a prospective candidate may have perceived some of these people as representing sectors of the community, or perhaps merely claiming to be so. Although individuals took different routes in submitting their own candidatures, they rarely had to go through any kind of screening process. Whether would-be candidates felt they were answering a call, or whether they thought they could “contribute” to the cause, or whether they decided to run on the basis of the benefits they could obtain from becoming an MP, the final deci-

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sion was almost invariably a personal one. The few cases in the mentioned northern districts, where multipartyists organized something similar to internal primaries, are interesting in themselves but hardly representative of more than 200 electoral constituencies. When somebody did try to block a candidate’s decision to run, it was more often the candidate’s own wife rather than the leader of a local party or any another organization. As has been seen, however, there was a more subtle, indirect way of influencing an individual’s decision to run. The repressive measures the regime frequently took, quite overtly, before and during electoral campaigns doubtless influenced those people who were making up their minds, although it is rather difficult to quantify the effects of such repression. Not only were leading figures of local parties harassed, beaten, or arrested, but many other people simply kept away from the elections just to avoid personal persecution.

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Setting Up a No-Party Electoral Campaign

The no-party model of politics envisaged substantial restrictions on the way electoral campaigns were to be run. Political parties, of course, were not meant to be part of the picture. When elections were first reintroduced at the local level in the late 1980s, local councillors were selected by calling a public meeting of voters and having them queue up behind their favorite candidate. Vote seekers were only allowed to make a short public speech, which was designed to help voters make up their minds about the “individual merits” of the respective candidates. In other words, no actual campaigning was envisaged. In the mid-1990s, this basic scheme was retained when direct elections were held at the national level. While voters could now cast a secret ballot on polling day, rather than line up openly behind the person of their choice, the candidates would still meet the voters by touring their constituency in a series of parish-level public meetings held over a longer, but still preestablished, period of time. Rules officially restricted candidates to fifteen-minute speeches to the people, with added time allowed for voters to ask them questions. By this time, however, the shape of Ugandan elections had already begun to change. “I was quite naive in thinking that there was no actual campaigning,” one MP recalled,15 while another one pointed out that actually “you do a lot of canvassing before the official one.”16 More extensive campaigning gradually made voters much more aware of each candidate’s political affiliations. The moment election campaigning went beyond scheduled public meetings, new strategic options opened up for the competing candidates. As with the selection of candidates, actual canvassing by individual candidates could also take a series of different forms. The Movement leadership, for example, could step in and use its personnel and financial resources to help its chosen candidates gather votes. Alternatively, the political parties could try to use

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their loose networks, in a more or less coordinated fashion, to support their own candidates. A third option was that individual candidates could base their campaigns on the mobilization of organizations, such as NGOs or councils of elders, whose primary function was not that of taking part in elections. Finally, candidates could also set up entirely independent election machines specifically designed for a single election and for a specific candidate. While the 1994 election for the Constituent Assembly was fought to a significant extent on an individual basis, the 1996 and 2001 parliamentary elections revealed much clearer divisions between the two main sides: the multipartyists and the Movement supporters. Since more often than not the Movement actively supported certain specific candidates, it substantially behaved as any political organization would have, and as such was accused of failing to remain faithful to its own individual merit principle. Indeed, when the Movement intervened in the election process, it was more effective at facilitating candidates than it was at selecting them in the first place. Indeed, it never had a completely free hand in choosing and fielding candidates or in making sure they would not be challenged from within the Movement’s own ranks. Canvassing itself, by contrast, showed that “the NRM was the only organisation with full political freedom during the elections, in addition to its far greater access to state resources for campaign purposes” (Kasfir 1994, 173–174). From the mid-1990s, many Movement candidates began to receive financial help with their canvassing. Estimated figures for the 1996 parliamentary election range between a few hundred thousand and several million Ugandan shillings (up to US$18,000) per head. During the 2001 parliamentary election, it was openly acknowledged that each candidate sponsored by the Movement received between 1 million and 5 million shillings (US$600–3,000) for campaigning purposes.17 In both cases, the secretariat claimed that the funds distributed among progovernment candidates did not come from state coffers but were raised by Museveni, as chair of the Movement, in the form of private donations. Besides its financial resources, the Movement could employ a variety of other instruments in its campaign drives. Representatives of public institutions who were not supposed to enter elections based on individual merit often did, and they did so in a full-fledged partisan way. In 1994, 1996, and 2001, for example, government ministers toured various constituencies and addressed public rallies under the pretext of explaining government policies, while in fact what they were doing was campaigning for specific candidates for parliament or for the Constituent Assembly. Widespread confusion about whether local councillors were supposed to take sides furthered the common misuse of local government organs. Local authorities often actively supported the government: “Some of the local council structures serve as a partisan NRM body during election time and target multipartists and their supporters” (Human Rights Watch 1999,

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54–56). Some of the councils in the north (especially at parish and higher levels) may have been too unpopular and far-removed from the people to be successfully employed as a campaigning tool. Moreover, councils were sometimes too internally divided to be consistently employed as a sound sponsor for candidates running on a Movement ticket.18 However, most local councillors, resident district commissioners, and Local Defence Units were used to mobilize support for Movement candidates. They proved “critical in ensuring that Movement candidates retained their hold over power, negating any claim to neutrality and nonpartisanship” (Oloka-Onyango 2000, 41). The Movement’s leaders took a particular interest in those constituencies where multipartyists represented a genuine challenge to the Movement itself. It was to these constituencies that contributions toward expenses were primarily channeled. In 1996, in those constituencies where no multipartyist candidate was running for election, pro-Movement candidates had been allowed to compete for seats in a relatively free contest. From the late 1990s, however, the Movement encountered increasing criticism and opposition, and it had become concerned about the trustworthiness of its own parliamentary majority. This subsequently led the Movement, and its leader Museveni, to increasingly interfere with, and exercise control over, the 2001 parliamentary election to reduce the risk of electoral defeat in certain specific constituencies and to ensure the loyalty of its elected representatives. Thus, the level of the authorities’ discrimination and intimidation, which had already played an important role in 1996, increased in an election campaign characterized by widespread, if not generalized, low-level violence, malpractice, and chaos. Western and eastern Uganda were the two areas that suffered most from such trouble, which at times was linked to the fierce battle for the political survival of Movement heavyweights.19 Civil servants were reportedly warned that they risked losing their jobs if they were found to be supporting the wrong candidate. Some voters were even told that their candidate would be killed if elected. As in 1996, the army itself appeared to be involved in election campaigning in areas such as Acholi. The UPDF public relations officer justified this by stating that there was no law stopping an army officer from campaigning for any candidate.20 The impact of such involvement was furthered by the fact that local people could hardly organize, or call upon opposition parties, to denounce and fight against mistreatment and abuse. Political parties, fighting a hegemonic force from a legally constrained position, could count on two factors only: their traditional presence in local areas—although by now this had become an ideological presence rather than a physical one—and the unifying effect that dealing with a common political enemy produced among the multipartyist camp. On the contrary, there were two major obstacles to party-based campaigning, and these were the same that had hindered the selection of party candidates. First of all, there was the fact

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that parties were allowed no official role in elections; conversely, they were required to remain extraneous to the electoral process and were repressed should they attempt to do otherwise. Second, had Uganda’s parties really wanted to challenge the government, they did not possess the financial or other resources required to organize an electoral bid of any significance. Party headquarters simply did not possess the local branches they needed to sustain an election campaign. This situation largely reflected the legal ban on party activities, which substantially affected the parties’ local organizations, although it exempted party head offices. By the late 1990s, government intimidation and harassment had become relatively widespread, albeit regionally differentiated, and it even increased further in the run-up to the 2001 election, when preelection violence led to some fifteen to thirty deaths and about 150 arrests.21 The Inter-Political Forces Co-operation formed by the UPC and the DP in 1996 to pool their financial and human resources failed to resolve the two parties’ organizational weaknesses, as its local task forces had been in place for only a short time before the presidential election, and they had no mandate with regard to the parliamentary poll. After the boycott of the parliamentary election had been decided, Uganda’s political parties tried to find a balance between this official position and their discreet encouragement for those candidates who had nevertheless decided to run in a limited number of areas. While national leaders distanced themselves from the election, they allowed local party people to campaign for individual candidates from the party: “In the end, of course, you had de facto party candidates.”22 In both 1996 and 2001, it was essential for candidates to quietly inform the public that they were pro-UPC or pro-DP in order to get grassroots support within those areas that constituted the party’s strongholds. Those candidates who used their party connections did so by employing local party leaders and members as contacts or by including them on their personal, independent electoral teams. Local party people at times acted as intermediaries in identifying, recommending, and mobilizing larger numbers of suitable election campaigners. There was clearly a degree of regional variation in the position of party structures and the degree of local political repression. As regards the DP, for example, Kampala was something of an exception, as the Young Democrats played a significant role in mobilizing electoral support for candidates from the party.23 A certain degree of organized party support was also to be found in traditional party strongholds such as West Nile or Acholi, whereas party candidates and organized backing were virtually absent in areas such as Mukono and Mbarara. As far as the UPC is concerned, historical party strongholds such as Mbarara and Mbale were practically out of bounds due to the intense hostility of local authorities toward any political activity by non-Movement organizations; as a result, there was no local party involvement in electoral politics. In general, very few multipartyists had the support of established party structures

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or could use such structures together with a personal campaign team. In most districts, party members were only loosely mobilized by individual candidates. In 2001, as during the previous election, as far as the DP and the UPC were concerned, electoral campaigning was generally “left to individuals. In a sense, the party wished us well.”24 The overall absence of any organized political platforms not only characterized Uganda’s traditional political parties; indeed, there was very little evidence of any nonparty organizations, other than local councils, getting involved in election campaigning. For example, although appeals were made by church leaders, the churches as such did not really play any substantial role in the 1996 and 2001 elections. As one MP put it, “I stayed away from the churches . . . and the churches themselves now tend to stay away from politics,”25 certainly more so than may have been the case in the 1960s. While religion was still closely related to party membership in Uganda, this was increasingly becoming a legacy of the past rather than a result of efforts to defend sacred beliefs and secular powers by the churches and by voters. Given the absence of organized political platforms, by far the most common way of arranging an election campaign under no-party politics was to create a personal campaign machine. The most striking aspect of this process was not so much the appointment of personal agents or the clientelistic relations that it generated, since similar arrangements could be found virtually everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa (and elsewhere), but rather the clear-cut independence of the vast majority of these networks from parties or any other preexisting political groupings. The ban on the activities of political organizations increased the compartmentalization of those electioneering devices that the various candidates set up in each constituency. These interim arrangements were hierarchically organized and were accompanied by the virtual absence of any horizontal links among these parallel constituency-based experiences. As a rule, a pyramid of agents would be set up to cover the entire constituency, consisting of one or more administrative counties and normally comprising 30,000–60,000 registered voters.26 The size of these pyramidal arrangements varied a great deal, partly because of different understandings of what an “agent” was, and therefore because of the blurred distinction between agents and more general supporters: some of them counted only fifty or so people, while others had an alleged workforce of 2,000–4,000. In the largest networks, the candidate rarely came into contact with lower-level agents, focusing instead on controlling the entire structure through intermediaries and area campaign managers. Each agent would receive a few basic instructions on political issues and electoral strategy, either from the candidate, who met with the agents in small groups, or from the candidates’ intermediaries. Thus instructed, agents went out to preach their patron’s gospel to the voters living in the area they had been

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assigned. The following is an account of how things were arranged by the better-organized candidates: The network you use goes down to the village level. You need to start to know the people who will give you the right names, you can’t know people in every area. I had a manager and a twelve-people core team at each level, including one person targeting women, one for the youth, one each for the main tribes, and so on. So you have this kind of team in each of the three subcounties, in each of the twenty parishes and in each of eighty-three villages. This means 996 individuals, plus 240, plus 36. Plus a twelve-people team at the top. It makes 1,284 agents covering the whole area. . . . Of course, you tend to lose contact with your own agents, you cannot stay in touch with all of them so you tend to delegate authority downwards. By the time you reach the village level everybody is a campaign manager!27

While these electoral machines were essentially independent from political parties and other organizations, the adoption of such arrangements was not incompatible with the deployment of party supporters. However, the latter did not normally play a central role within individual election machines. The sheer abundance of unemployed people was to the advantage of electoral candidates: getting involved in electoral politics offered ad hoc “agents” the chance of some small, but immediate, material reward. Activists were given soft drinks and on occasion a little money: “This was a full time job, so somebody might have a long way to walk and ask for, say, USh1,000—half a dollar—to eat something during the day.”28 Oiling the agents’ palms with handouts of soft drinks, soap, or similar items normally constituted a substantial part of any candidate’s election spending, with additional expenditure going to petrol, posters, photographs, manifestos, and, on rare occasions, even T-shirts and radio programs. The operational cost of individual candidates’ electoral campaigns can only be estimated, but it appears to have grown significantly between the 1996 election—when it fluctuated between 6 million and 20 million Ugandan shillings (i.e., US$3,600–$12,000)—and the 2001 election, when the cost of running a campaign skyrocketed, with some claiming that individual candidates spent US$100,000 in their attempts to get elected in the more expensive rural constituencies. By Ugandan standards, these were enormous amounts of money, and several MPs ended up indebted as a result, thus becoming very vulnerable to patronage and financial offers by the Ugandan government (Kasfir and Twebaze, forthcoming, 42–43). In the long term, the campaign agents may aspire to sharing some of the spoils of power or merely to be associated with a winning candidate in the future. Indeed, in certain exceptional cases, the political machines set up to run an election campaign were retained after the poll and transformed into semipermanent structures. A logic of reciprocity—“support me and if I win I will in turn support you” (Tamale 1999, 164ff.)—appeared to operate in such

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cases, whereby the motivations underlying some of the agents’ involvement included the prospect of using the same network of loyal volunteers for their own personal interests. In the Mbarara municipality, for example, Winnie Byanyima’s 1,500-strong Unity network, set up in 1996, was preserved not only to keep the MP in touch with her constituents and to facilitate mobilization in subsequent elections, but also to campaign for the election of Byanyima’s associates to local councils. Normally, however, recruitment to personal election machines was so informal that many candidates hardly knew how many agents they had actually employed. As one of them recalls, “Others were just voters, or little more than that. But every person asked for a letter of appointment, and even now, at times they come and show it to you to get something, they say ‘Do you remember me, I was your agent.’”29 Since political representation was based on individuals, and there were no party symbols displayed during the election process, collecting and assessing election results was far from easy. While several MPs were obviously classifiable as either movementist or multipartyist, a number of them were not so easily labeled. This was also because many first-time MPs emerged victorious both in 1996, when parliament was directly elected for the first time under the Movement, and in 2001, when about forty sitting MPs decided not to run and a further sixty or so were defeated. If we look at the size of the Movement’s parliamentary caucus formed after the 1996 election, which consisted of about 210 MPs out of a total of 282, and at Museveni’s own claim in the aftermath of the 2001 election that the Movement had won about 230 MPs out of 292,30 there appears to be little difference between the political composition of the two legislatures. Most leading opposition figures won or maintained their seats. Thus, for example, the UPC’s Cecilia Ogwal withstood the challenge mounted by Sam Engola and retained the Lira municipality seat. In Kampala, Ken Lukyamuzi of the small Conservative Party won almost 75 percent of the vote in his constituency. Two members of the DP, Micheal Mabikke, leader of the Young Democrats, and Latif Ssebaggala also won seats in the capital. In the southwest, the Movement elite’s stronghold, Kizza Besigye’s wife, Winnie Byanyima, was once again elected in her hometown of Mbarara. Indeed, the number of self-declared multipartyists grew to between thirty-five and fifty in the seventh parliament (about thirty belonged to the UPC and a dozen to the DP),31 a substantial rise from the approximately twenty such MPs in the sixth legislature, the election of which had been officially boycotted by the major parties. While the somewhat aggressive election campaign mounted by Museveni in 2001 was possibly not that effective in defeating the prominent multipartyist figures that he was targeting, the president’s efforts were probably more successful in ensuring that those MPs unofficially elected on a Movement ticket would represent rather acquiescent legislators, as seen in the next chapter.

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Electoral Organization Under a No-Party System

Four main points sum up the findings on the process of electoral organization at both the selection and campaigning stages in Uganda. First of all, the party organizations played an extremely marginal role in the electoral process. Parties were marginalized, restricted, and repressed by the laws of the Ugandan state. Party members did at times manage to join forces with other multipartyists or to get involved in the personal electoral campaigns of multiparty candidates. However, the parties themselves retracted to the margins in 1996, when they decided to officially boycott the parliamentary election, and they did not get much more directly involved in the 2001 campaign either. In general, they were not in a position to organize properly or to mobilize the required support and resources. Second, restrained by the ideological principles of no-partyism and by a delay in developing its own organization, the Movement’s efforts resulted in the poorly coordinated backing of some of its candidates. This needs to be doubly qualified. On the one hand, both state authorities—at the local and national levels—and public resources got heavily involved in the election process, whether directly through the incumbent candidates or as a result of their mobilization by the Movement’s leadership. On the other hand, the somewhat repressive climate surrounding the 1996 and 2001 elections and the resulting marginalization of multipartyists tended to contain any pressure in favor of the improved organization of the Movement’s own campaigning efforts. Third, there were relatively few instances of political involvement by organizations that were not strictly political. Nonparty groups or associations, such as village elders and local churches, only got significantly involved on extremely rare occasions, sometimes through their semiorganized backing of particular candidates. Fourth, and finally, as prescribed by the no-party rules and the principle of an individual-based contest, most candidates running for national election were relatively isolated, having virtually no contact with other such candidates or any structural ties with political or social organizations. The prevalence of highly individualized electoral machines and the self-selection of candidates together marked a broad fragmentation of political competition: countrywide connections and continuity between social organizations and candidates were weak at best and nonexistent in several cases. While this partly reflected the broader absence of organizational arrangements, which tends to characterize most African countries, Uganda’s no-party setup appeared an extreme case. The relative isolation of candidates, together with the absence of any party-like connections, begs the question of why party-like structures did not emerge outside parliament in the same way they did within parliament (see Chapter 8). Evidence from Uganda seems to support the broader arguments about the primacy of party-like legislative organizations over the two other

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key dimensions of a political party: “the party in the electorate” and “the party as an organization.”32 In Uganda, there was less urgency to develop extraparliamentary organizations than there was to set up cooperative arrangements within parliament. “Like other political institutions, political parties are as attractive as the alternatives permit” (Strøm 2000, 183), and ad hoc, independent electoral machines made of temporary agents were a relatively easy option as a surrogate arrangement. The constituency-based electoral system, which required candidates to campaign in a relatively limited area, and the large availability of unemployed people meant that a local campaign organization could be quickly and smoothly set up and then disbanded when no longer needed. On the contrary, a nationwide electoral district or a more expensive workforce would have reduced the attractiveness of temporary devices based on hired agents. In the face of government harassment and widespread poverty, however, the latter turned out to be cost-effective, efficient alternatives. The clampdown on party arrangements and personnel was largely directed toward citizens or party-citizen activism—the limitations on political parties targeted party activities outside parliament, such as party conferences, local branches, and public rallies—and thus temporary arrangements best suited a situation in which ordinary Ugandans were much more likely to be harassed by government authorities than any individual MPs were. However, the fact that party-like groups emerged in parliament proved that “their ability to reduce transaction costs and solve collective action problems in the legislative arena may be their ultimate rationale and source of strength” (Strøm 2000, 189). Despite the existence of the individual merit principle, legislators were strongly encouraged to organize and to act together. Common action dramatically increased the prospect of success compared with acting on one’s own (Bowler 2000, 177): in general, MPs maximized the benefits they enjoyed if they supported or opposed a government collectively; they increased their influence on policymaking and their capacity to gain access to prestigious positions if they managed to join forces; and their chances of being reelected rose if they pooled their resources. Thus, the quasi-party arrangements that began to emerge in Uganda’s parliamentary politics—for example, the Movement caucus, the Young Parliamentarians Association, the women’s caucus—confirm the idea that “the political party is a purposefully designed organisation of, by and for legislators” (Thies 2000, 256). These issues are addressed in the next chapter.

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8 The Parliamentary Politics of No-Partyism

POLITICAL ACTIVITY WITHIN UGANDA’S SIXTH (1996–2001) AND seventh (2001–2006) legislatures, together with the political relationship between parliament and the presidency, clearly illustrate the implications of nopartyism. How did nonpartisan, independent MPs transform their individual political positions into effective political action within parliament? To what extent did the inner workings of the same parliament rely on individual contacts among MPs rather than group-based political interactions? Did the country’s elected representatives have any way of surrogating the coordinating functions of traditional political parties? Furthermore, just how effective were these alternative organizational arrangements in shaping their members’ voting behavior? Understanding the inner workings of parliament and its role during Uganda’s period of no-party politics requires a prior understanding of its position vis-à-vis the presidency. A directly elected executive tended to magnify the implications of an individualized assembly. The president’s legitimacy and his mandate do not derive from a parliamentary vote of confidence. Executive and legislative powers are therefore more clearly separated than in parliamentary systems (Lijphart 1992; Sartori 1995). This not only lessens the likelihood that MPs will form groups and behave in a partisan manner within parliament, but it also implies the existence of potential conflicts and deadlocks between parliament and government. The independently elected members of Uganda’s parliament devised several ways of coordinating their activities. Despite the fact that government counted on its own independent mandate and that a large majority of MPs supported the Movement, it soon became evident that the executive needed some form of political organization within parliament. A party-like Movement group was thus formed to influence the behavior of MPs when critical parliamentary votes were being taken. To some extent, this cast the shadow of the ruling elite’s political hegemony over parliament. However, the cohesion of the pro155

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government group in parliament remained relatively precarious, in part because of a lack of binding sanctions; the result was that in certain extreme cases, government had to force its way through parliament, which then led to constitutional crises. Uganda has a full-fledged presidential executive. The president is directly elected by means of a double-ballot system. He is both head of state and head of government. As such, the president appoints and directs the cabinet, whose members are directly responsible to him. The government is not subject to a parliamentary vote of confidence, but neither can parliament, which has a fixed term, be dissolved by the president. The president, however, is endowed with an American-style veto power over all legislation, and this power can only be overruled by a two-thirds parliamentary majority.1 Presidential systems are prone to antagonism between legislative and executive bodies, which enjoy formally separate electoral legitimacy since the political majorities they represent may be different or even oppositional. The divide that can emerge between legislative and executive powerholders, where each of the two owes its mandate directly to the electorate, has long been a focal criticism of presidential systems.2 While a parliamentary system creates incentives that tend to bind the executive and its parliamentary majority together—for the fortunes of the two are to some extent tied—these incentives are not as strong in a presidential context. An executive presidency is not the expression of a parliamentary majority nor, in general, does the survival of the former depend on the stability of the support it receives from the latter. However, although the origins and the survival of an executive president are independent from those of the assembly, effective governmental action still largely depends on whether the government receives the support of the House. For presidential systems, too, it holds true that “cohesion and discipline matter. . . . The maintenance of a cohesive voting bloc inside a legislative body is a crucially important feature” (Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999, 3). The lack of legislative support may “contribute to chronic conflict between the branches of government, which can in turn generate constitutional crises” (Carey 1997, 69), as witnessed by those presidential countries in transition to democracy (such crises occurred, for example, in Peru in 1992, and in Russia in 1994–1995). In Africa, the absence of a presidential majority within parliament contributed to the collapse of electoral regimes in at least two cases: in the Congo during the early 1960s, and in Niger in 1996.3 Under the no-party system, the limits imposed on political organization, together with the fragmentation of a completely individualized assembly, made the government’s pursuit of parliamentary support increasingly complex, from the theoretical point of view at least. In Uganda’s case, the cohesion of a noparty majority and the extent to which the president had to, and could, rely on such a majority were very much open to debate. During the decade covered by

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the sixth and seventh legislatures (1996–2006), President Museveni’s ruling group did enjoy the support of a large parliamentary majority. When the country began the transition to multipartyism and MPs were required to formalize their affiliations, 242 MPs out of a total 304 registered with the NRM-O party.4 Nevertheless, the country’s politics were not devoid of the trademark problems that presidential executives may generate when dealing with legislators. Museveni, for example, often complained that he was “tired of arguing” with MPs when they delayed the passing of important legislation: When I was elected, I signed a contract with the people of Uganda, and government is supposed to implement programmes. Unless this is done it will cause a political crisis. We cannot go on like this. We cannot sign a contract with the electorate and some groups frustrate it. . . . Parliament is another confusion. Traditionally, I have been having bureaucrats but now there are MPs. . . . How many wars shall I fight?5

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The Resurgence and Evolution of Parliament in a New Political Age

The election of a new, multiparty parliament in 2006 was only the most recent of a series of measures marking the evolution of an institution that, notably during the second half of the 1990s, came to play an unprecedented role in Ugandan politics. Shortly after the end of the war, the NRM’s National Resistance Council, composed of some twenty-two to thirty-eight former guerrilla commanders, was installed as the country’s parliament for a period of just over a year (February 1986 to April 1987).6 While this was presented as a parliament, its very size, its lack of any electoral mandate, and “legislative” decisions in the form of simple presidential decrees made it more akin to a military junta than a real parliament. The NRC was subsequently expanded to between eighty and ninety-eight members, and it began to adopt a formal process of making and approving new legislation. This expanded NRC was to last two years, during which time it made the lasting distinction between a core group of leaders, called the “historicals,” and all those who joined at later stages. Between April 1989 and May 1996, the NRC was further expanded and given a popular mandate through indirect elections. The new Ugandan constitution provided for a directly elected parliament, established in 1996. The sixth and seventh legislatures, which together covered the 1996–2006 decade, constituted a key experience in no-party politics. A new era was subsequently ushered in with the election of a new party-based assembly. The sixth legislature—the first directly elected parliament under the noparty system—represented a ground-breaking development in Uganda’s political history. The last serious parliamentary experience dated back to the early 1960s, because the turbulent elections of 1980 did not provide the elected

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assembly with full legitimacy. Thus, building on its immediately previous (indirectly elected) structures, the new parliament had the task of fully restoring parliamentary practice.7 The considerable efforts that were made to assert its central role in Ugandan politics—second only to Museveni’s powerful presidency—were supported by four key factors (Kasfir and Twebaze, forthcoming). The first was the 1995 constitution, which placed parliament in a key position within the broader institutional framework, underlining its capacity to take the legislative initiative; its supervisory, budgetary, and investigative functions; its committee-based structural arrangement; its self-regulation through standing orders; its power to override the president’s opposition with qualified majorities and to veto presidential nominees to key offices; and, finally, its power to remove the president from office should the latter abuse his power or prove incapable of performing the job. The second factor was the development of a strong system of committees that significantly contributed to the effectiveness of parliament. Strong committees are often a basis for, and reflection of, the strength of parliament itself. In Uganda, such committees were soon to play a vital role in lawmaking, supervision of the executive, consensus building, and mobilization. Questions relating to privatization policies, to the appointment of top officials, or to corruption scandals were often forcefully raised by standing parliamentary committees (cf. Tangri and Mwenda 2006, 112; The Monitor and New Vision 14 April 1999). A third way in which parliamentary power was increased was through the improvement of its facilities and resources, including the presence of professional staff, a library and research center, Internet services, and offices for MPs. The Uganda Parliamentary Technical Assistance Project, funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), contributed to this end (Kayunga 2001, 184). Finally, according to Kasfir and Twebaze, the very no-party framework, at least initially, created a situation that could be exploited to strengthen parliament’s position vis-à-vis the executive. The existence of a blurred boundary between the two allowed the more critical supporters of the Movement to join forces with multipartyists “without losing their Movement credentials” (Kasfir and Twebaze, forthcoming, 33), thus furthering opportunities for the emergence of parliamentary coalitions of reformist MPs ready to oversee government activities. The capacity of a representative assembly to keep a directly elected president in check was one of the alleged advantages of the individual merit principle, which, it was claimed, enabled MPs who were not under the pressure and control of party whips to freely oppose the spread of corruption or the entrenchment of personal interests in public policy legislation.8 While political parties maintained a presence in the mind of many Ugandans, as well as in extraparliamentary politics, they had virtually no relationship with parliament or any influence on parliamentary activities. Parties were, by law, banned from what was meant to be a no-party parliament, and the leaders of the two main

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opposition forces were not even members of the legislative assembly (the UPC’s late president Milton Obote was in exile, while DP leader Paul Ssemogerere never ran for parliament, but only for the presidency in 1996). In the absence of Uganda’s traditional parties, a new, independent-minded generation of opposition leaders emerged from among the MPs’ ranks. Among the most visible were Winnie Byanyima, Norbert Mao, and Wandera Ogalo. The courage and active commitment they displayed was rooted in the experience of the Constituent Assembly, whose chair, the late James Wapakhabulo, helped legitimize dissent and criticism among members of House.9 In 1998 and 1999, in particular, these leading MPs encouraged parliament to scrutinize government legislation more closely, to monitor the activities of the executive, and to censure allegedly corrupt ministers. This process strengthened the authority of parliament, fostering a sense of belonging even among those MPs who were radically opposed to the Movement: “This is a very strong parliament: it has done better than any other before it.”10 The effectiveness of the no-party parliament during its first mandate could be clearly seen in its capacity to pass important legislative measures that further increased the powers and role of the legislative assembly. Parliamentary committees were often the source of key legislative action. In particular, two fundamentally important Private Member’s Bills originated within such a committee before going on to become important new laws: the 1997 Administration of Parliament Act, and the 2001 Budget Act. Neither did parliament shy away from confronting the government directly. Indeed, there were clashes, notably on issues such as institutional reform, corruption, and privatization. When the controversial 1998 Political Organisations Bill was tabled by the government, for example, the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee strongly objected to the government’s restrictive views. Its report proposed changes that would have eased party restrictions, leading the government to withdraw the bill altogether. This case clearly reveals the contest between the Movement, the old parties’ extraparliamentary opposition, and a not entirely controllable parliament. Privatization also became a hotly debated issue. Privatization plans for the Uganda Commercial Bank and associated undercover dealings, for example, led to the assembly—which opposed the sale of the bank for the entire duration of the sixth legislature—getting involved in a tugof-war with the president. Led by the independent-minded politician Augustine Ruzindana, the Public Accounts Committee investigated a number of cases of financial mismanagement (Tangri and Mwenda 2006, 112). Indeed, parliament was able to hold members of the executive accountable by censuring two of them for misconduct and by creating sufficient pressure for three others to resign as well. The minister of state for education, Jim Muhwezi, and the minister of state for finance, Sam Kuteesa, both of whom were members of the inner presidential circle, were censured by two separate votes taken in 1998 and were forced to resign as a result. Ministers Kirunda Kivejinja,

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Matthew Rukikaire, and Richard Kajijuka also resigned on separate occasions, between 1997 and 1999. Other members of government, most notably VicePresident Speciosa Kazibwe, were “saved” by cabinet reshuffles that moved them away from those sectors in which they were allegedly responsible for mismanagement or corruption. The various cases in question involved a range of misconduct, from taking bribes to conflict of interest, from the diversion of fuel from a state-owned company to the failure to account for rapidly accumulated private wealth.11 Parliament’s independent power to scrutinize government-proposed legislation and to hold the executive accountable for its actions was strongly and openly resented by President Museveni, who repeatedly attacked parliament and tried to delegitimize it (see Chapter 4). In addition to such direct attacks, the executive’s reaction consisted of a twofold strategy. In the short term, remedies were sought within the existing parliament. As the unexpected consequences of an assembly elected on the basis of individual merit became increasingly evident, one potential solution was to establish a progovernment, party-like parliamentary group: the Movement caucus. Whether addressed by Museveni himself or by other Movement leaders, this caucus was designed to extend and institutionalize what Kayunga terms the “Rwakitura phenomenon” (in reference to the president’s own country residence): “Whenever there is a deadlock . . . the president invites certain members of parliament for some form of panel beating” (Kayunga 2001, 179); this was often accompanied by the distribution of material incentives. Attempts to streamline parliament were also made at the plenary level, with the imposition of a more subservient speaker. Parliament’s efforts to create a degree of legislative independence from government suffered one of its worst setbacks when a governmentsponsored Referendum Bill was passed in flagrant defiance of procedural correctness (see Chapter 2). In the medium term, the president made a deliberate effort to ensure that the seventh legislature would be a very different story. First, Museveni intervened heavily in the 2001 parliamentary election by providing political and financial backing to loyal candidates who were challenging sitting “troublemakers” (Tangri and Mwenda 2006, 115; Kasfir and Twebaze, forthcoming, 17). Furthermore, as soon as the new parliament had been sworn in, the government used pressure tactics to ensure that its own loyal supporters filled key parliamentary committees, regardless of their specific skills. As a result, several committees lost their dynamic, independent character, as did parliament to a certain degree. In the new parliament, for example, no minister was censured, despite the constant exposure of scandals that continued to plague Uganda’s public life. Third, the adoption of open roll call voting on all issues—a measure devised to facilitate the constitutional amendment that would allow Museveni to retain the presidency— meant that MPs were put under much greater pressure over their voting behavior. Finally, the practice of

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rushing through key legislative proposals (including the 2003 Movement Amendment Bill and the 2005 Constitutional Amendment Bill, as in fact had already happened in the case of the 1999 Referendum Bill) made it very difficult to properly scrutinize new legislation. Generally speaking, the seventh parliament was forced to adopt a much lower profile. Yet, Kasfir and Twebaze stress that its rubber stamp reputation was partly, if not wholly, undeserved and misleading. Although parliament was not able to counter the executive’s most controversial legislative proposals—notably on issues relating to the constitution or the political system at large—it did not entirely renounce an active role in policymaking and oversight activities. Many government proposals thus continued to be significantly modified, such as those on privatization, on northern Uganda, on social security, and on access to information (Kasfir and Twebaze, forthcoming, 18–19). With regard to the claim that individual merit fostered parliamentary standing, the evidence we have provides no clear confirmation or otherwise. Indeed, cases such as those of the referendum law would seem to bear out the general idea that, on the contrary, “individual merit weakens parliament because members, as individuals, are open to executive control and manipulation.”12 However, the question of how a completely atomized parliament would interact with government in the long term had already been preempted. The moment the Movement created its own parliamentary caucus to impose a degree of order among its rank and file, the no-party assembly was, to a significant extent, no longer atomized. The alleged individualism of parliament was in fact swept aside: practical necessities overrode ideological claims, demonstrating that a no-party parliament could hardly be considered a sustainable project. Museveni himself recognized the need to use caucus-like arrangements to solve contentious issues and organize parliamentary politics: “Even those long term multipartists—these others who are allergic to the Movement—you can start slowly in parliament and form a caucus. In the UK parties started in parliament.”13 The remaining part of this chapter focuses on the different groups that emerged within parliament and on the way that legislators who were elected on a no-party basis actually voted in parliament—that is, whether they voted on the basis of true freedom of choice, or under pressure from these semiorganized networks.

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The True Extent of MPs’ Independence

Members of any legislative assembly tend to devise party-like cooperative mechanisms. There are two main theories regarding the benefits that MPs gain from organizing, or belonging to, party-like groupings (Bowler 2000; cf. Cox and McCubbins 1993). According to one theory—the “one-arena model”—

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legislators focus on the advantages that collective parliamentary action can provide. MPs need to coalesce to reap such benefits as adequate office space and staff; to receive choice committee assignments; and to ensure involvement in agenda setting and policymaking (for example, through control of the agenda and government and through legislative action). The so-called “twoarena model,” on the contrary, emphasizes the links between parliamentary and electoral politics by focusing on the concern of MPs with ensuring their nomination for the next election as well as the necessary support to actually contest it. These concerns can be placated by the organizational, symbolic (e.g., the label), and financial resources that a political party provides. Whichever of the two interpretations one wants to accept—the one- or the two-arena model—both concur that party-like arrangements are likely to emerge, whether among MPs only or among the electorate. There may be a strong incentive for legislators to organize regardless of the role of parties among the electorate—that is, even in the context of a general decline in the organization of parties within civil society. In the case of the world’s advanced democracies, it has been convincingly argued that the organization of parliamentary groupings is likely to “survive and even prosper” since they “still enjoy tremendous procedural advantage over individuals or nonpartisan legislative groups; . . . if parties really are losing their hold on the electorate, it represents a return to their roots as parliamentary organizations” (Thies 2000, 239, emphasis added). In this sense, “democracy without parties might be unthinkable, but large modern legislatures without political parties is almost inconceivable” (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000, 9). Since Ugandan MPs were supposedly elected on individual platforms, parliamentary politics was meant to be characterized by an extreme degree of fluidity. The formation of parliamentary groups ran against the individual merit goal of promoting nonconfrontational politics: any crystallized political alignments in a segmented society, the argument went, were likely to express ethnically based antagonisms. Uganda’s no-party MPs generally claimed that they indeed enjoyed a very broad margin of freedom and scope for individual positioning on parliamentary issues. Lobbying focused on individuals rather than on groups, and individuals were comparatively free when casting their votes. This was particularly the case when noncontroversial matters were being dealt with. The other side of the coin was that not only voting, but also everyday tasks such as collecting information on agenda issues were largely left to individual MPs. To learn more about such issues, MPs were meant to rely on parliamentary committees or to refer back to their constituents through local hearings. Neither did MPs have any ready-made network for expressing their grievances or for submitting statements or bills to parliament. As Bjorn Rasch reminds us, “The legislative task is collective in nature, and collective dilemmas will readily emerge” (Rasch 1999, 123). Individual legislators acting on their own lose out

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on the benefits (e.g., control over the distribution of appointments and other perks, over the agenda, over policymaking) that can be gained through coordinated action (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 83ff.). So, how did things actually work in the Ugandan parliament? How did some 300 MPs managed to organize themselves to deal with parliamentary issues? What patterns of association emerged, if any? Did cooperative arrangements impose restraints on the behavior of individual MPs and, if so, to what extent? The most important form of party-surrogate that emerged within Uganda’s no-party system was the parliamentary caucus. The word caucus, which is of American Indian origin, derives its political meaning from US politics, where it describes “a private meeting of political party members in order to seek agreement on a common course of action,” “an organization of members . . . [which] may be officially recognized, as are the House majority and minority caucuses,” or “unofficial groups of members having shared legislative interests” (Shafritz 1993, 73). Hereafter, the term is adopted to indicate the more or less formalized, regularized arrangement of meetings of a qualified, selected or otherwise restricted group of MPs. A tendency toward the formation of caucuses had been evident since at least the mid-1990s, subsequent to the holding of direct, national elections. The first caucus was formally inaugurated by the seventy or so multipartyist delegates to the Constituent Assembly, under the name of the National Caucus for Democracy.14 This represented a direct response to the need for common strategies and collective discipline within the assembly, a problem that had remained unanswered in the arguments of the no-party enthusiasts. It was no coincidence that such an answer emerged from the ranks of the pluralist camp: “Electoral politics is about organization, some minimum programme and political discipline based on defined political lines. The multipartists were better prepared for this game” (Tajudeen 1997, 29). Although no discussion by NRM leaders had ever hinted at the need to organize MPs into political groups, it did not take them long to learn from the multipartyists and to further develop this kind of forum. Despite their minority role and their limited impact on the final document, the opposition had appeared to make the most of their presence within the Constituent Assembly, at least in terms of their capacity to coordinate as a group and to present the strongest possible arguments during the constitution-making debates. The need to respond as a group, and thus to formulate common positions in the best possible way, was not lost on the advocates of no-partyism: The opposition forced some of these things on us. . . . We had come on individual merit to discuss the Constitution of Uganda . . . [but] as we went home in the evenings, they would meet to plot strategies so we were forced to form the Movement caucus. . . . When people form themselves as an opposition, then you have to organise yourselves, because the government cannot sit there and see programmes derailed.15

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Pro-NRM delegates within the Constituent Assembly were promptly summoned to constitute a rather informal caucus, and by the time the sixth legislature had been elected in 1996, things had been turned upside down. It was now the Movement that rapidly organized its MPs through its own caucus. The multipartyists, heavily reduced in numbers, decided they were better off avoiding any strict identification as a provocateur group. Thus, while the caucus approach originated within the multipartyist camp, it was the Movement that quickly adopted it and gave it a somewhat more stable and elaborate format. Far from being restricted to the movementists-versus-multipartyists divide, the fashion of creating caucuses soon spread to other areas deemed suitable for regrouping MPs. Hence the creation of the Young Parliamentarians Association (YPA), which gathered together all young or first-time MPs, and acquired fame for its consistent battle against political corruption. A number of ethnically based caucuses also emerged—such as the Acholi and the Buganda parliamentary groups—challenging the integrationist, “antisectarian” ideas of the Movement’s leadership.16 On an even smaller scale, several individual districts formed their own caucuses (Pallisa, Moroto, and many others). A “minority tribes of Uganda group” had been reportedly formed in the Constituent Assembly by delegates representing the Karimojong, the Samia, the Madi, the Kakwa, the Bamba, the Bakonzo, and the Baruli; and in 1999, even a Parliamentary Pastoralists Association was launched, banding together MPs from Ankole, Karamoja, Teso, and other cattle-raising areas.17 These semiorganized parliamentary networks differed not only with regard to their membership criteria and size, but also in terms of political objectives, as shown in Table 8.1. Some were meant to operate as links with electoral conTable 8.1 Parliamentary Caucuses

Parliamentary Caucuses in the Sixth Parliament: Membership and Main Objectives Membership (approximate)

Movement caucus Young Parliamentarians Association Uganda Women Parliamentarians Association Buganda Parliamentary Association Acholi Parliamentary Group Pallisa District Group Parliamentary Pastoralists Association

211 93

Membership Criteria Partisanship Age/Parliamentary experience

51

Gender

78

Ethnicity/Region

12

Ethnicity/Region

4 n.a.

District Predominant productive activity within the constituency

Main Objectives Support for government Lobbying for positions, constituency activities, anticorruption campaign Women’s rights Land, traditional institutions Customary institutions, security from armed rebels Resources for the district Pastoralists’ interests

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stituencies, while others were designed to represent ethnic communities, to support government policies, and so on. Yet, their broader common aim was the coordination of collective action in parliament, something that was greatly appreciated by most MPs, who had had to get into parliament on their own and who lacked the support of party-like networks. Caucuses allowed individual members to air their views more often than they could possibly do in parliament; to draw attention to, select, mediate, and bring together various different ideas; to learn about available policy options; and to shape parliamentary debate by presenting arguments and issues in a more articulate fashion.18 The true importance of caucuses to Uganda’s politics hinged on the extent to which they could actually express specific positions on given political issues, submit these positions during the course of parliamentary debates, and back them in parliament. A key feature of parliamentary life in Uganda, however, was the virtual lack of any direct sanctions brought by caucuses to ensure that individual MPs would back the group’s line on specific bills or motions. The absence of binding sanctions was both an aim and a consequence of individual merit, no-party politics. In this sense, Uganda’s case compares strikingly with the multiparty setup adopted by South Africa during the initial years of the postapartheid democracy, between 1994 and 1999. In that case, political parties were strengthened by antidefection constitutional provisions that prevented MPs from neglecting party directives when voting in parliament. Anyone who did so was to be expelled from their party and automatically lose their parliamentary seat. This implied that South African party organizations had complete control over the behavior of their MPs, in particular during parliamentary votes. Indeed, during its first year in power, the African National Congress (ANC) government developed the parliamentary practice of passing legislation without even holding a vote.19 In the absence of any direct disciplinary instruments or party disciplinary bodies, the question in Uganda was whether, and to what extent, parliamentary caucuses could adopt indirect ways of shaping or influencing the vote. What specific mechanisms were developed for this purpose? Did the caucus system succeed in having a persuasive effect over the voting behavior of almost 300 MPs?20 The Movement Caucus: Its Membership, Resources, and Sanctions Since the presence of an informally coordinated group in the Constituent Assembly had “proved to be a good experience, . . . the initiative was prompted by the President’s High Command”21 (or, in a slightly different version, by a lobby of MPs close to Museveni)22 to set up a more stable caucus in the parliament that was elected in 1996. Voting discipline within the assembly was a key concern: there was a need “to bring order in parliamentary activities . . .

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to understand and make clear what is our position and what is the government position, and to see whether there is any discrepancy between the two.”23 The association initially consisted of about ninety legislators (all women district representatives24 and one member elected by MPs from the same district), but in 1998, it was expanded to include all MPs willing to join. Uganda’s president wanted to abandon what risked creating a distinction between proMovement MPs that were “more movementist than others” and everyone else. All MPs with progovernment sympathies would gather in plenary sessions.25 Nevertheless, the caucus remained an entirely informal phenomenon, and there was no mention of it among the organs established by the 1997 Movement Act. Because of the Movement’s officially all-inclusive membership, every legislator was in theory a legitimate member of the caucus. To bring home this point, the outspoken multipartyist MP Norbert Mao attended an important meeting held by the caucus.26 Ignoring the principles of Movement politics and individual merit, however, the chair of the caucus stated that it consisted of only 211 actual members. This very precise figure implied a clear distinction between those who belonged to the caucus and those who did not. As a consequence, multipartyist MPs attacked the caucus as illegal, since by law every citizen was deemed to be a member of the Movement. Just like the parliamentary group of any government under multiparty politics, the caucus mediated between three sides: the executive, the Movement’s extraparliamentary organization, and pro-Movement MPs. It was given the task of creating a balance between the different components of the Movement within parliament, while remaining officially independent from extraparliamentary powers.27 The Ugandan vice-president and former caucus chair, Gilbert Bukenya, and the staunch supporter of the Movement, Minister Mondo Kagonyera, provided two straightforward explanations of the rationale underlying the creation of the caucus. They explicitly linked it to the detrimental effects of an individual merit, atomized parliament: Everywhere in the world, aside from parliamentary activities, politicians need to meet informally. It’s a consensus-building caucus. Although we have individual merit, individual politics then need to come together to reach group consensus. I see it as a filter and a refiner of possible policies before they come to the House. This is a young democracy. If people were to see the very leadership conflicting, they would be scared. . . . Politics is a game of solving problems, if you do it in public you are finished. . . . Then we vote on the issues we have been discussing. I call it a “consensus vote”: I have directed the caucus in building consensus. You know, when it ends up divided, with two positions and two groups that are not reconciled, I don’t take it as a good caucus.28 We can’t afford just to go on the floor of parliament and create problems with each other, wash our dirty linen in public! So, when controversial issues arise, we have to discuss them in the caucus. It is usually the very politically

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charged and controversial issues. . . . We are not a bunch of undisciplined people!29

The forum not only served the leadership’s purposes, but it also performed certain very clear functions from the point of view of Uganda’s MPs. The caucus helped increase the depth of MPs’ knowledge and understanding of government policies—in fact, it was within the caucus that many of them got to know what government was really about and what policy options were actually available.30 While the caucus did not circulate written documentation, its speeches and debates provided important information to MPs who would have otherwise been left very much to their own devices: “I have also been going to the Movement caucus. At first I didn’t. But then a friend told me: ‘How are you going to know what’s going on in the Movement and in parliament?’ And I decided it was reasonable to attend.”31 Attendance at the meetings, held roughly once a month, tended to fluctuate and largely depended on the issues on the agenda; attendance was always high when Museveni himself addressed the gathering. Important national debates would normally result in caucus discussions on the matter. However, movementists tended to meet and make concerted efforts to establish a common position on those issues that saw opposition MPs coalescing, or on those issues that could potentially spur MPs as such to oppose the government’s position.32 Not surprisingly, the government constantly strove to steer the activities of the caucus and to use the caucus to maximize its own control over parliament, both through the secretariat and through the direct involvement of the president. The agenda, for example, was usually established by the caucus chair, upon consultation with the Movement’s highest political organs. Most of the time, members would be informed about dates of meetings and of the issues to be discussed by means of a convocation notice placed in their pigeonholes. Ministers, and sometimes the president himself, would turn up at important meetings to spell out their positions and to make clear what they expected from MPs: “To ensure support on the matter . . . we are encouraged to be active in the debate to persuade the House.”33 With introductory briefings followed by top-down persuasive discourse, the outcome would in many cases be a foregone conclusion. In the scornful words of multipartyist MPs, the caucus ended up as “just a forum to influence spineless MPs, for bulldozing them to support the government position—an instrument of the president”34 aimed at “trying to push, to get involved and manipulate parliament.”35 Yet, the possibility was there for the floor to react, and for members simply to disagree with the position expressed by the leadership.36 Hence the key problem of the caucus approach: despite its top-down arrangements and all the spin, what was to happen if members could not sort out their differences within the caucus? The question of just how successful the Movement was in using the caucus to secure cohesion among its supporters in parliament reveals a mixed

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picture. The answer is complicated by two factors that lessened somewhat the importance of discipline during the sixth and seventh legislatures and helped disguise defections. These two factors were the size of the pro-Movement parliamentary majority and its unclear organizational boundaries. In practice, the Movement did not ever require the backing of all its declared supporters to ensure the passage of a given bill or resolution, nor was it easy to identify defectors when group divisions remained so loose. The Movement caucus was widely held to be the most influential of all parliamentary associations. This was largely because of its size, both in absolute terms and when compared with other groupings. To some degree, however, its relative strength was also due to the kind, extent, and effectiveness of the pressure that it could bring to bear on its members. Informal pressure and kickbacks were frequently used to ensure compliance with, and support for, the official line. As a leading movementist put it, “There’s no power to whip, although informally we do prevail on people.”37 Museveni’s use of the caucus to rush through a new 2000 Referendum Bill and prevent a constitutional crisis prompted one commentator to declare that there was “now a real likelihood that the unconstitutional, undefined, secretive and unaccountable Movement caucus is to increasingly assume the role of Parliament.”38 In a surprisingly candid fashion, a former chair of the caucus explained how the Movement exercised control over its MPs and how it was planning to tighten this control: In fact, when people come to a consensus and you belong to that ideological group, you tend to stick to it. A party can discipline, if you behave badly. And, indirectly, we do it too. For example, through assistance at the next election. People don’t want to lose their belonging to a certain group. We’ve introduced new rules, a “Code of conduct” that was approved by the last NEC. It includes a “Leadership code”: how you should behave. Otherwise, you can be thrown out, marginalized—although this is not done formally.39

Ugandan elections were formally fought on a nonpartisan basis. Nevertheless, the fear of having to run, in practice, against unofficial pressure from the Movement, and without its financial support, may have been a further, very powerful reason for an MP to comply with directives from above. Campaigns would be orchestrated to cast aspersions on untrustworthy members, and local authorities—in particular, the often intimidating resident district commissioners—were easily mobilized to prevent such MPs from receiving a new mandate.40 In contrast, pledges of financial or political backing at future elections and promises of immediate material rewards proved particularly effective in a country where poverty was widespread, democratic practices were a recent acquisition, and alternative organizations were few and far between. Incentives would primarily be given out to caucus leaders and even to the parliamentary speaker. These, in turn, were given the job of making it clear to Movement sup-

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porters what the benefits and punishments for their behavior would be. Patronage took a variety of different forms: ministerial appointments, money, business deals, foreign travel, disbursements, and investments in certain constituencies were among the inducements used to encourage MPs to lend their support to certain political positions. Not surprisingly, it was the more loyal members who were constantly rewarded, much to the resentment of other members.41 These practices took place during both the the sixth and seventh legislatures. In the run-up to the June 2000 referendum, for example, a number of MPs confirmed that USh500,000–USh1 million (US$300–600) had been distributed to Movement MPs, through the caucus, by the National Referendum Committee. Such money was officially distributed to fund “facilitation” activities among local referendum committees. However, it was given only to “active Movement supporters” and to members who regularly attended the caucus, “with some MPs being referred to Bukenya [at the time the caucus chair] for clearance.”42 In late 2004, some 240 progovernment MPs were paid USh5 million each (amounting to a total of USh1.2 billion, or about $680,000) to support the amendment of the constitution lifting the limit on the presidential term of office, thus allowing Museveni to run for the presidency once again. What was meant to be a covert form of distribution, supposedly managed by the parliamentary affairs minister, was made public when one MP was denied his share. The chair of the Movement caucus, Charles Bakkabulindi, confirmed the handouts, though he claimed that the money had not been handed out in exchange for a commitment to back the third-term reform, but to help MPs reach out to their constituents and explain the broader constitutional reforms at issue.43 However, although the Ugandan government itself had taken the initiative in forming the caucus, it did not always manage to control its members. Museveni let it be known that he would not tolerate any Movement leader or minister taking up positions other than those in keeping with the official line.44 However, the question how of to effectively sanction other “errant members” remained to some extent unanswered. Much depended, for example, on the method of voting adopted by parliament on a case-by-case basis. On those rare occasions when voting was secret, “the opposition numbers swell[ed].”45 This may explain why, since the time of the Constituent Assembly, the division lobby method had prevailed. This method of voting implied a lack of secrecy, which was heavily criticized since it tended to create difficult situations: “People are being cajoled or coerced to vote . . . against their conscience; . . . delegates say ‘I agree with you . . . but I can’t afford to be identified with you.’”46 In 2005, prior to the parliamentary vote on the removal of the constitutional limit on the number of presidential terms, the rules of procedures of the House were changed and open roll call voting was extended to all issues. This was bound to reduce the autonomy of MPs, as their position on controversial or sensitive issues was no longer protected by secrecy of the vote they cast (Kasfir and Twebaze, forthcoming, 25).

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The way MPs voted was nevertheless influenced by the specific issue in question. Not surprisingly, such issues as the Referendum Bill and the lifting of the two-term limit required explicit monetary inducements. Some described the the caucus as “very effective on voting when issues are not controversial, that is, when there is consensus in the caucus.”47 This would seem to imply that, while the caucus may have been an important forum for discussion and information gathering, it did not really affect how MPs voted in the House, but merely acted as a “conditionally active” coalition: “When we don’t agree, people would go their own way”48 without necessarily buying the government’s line: “The president calls them to strategize. . . . They try to stick together, when voting. But it’s one thing to say ‘We shall do this,’ quite another thing to actually vote that way. Many just want to listen to the debate, but they can be persuaded otherwise.”49 The House records during the sixth legislature include numerous instances of a split in the votes of caucus members. Such cases include the election of the parliamentary speaker (when several movementists decided to support the multipartyist candidate Ben Wacha);50 the rejection of the ministerial appointment of the president’s brother, Salim Saleh, who lacked the basic educational requirements and was well known for his shady dealings; the censuring of corrupt ministers; and certain legislative measures such as the Land Bill, the Local Governments Bill, the Political Organisations Bill, and the Referendum Bill. The occurrence of “control failures” prompted the Movement to further tighten its grip on progovernment MPs: “They are now proposing to put in some rules for discipline. It comes from the National Executive Committee [of the Movement], and it was discussed in the caucus. The idea is that we shouldn’t just discuss things on the floor—and come out as divided—but the Movement people should have a common position.”51 A number of members, however, rebelled against these attempts to pilot the caucus from above. In 1998, for example, the caucus chair was strongly condemned when he “consulted with other leaders outside” parliament on how to handle the case of Colonel Kiiza Besigye, who had published an article that was extremely critical of the Movement. As it turned out, the chair was forced to back down by other MPs who insisted that “the caucus is a loose association, and not a formal Movement organ required to take orders from the president.”52 At the same time, several members also refused to formally endorse oaths of allegiance and codes of conduct put forward by Movement leaders. Such proposals were rejected as “an attempt to bind them to a political party of sorts, which has been formed without their knowledge or consultation, because one can’t pay allegiance to a system,”53 as the Movement was normally described. It was during the mandate of the seventh parliament (2001–2006), however, that the obstacles the Movement encountered in driving its initiatives through parliament were considerably reduced. By this time, on the one hand,

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critical movementists were closing ranks with multipartyists, as they both engaged in forming political groupings—notably the Parliamentary Advocacy Forum (PAFO)—that would contribute to launching a new, full-fledged opposition party (the FDC) when the country opened up to multiparty politics. On the other hand, not only had Museveni and the Movement intervened in the 2001 election process to make sure that the government would enjoy the support of a more cohesive parliamentary majority, but progovernment MPs tended to assume a low profile in view of the official transformation of the Movement into a political party and of the formalization of their membership in the ruling party. Opposition MPs Between Parliament and Parties The first group of multipartyist MPs that entered parliament in 1996 did so without owing allegiance to any organization. This was both because of the individual merit principle, and because the Democratic Party and the Uganda People’s Congress had officially boycotted the parliamentary election. Once in parliament, opposition MPs were in a position to regroup, either along party lines or through the formation of a larger, more influential unit comprising multipartyists of all political colors. As a matter of fact, they had already partly set aside their differences in the Constituent Assembly, where the experience of the National Caucus for Democracy had generally left a positive mark. Something similar occurred with the formation of the Inter-Political Forces Co-operation during the first presidential campaign in 1996. Thus, a clear legacy on which to build parliamentary cooperation was there, and one would have expected some kind of common arrangement to be worked out. Initially, however, multipartyist MPs decided to go it alone. One reason why this decision was taken had to do with the limited size of the full-fledged multipartyist opposition within parliament. Compared to the approximately seventy Constituent Assembly delegates belonging to Uganda’s traditional political parties, the first directly elected legislature saw a comprehensive reduction in the number of multipartyists. Exactly how many of them were left is difficult to say, however. The names of prominent proparty members of the House, mostly highly vocal, influential MPs, were well known to Ugandans. While estimates gave their numbers at between twenty and thirty, only sixteen MPs (or 6 percent of a total 276) openly declared their support for multipartyism. Nine of them belonged to the Uganda People’s Congress, five to the Democratic Party, and two to the Conservative Party. Eleven of them had been elected in northern constituencies, two came from the east, and three came from Buganda. No multipartyist MP came from western Uganda, the heartland of Movement support.54 Nevertheless, multipartyism enjoyed the sympathies of a much larger spectrum of MPs than mere numbers reveal. Indeed, between declared oppo-

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sition figures and full-fledged movementists, the Ugandan parliament was characterized by a significant gray area that included low-profile multipartyists, so-called independents, and a number of critical or unconvinced movementists. Some even claimed that there was a discernible trend, with “an increasing number of MPs somehow moving to the multipartyists.”55 The most optimistic estimates of support for the idea of shifting to an orthodox multiparty political system ranged from fifty to seventy MPs. Such estimates, however, largely hinged on the question of whether being critical of the Movement was to be equated with being a multiparty supporter. It was this unclear boundary that purportedly convinced the multipartyists in the new parliament not to create any official grouping. Retaining the maximum degree of fluidity and openness was meant to encourage independentminded colleagues to join forces on specific issues where common positions could be found. Setting up a caucus could have been perceived as a provocative act and could have consolidated existing divisions. The government may have tried to infiltrate such a caucus in order to discover its plans and then focus its efforts on defeating any positions agreed by the multipartyists.56 Thus, the latter came to the conclusion that they would have an easier time and would be in a better position to accomplish their job by acting as free agents. They did not wish to set up any clear boundaries between them and independent or pro-Movement members of parliament. Rather than adopting any stable structure, multipartyists opted to retain a degree of fluidity that would allow them to lobby, join forces, and vote along with “well-wishers,” and vice versa. This was designed to avoid the risk that, in the words of a movementist MP, “at times, a multipartyist position would be systematically defeated, at any cost, even though they have substance.”57 Some outspoken multipartyists even claimed that there was no need for a multipartyist caucus since, according to one opposition MP, “[We are] running this parliament by the force of our arguments; . . . the ideas come from us, as a core group in parliament.”58 Whether good or bad, the battle fought by multipartyists was a straightforward one—probably clearer, for example, than what “movementists” stood for—and one whose terms had been largely spelled out during the Constituent Assembly. Once the constitution had been approved and political parties had been confined to the margins of political life, there was little for multipartyists to discuss among themselves, and maybe much more that could have divided their camp. Furthermore, it could be argued that the lack of any real opportunity to gain power—in other words, the absence of any genuine political competition—made the need for group discipline that much less urgent (Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999, 13). Of course, there was also a question of the antagonism or competition between the parties themselves. Policy differences and strategic divisions contributed to the lack of any official parliamentary caucus grouping together MPs from the DP, UPC, and CP. Moreover, while several multipartyist MPs

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did hold official positions in the old parties, the weakness of the latter made any coordination between them rather difficult. For the entire duration of the sixth legislature, the multipartyists only gathered on a very irregular, ad hoc basis. They claimed that they knew who they were and what they wanted, and that any of them could convene a meeting when necessary. Those few cases of the coordination of the MPs’ actions generally concerned policy measures rather than group discipline. When, for example, the important, highly contentious Political Organisations Bill was tabled toward the end of 1998, the general feeling was that the struggle for multipartyism required its supporters to stick more closely together, and consequently a slightly less irregular forum was convened. However, this coalition, which was of an extraparliamentary, short-lived nature, brought together not only opposition MPs but also a few party leaders.59 Over all, the relatively strong influence that multipartyists had over parliamentary life hinged very much on individual initiative. The presence of parties became only more evident during the mandate of the seventh parliament (2001–2006), when opposition MPs moved from the decision to go it alone to the formation of weak party caucuses. For a start, MPs had become more numerous, with estimates ranging between sixty and eighty. After the 2001 election, for example, the UPC counted about forty MPs (two soon crossed to the Movement, and two joined the newly formed FDC toward the end of the legislature). The DP also initially had between twelve and fourteen parliamentarians, with two defecting to the FDC (most members of the DP caucus were also members of PAFO).60 Opposition MPs thus needed to improve the organization of their informal networks. In addition, as it became clear that the country was moving toward multiparty politics, the party affiliations of MPs became more explicit. Party caucuses were therefore duly formed. The DP, for example, held monthly meetings and required all members of the caucus to contribute about USh50,000 to promote initiatives within the constituencies. A Surprising Actor: The Association of Young and First-Time Parliamentarians The most important case of the independent organization of MPs was the Young Parliamentarians Association (YPA). The association was a surrogate for an electoral political party, as it largely concentrated on promoting the popularity of members within their own constituencies, and it also had a significant impact on parliamentary politics. Its impact on the country’s politics was such that many started “calling for it to be transformed into a political party.”61 Talks or fears of a similar development lasted for quite some time. The YPA, which emerged at the very outset of the sixth legislature, in October 1996, was the brainchild of a young generation of committed MPs,

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including Onyango Kakoba, Patrick Kiggundu, Salamu Musumba, and Lieutenant James Kinobe: We were strangers when we first came here, and parliament had no structure whatsoever for any kind of, say, “induction,” to learn what parliament is and how it works. We were new, and, as we got here, we were in the dark. We thought that with a caucus we would be able to support ourselves in understanding how things work and in taking part to the legislative activities of parliament.62

The official goals of the group of young MPs were spelled out in its constitution, and they included promoting harmony and cooperation among parliamentarians, fostering debate and other activities designed to strengthen Uganda’s legislative processes, and “championing the crusade against social ills of whatever kind and nature, especially corruption and nepotism” (Kayunga 2001, 196). However, one key, though not explicit, aim was “the struggle against the hegemony of the historicals that at one time attempted to employ notions of ‘longevity’ and ‘experience’ to legitimize their practices in parliament” (Kayunga 2001, 196). The label “young parliamentarians” referred not only to age but also to political experience. It therefore included both elder members who were new to parliament and young MPs who had been in parliament for some time. This group of young or first-time MPs ostensibly emerged as a reaction to the prevailing tendency for established politicians to marginalize newcomers and leave them little political influence.63 On the basis of its two criteria for membership—age and parliamentary experience—the association enrolled a total of ninety-three MPs. The plenary meeting of the caucus was convened every two to three months, while a nineperson executive kept in touch more regularly through fortnightly meetings. The Young Parliamentarians became one of the most highly formalized and well-structured of Uganda’s parliamentary caucuses. They were registered both within parliament and with the registrar, and their statute specified membership requirements and fees as well as positions on the executive body. The YPA reflected its members’ disenchantment with being left out of key political developments. By grouping together, they attempted to provide each other with support through the pooling and coordination of the scarce resources at their disposal: “Here we don’t have political parties, so MPs need to team up with each other.”64 In the absence of political parties and party networks, MPs had to find alternative ways of retaining or building up the support of their constituents in view of future elections. In poorly developed African countries, in particular, the assessment of a parliamentarian’s performance often depends to a considerable degree on her or his capacity to set up local activities and to attract resources from the center of the political system (Barkan and Okumu 1980). The YPA’s energies were focused on the mobilization of electoral constituencies for “developmental” activities. The very fact

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that the managing body included the figure of a “development coordinator” is rather revealing. Each member was required to contribute a regular share (about USh100,000, or US$60) of her or his monthly pay. Contributions would be pooled together in a development fund and then redistributed to individual constituencies for developmental activities, mostly during local visits by members of the association.65 Thus, regardless of the developmental merits of YPA’s initiatives, the arrangement no doubt helped MPs build and promote their personal image within their constituencies. The membership fees that MPs set for themselves were, by Ugandan standards, quite high, and few would have been prepared to pay so much if the benefits involved had not been greater than the costs that members had to meet.66 The YPA was a response to the lack of financial support for increasingly expensive electoral campaigns and the need for political action at the constituency level. Thus, the YPA’s activities were a surrogate for what political parties should have been doing.67 The single-member constituency system ensured that the MPs involved would not be running against each other, and so they could associate in a de facto cartel of sitting MPs, each one looking forward to receiving a new mandate from her or his constituency. While the goal of the association initially was to remedy the marginalization of young MPs and to organize them for the purpose of constituencyoriented action, an increasing awareness of the members’ leverage as a pressure group led the YPA to adopt a more forward approach to parliamentary politics. The potential of a mixed-membership group with the capacity to bridge the divide between the multipartyist and the movementist camps was not lost on its members. Younger people, in particular, were more likely to identify with the YPA on the basis of their age rather than on the Movement’s history or ideology.68 The association quickly established itself as a crucial, independent player in parliamentary politics. Its influence was strengthened by a certain popularity among the media.69 The YPA was possibly the sole nonparty organization to enjoy a certain respect among leading multipartyists—such as Ben Wacha, Dick Nyai, and Norbert Mao—who subscribed to the association. However, the forceful public image of the Young Parliamentarians went beyond that. The media, for example, were responsive to and fairly supportive of the YPA’s crusade against political corruption. Furthermore, the YPA occasionally joined forces with other “progressive,” independent pressure groups, such as the Uganda Land Alliance and The Free Movement (TFM). Contacts were allegedly established with the international community as well, in the form of the UNDP, the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), the British High Commission, and, in particular, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The latter was eager to find alternative partners in Uganda after it had cut its links with the UPC. A relatively close, regular contact was thus established with the YPA, largely aimed at funding extraparliamentary seminars focusing on allegedly neutral

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issues such as governance and transparency. While the majority of YPA members subscribed to the Movement, many of them were open to the possibility of, or even the need for, the reform and improvement of the system.70 The case of the Young Parliamentarians is particularly interesting for the incremental spillover effect that the original organization produced. Although the organization had originally been set up to combat the marginalization of young MPs, it soon moved on to promoting constituency-based collective activities, and it ended up by playing a more active role in parliamentary politics. Museveni was allegedly annoyed when the YPA tried to propose Major John Kazoora as National Political Commissar.71 A key question that remained was whether the YPA could at some point be transformed into a political party. Many members had joined what was a flexible, open arrangement with limited goals. Changing the aims or the arrangements of the organization could have caused the resentment and disaffection of many members.72 A further difficulty was that of converting an elitist, exclusive circle of MPs into a nationwide political organization capable of gaining significant support among the electorate. One foresighted MP claimed, “I wouldn’t commit myself to transform it into a political party, for the time being. You know, by the time you reach it, the bridge may no longer be there!”73 Considering the subsequent development of the YPA requires first examining what impact the association had on the behavior of its members within parliament. The underlying reasons for the creation of the YPA also included the presence of divergent views within the Movement camp, the least orthodox of which were at that point in search of appropriate channels of expression. Their concern was to protect the positions of individual MPs from uncalled-for external interference. Pressure from the government, especially from the president, to force parliamentarians into lending uncritical support to governmental policies caused considerable resentment among courageous young MPs—the “young Turks”—such as Salamu Musumba, Onyango Kakoba, and Winnie Byanyima. Rather than bowing to the weight of such pressure, they were ready to raise criticisms of and demand improvements to the government’s legislative proposals, as well as to expose malpractice and corruption and demand that this be dealt with in the strongest possible manner.74 The tension generated regarding similar issues, by the parliamentary presence of independent-minded individuals with loose or no partisan commitments, was what prompted the emergence of the YPA. Although its membership partly overlapped with that of the Movement caucus, the YPA was a separate, new political entity. Nevertheless, the relationship between the Movement caucus and the YPA was not merely one of a complementary division of labor. Some MPs claimed that there was no actual contrast between the two except on the question of corruption, where a divide was inevitably generated by the fact that the Movement caucus included people within government.75

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The membership of YPA straddled both multipartyist and movementist sides, thus giving it the advantage of appealing to virtually the entire parliamentary spectrum. In addition to its official membership, the Young Parliamentarians claimed the support of at least fifty “well-wishers”—MPs who were relatively free of party-like affiliations and who often lent their support to the YPA. Public support for the association, as expressed by the media, meant that several MPs were keen to be seen on the YPA’s side and were careful not to appear to hinder its anticorruption crusade.76 On occasion, the association was able to assemble the majorities required to influence the outcome of certain parliamentary votes.77 The significant influence the YPA had built up was largely an accepted fact. Among the alleged benefits of its increased authority were that all key positions within the Movement caucus were occupied by YPA people (or was it the other way around?) and that ministerial positions were increasingly being assigned to members of the association.78 The very cross-sectional nature of the YPA, however, also accounts for its limitations. Its efforts to formulate common positions were constrained by the need to avoid alienating any of the various “wings” of the same YPA. However, since debates on politically or ideologically charged issues were generally avoided, it may be concluded that “politics” was rarely discussed by the YPA, which tended to limit itself to “developmental issues.”79 In other words, the association often avoided controversial issues as too slippery a terrain; it was important to be able to work out common positions without creating a deep divide among its members. The YPA could expose, debate, mobilize, or sensitize; but, just like the other caucuses, in the end, the YPA could never properly impose any voting discipline but had to leave MPs to their own devices each time an actual vote was to be cast.80 As a result, even in a relatively effective organization such as the Young Parliamentarians Association, any genuine coordination of parliamentary action was heavily restricted by fears of undermining cooperation in those areas where agreement among members could be reached. The Return of Ethnicity: Communal Caucuses The two no-party parliaments also saw the materialization of semistructured, ethnically based caucuses. Virtually every MP, in theory at least, joined the association that grouped together all elected representatives who shared an ethnic identity or who came from the same “historical” area of the country (that is, a past political or administrative entity). This was true despite the fact that the latter areas had since been divided into different districts: Busoga, for example, was split into the districts of Jinja, Kamuli, and Iganga (from which Bugiri, Kaliro, and Mayuge were also carved out between 2005 and 2006); the Acholi people lived in both Gulu and Kitgum (and later also Pader and Kilak),

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while the former Ankole kingdom comprised Mbarara, Bushenyi, and Ntungamo (to which Ibanda, Kabingo, and Kiruhura were later added). There was a double irony in the appearance of communal caucuses inside parliament. Not only were they set up as organized arrangements within a supposedly individualized assembly, but their formation was based on the very “organizational principle” that Museveni had declared war on, namely, ethnicity. In a sense, caucuses proved just how difficult it was to get rid of both political organizations and politicized ethnicities. Yet, while these caucuses gave expression to important identities and common concerns, many MPs observed that they were “not strong, it’s rather to give a feeling of belonging: they are just tribalistic things.”81 Some condemned the underlying idea of grouping together on a communal basis: “A caucus should be larger than tribal . . . these are just ethnic groups, not really caucuses.”82 On occasion, community caucuses played a role in matters that did not appear to be immediately related to any specific ethnoregional area. Primarily, however, they organized around locally defined, locally relevant issues. With seventy-eight members (including a number of army representatives within parliament), the Buganda Parliamentary Association was not only the largest among these groupings, but it constituted, on paper at least, a sizable parliamentary force. Its very creation and its claimed defense of Buganda’s interests generated lasting tension with the Lukiiko (Kayunga 2001, 206). The Buganda caucus was not only a regional advocacy group within parliament, but it also operated along the lines of the Young Parliamentarians in pooling members’ resources through a development fund designed to address constituency concerns. Another vocal presence was that of the Acholi Parliamentary Group, consisting of a dozen Acholi MPs. The latter shared a strong concern about certain issues specific to the northern regions, most notably the security problem and the associated questions of cattle restocking and compensation for lost properties and the question of general economic development. They maneuvered quite effectively and lobbied the president, legislators, and foreign representatives until an Amnesty Bill for the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army was tabled and passed by parliament in the second half of 1999. Other common concerns included the recognition and protection of the customary land tenure system in Acholi. Accordingly, the Acholi MPs acted collectively when land reform was discussed in 1998. At the same time, however, the politically charged issues at the center of Uganda’s political agenda, which were to lead to divisions between progovernment and opposition MPs, were deliberately avoided both during caucus meetings and on joint consultative tours of the northern districts of Gulu and Kitgum. In the words of former Democratic Party vice-president and MP Zachary Olum, “We have no common position on the Referendum and the Political Organisations bills. I’m a renowned multipartist, while my colleague Pen Mogi is a Movement supporter. We don’t want

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to send wrong signals to the people that once you don’t agree on an issue, you can’t agree on others.”83 The problem of internal cohesion and the ideological differences separating caucus members was not unique to the Acholi group. Rather, it was a problem affecting all community caucuses, and as such was the main reason why, despite the significant number of members some caucuses boasted, their actual effectiveness and impact on Ugandan politics remained rather limited. As a member of the Buganda caucus put it: It’s only recently that they’ve met once a month, with the questions of the Kabaka’s wedding or palace to be discussed. Cultural issues. Otherwise, I don’t think we really have a common position. So we try to avoid political issues, for we would not agree: there’s movementists, federalists, multipartists, and so on. The only thing that holds us together is the kabakaship as a political institution, although it’s difficult to draw the line between political and cultural roles. All of the seventy-three believe in it. But out of seventythree members, you are lucky if you get fifteen who come to a meeting. It’s mainly for lack of support and lack of a common position. There is a main divide between movementists and nonmovementists.84

Women, Gender, and Parliamentary Politics The recognition and improvement of the status of women in Ugandan politics was one of the successful changes brought about by the NRM regime; as a result, the country’s women’s movement gained an exceptionally high profile by African standards. While 1986 witnessed the mobilization of urban women and women’s organizations around the Action for Development (ACFODE) NGO, the process of getting women’s concerns voiced within the context of national and local politics proved helpful to, and largely guided by, President Museveni himself. In Sylvia Tamale’s words, the “affirmative action policy did not emerge directly from the struggle and demands of women’s grassroots organisations. Rather, it was imposed from above for reasons having more to do with political manoeuvring than a genuine commitment to women’s rights” (Goetz 2002, 556). The decision that women needed special attention to ensure their political representation dated back to the early days of the Resistance Councils, when it was established that resistance committees would include women representatives. In a further step, in 1989, the government introduced a proactive program that, by reserving one parliamentary seat for a woman in each district (thirty-four at the time) in the indirectly elected national legislature, went beyond anything that the country’s women’s organizations had actually asked for (Rubongoya 2007, 79). More generally, from the first years of Movement rule, women’s presence within key areas such as parliament, the courts, the civil service, local governments, universities, civil organizations, and even business

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was considerably increased (Rubongoya 2007, 79). As a result, the support of women became an important ingredient that contributed to legitimizing the Movement’s no-party system. The NRM’s prowomen approach facilitated the election of some fifty women delegates to the Constituent Assembly, and a couple of years later a similar number entered the new parliament. The presence of women in the country’s subsequent parliaments grew, partly as a result of a multiplication of districts that led to a corresponding increase in the number of seats reserved for women, and partly as a result of an increase in the number of seats won by women in open elections (see Table 8.2). At the local level, affirmative action resulted in a minimum 30 percent presence of women within local councils. As the country’s political institutions opened up to women, people like Gertrude Njuba, Winnie Byanyima, Cecilia Ogwal, Miria Matembe, and Salamu Musumba became increasingly influential, and some of them were appointed to important political offices. For several years, a politician of lesser stature, Speciosa Kazibwe, was also Uganda’s vice-president, the second highest constitutional office in the country. Women as an interest group began to acquire influence during Uganda’s constitution-making debates. This was a critical time for guaranteeing overall protection of their concerns, interests, and positions, which until then had been traditionally neglected by Ugandan politics. Aware of the crucial nature of that moment, and with the important backing of the NRM, women demanded that the gender issue be incorporated into a number of constitutional provisions, ranging from declarations of principle concerning nondiscrimination and equal opportunities, to clauses relating to property rights or to affirmative action on Table 8.2

Women in Uganda’s Elected Assemblies, 1994–2006

Constituent Assembly (1994–1995) Sixth parliament (1996–2001) Seventh parliament (2001–2006) Eighth parliament (2006–2011)

Women District Members Women over Total Representatives Members (Reserved Seats)

Women Holding Nonreserved Seats

Number of Members

Women Members

288

51

18%

39

12

282

50

18%

45

5

295

75

25%

56

17

309

99

32%

69

25

Sources: Electoral Commission (2001a, 2006); Interim Electoral Commission (n.d.); Parliament of Uganda (n.d.); InterParliamentary Union, Women in National Parliaments, 2007 (www.ipu.org). Notes: Data for “Women Members” and “Women Holding Nonreserved Seats” are approximations based on a slightly larger figure for the overall number of MPs in the seventh parliament (304) and in the eighth parliament (332), which is obtained when one includes ex officio members (i.e., ministers, who have no right to vote).

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political representation. Their mobilization strategies proved rather successful. Women delegates organized workshops, provided information, and lobbied male colleagues: “How were the token female Constituent Assembly delegates able to make such monumental achievements in an assembly as skewed as the CA? . . . The answer is: ‘By caucusing’” (Tamale 1999, 116). Yet, this was done on a rigorously nonpartisan basis, as demonstrated by the fact that the women’s caucus did not take a stand on the issue of whether a no-party or a multiparty political system was to be adopted, and the six women who were among the sixty-four multipartyist delegates who walked out when the Movement system was incorporated into the new constitution were doing so out of their longtime affiliation with the old political parties (Goetz 2002, 561). As acting together had proved successful within the Constituent Assembly, women who were elected to the sixth legislature built on this experience in order to organize a Uganda Women Parliamentarians Association (UWPA). Yet, the points that women scored during the constitution-making process mark their greatest accomplishment. After that, women’s collective parliamentary action declined somewhat. As was the case with the communitybased caucuses, the limits to the maneuvers of the women’s caucus were essentially set by the inescapable need to bridge over political differences, so that “avoiding divisive issues [was] vital to its success” (Tamale 1999, 153). On occasion, the caucus tried to open up and include representatives of other marginalized groups such as people with disabilities, workers, and youth, all of whom were granted special parliamentary seats, under the label of the Special Interests Groups Caucus. This arrangement was meant to further the limited forces of these diverse groupings and enable them to exchange reciprocal support. Women MPs did manage a few achievements, such as the amendment to the Local Government Act (1997), to provide for reserved seats for women, and the adoption by the government of the National Gender Policy (Tamale 1999, 154, 156). Moreover, women MPs developed close ties with extraparliamentary organizations. The Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE), the National Association of Women’s Organisations in Uganda (NAWOU), the Uganda Women’s Network (UWONET), and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation all helped finance and organize activities whereby women MPs could acquire the skills they needed to fully understand political and economic issues and to influence parliamentary debate (Tamale 1999, 156). Special external relations also made the UWPA the only caucus with access to international funding, which was provided by organizations committed to promoting women’s emancipation, such as the British Department for International Development (DFID) or the American and the Danish development agencies (USAID and DANIDA) (Kayunga 2001, 200). However, Museveni himself had become much less supportive of their cause. In 1998, he was the target of criticism for his alleged role in the “lost amendment” case. An amendment proposed by Miria Matembe granting land

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co-ownership to spouses was left out of the land reform law despite having allegedly been passed by parliament. While the question was never entirely clarified, what happened reflected a general trend whereby women’s concerns were increasingly ignored, marginalized, or manipulated by the government, as happened not only with the Land Act but also with the inconclusive Domestic Relations Bill and the Sexual Offences Bill (Goetz 2002, 564ff.). The regime’s support for women’s issues had peaked.

■

Balance Sheet of Organized Parliamentary Action

A few members of parliament were strongly opposed to the very idea of setting up caucuses, which were condemned as an inexcusable, dangerous attempt to curtail the freedom of MPs and the independence of parliament as a whole. This kind of criticism was obviously raised by multipartyist members of the assembly, who denounced the executive’s attempts to discriminate between MPs and leave them out of those forums where the bases for key parliamentary decisions were being prepared. However, the same point was also made by those movementists who saw the caucuses as a betrayal of the original individual merit principle: “I don’t belong to any caucus. I don’t believe there’s a need for it. If the constitution says that the system is based on individual merit, you don’t come here to be whipped into line. Although, I know that in practice it’s partly different. They set up the Movement caucus. But I don’t attend the meetings of the caucus, I don’t believe in it. Otherwise, we can go back to multipartism.”85 The concern with the manipulative use of parliamentary associations went beyond the Movement caucus and involved government interference with other groups. As a matter of fact, any coordinating arrangement that was set up in parliament could be instrumentally used by the executive to reach out to MPs and to try and put pressure on them: “Many caucuses have been used by the president to meet them and exert influence . . . YPA, the Movement, the women, even the districts. I mean, like the Acholi. You just get a letter from the clerk of parliament that your group will meet the president, without any solicitation! Why?! Why should we?!”86 Despite all these criticisms, there was no lack of MPs who believed that caucuses did not significantly detract from the members’ capacity to behave independently. As much as political groups struggled to shape the way their members voted, the bottom line was that MPs were officially independent. At the end of the day, they were generally free to do as they saw fit, rather than be forced to do what they had been told to do. The argument went that this was clear from the purported autonomy of parliament as a whole, and of individual MPs as well. In other words, whatever they did, caucuses did not have

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much of an impact, and parliamentary politics largely remained an individualistic affair. Some members perceived the caucus as an instrument taken out of its natural context, multiparty politics, where it can prove very effective because it has the power to make people stick to agreed, or imposed, positions. Under no-partyism, a significant part of parliamentary lobbying was done oneon-one, by individual members free from any binding rules. This also implies that it was often quite difficult to establish how many people were behind a position as issues reached the plenary session of parliament.87 Moreover, although the Movement’s parliamentary leadership could certainly make use of patronage resources—“they are the party in power, they have all the resources”88—for most caucuses it was “a matter of persuasion rather than control.”89 Only weak inducements and deterrents could be used to enforce a commonly agreed position (if and when the latter was achieved). The meetings of most parliamentary associations were rather intermittent and issue dependent, and a considerable overlap of membership of the various caucuses hindered the formation of clear-cut expectations with regard to an MP’s voting behavior. Thus, an MP’s endeavor to preserve some independence was somewhat facilitated by caucus boundaries that were largely crosscutting and porous: Even if whipping is informally there, it’s not effective. You know, you end up sitting in different caucuses so that you receive different inputs and pressures, different positions. And whipping, it’s not even by the government, it’s by interest groups. For example, the Young Parliamentarians Association or the Buganda Parliamentary Association, it is them who ask members to vote this or that way. I don’t know whether you can call it whipping. It’s just a matter of persuasion. You cannot isolate anybody, penalize him because he hasn’t stuck to a group’s position. It’s not like parties in Britain.90

For minor caucuses, in particular, the difficulty in acting cohesively and shaping the vote would suggest that caucus meetings served almost exclusively as information-gathering forums; turnout was frequently low, partly because of the doubts many members had about the effectiveness of having such caucuses in the first place. Quite often the caucuses themselves ended up splitting on a given issue. Or if they did not, people were simply able to adopt another position and vote differently. Thus, the presence of caucuses did not necessarily shape the parliamentary vote. All the above indicates that MPs enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom of movement; it also implies that it was not easy to gather and organize collective support for specific measures. The government would often spend a lot of time discussing and negotiating with individual members of the House to persuade them to vote in a certain way on specific issues.91 As a matter of fact, there was an increasing awareness of the need to improve collective coordination and to devise sanctions that would aid its

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enforcement. This is evident, for example, in the creation of the caucuses, the adoption of the Movement’s codes of conduct, the collection of caucus membership fees, the conditional disbursement of government money to MPs, and so on. The issue of discipline, however, never completely came to the fore for two basic reasons. The first reason is that, compared with the presidency, parliament was still too weak to actually create a deadlock. The weakness of parliament meant that the executive’s concern with the discipline of MPs, though visibly growing, was still rather limited. This was clear from the debate on the army’s involvement and dealings in the Congo war, for example. Despite the fact that there was widespread opposition, both at popular and parliamentary levels, this opposition failed to materialize into any concrete action or to create any institutional obstacle to the government’s prolonging the war at will. The second reason is that, as with legislative parties in parliamentary systems, “party cohesion is a direct function of the degree of competition.”92 However, effective competition was hardly a feature of Uganda’s hegemonic politics. The multipartyist opposition in parliament was so small that even when the Movement’s ranks split, creating an embarrassing situation as a result, the government was still able to get away with it; and where a ruling group had a large majority and no prospect of being challenged at elections, it could simply decide “not to enforce discipline where there is no point” (Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999, 13). Yet, there was continued concern over discipline, because any governing party needs to preserve a minimum degree of unity in order to retain power. On those occasions when the Movement was seriously challenged on critical issues, it chose to bulldoze its way through. In the case of the Referendum Bill, for example, this was done by means of the straightforward manipulation of parliamentary voting. Given that several unconvinced movementists had failed to turn up when votes were being cast, the bill was passed without the required quorum. In addition to the manipulation of rules, the physical and political presence of powerful ministers in parliament, which ran counter to the principle of the separation of executive and legislative powers characteristic of presidential systems, was also instrumental in whipping MPs into line. This was the case, for example, when the parliamentary committee failed to have the Political Organisations Bill scheduled before the Referendum Bill. Alternatively, ministerial positions were left vacant for some time after cabinet reshuffles, “left hanging to whip parliament back into good behaviour.”93 On a further occasion, when educational qualifications for local councillors were being discussed, Museveni used the resident district commissioners to pressure MPs, which they did by telling people that sitting MPs were trying to prevent other candidates from having access to positions of power.94 These buffer solutions, however, were neither a guarantee of success nor likely to last, as “MPs are becoming more and more independent, on any issues.”95 Initially, the very fact of having to deal with Museveni made things

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rather uncomfortable for many MPs, as they were quite frightened by the figure of Uganda’s president. This made it even easier for him to dictate to parliament. Yet, MPs gradually acquired the self-confidence they needed to counter his dictates, at times by simply remaining silent and then doing things differently from the way he had demanded.96 Generally speaking, the absence of direct sanctions enabled individual MPs to actually retain a degree of independence. In a similar context, Museveni’s charisma—oiled with a pragmatic combination of patronage and intimidation, mediated by the Movement caucus and enforced by his bending legislative and constitutional rules—helped him overcome parliamentary opposition and organizational vacuums. Yet, in certain extreme cases, the Movement’s policy of bulldozing any opposition to the government’s more important legislative proposals eventually led to constitutional crises, as happened in the case of the 1999–2000 disputes regarding the referendum laws.

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9 The Demise of a Democratic Model

INSOFAR AS THE IDEAL OF INDIVIDUAL MERIT POLITICS ENVISAGED a system with no need for political organizations, Uganda’s no-party regime displayed a severe incapacity to fulfill its own promises. The very notion of no-party electoral politics raised practical questions concerning the way politics was to be organized in the presence of the ban on political party activities, and in particular on the actual room afforded to parties and nonparty organizations within the country’s political framework. An empirical investigation into these issues reveals critical flaws in the political system adopted by Uganda for some twenty years. At a more general level, Uganda’s politics were based on a clear discrepancy between theory and practice. A political system that claimed to be founded on individual merit and the absence of political parties still had to come up with some form of organization to address pressing political needs. Some of these organizational forms belonged to the old parties themselves; some were separate organizations that were nevertheless closely linked to the old parties; others were entirely independent, surrogate arrangements; and, finally, there were what amounted to new, party-like structures in all but name. Three further points emerged with great clarity. The first is that the noparty framework was hardly ever in place, since the Movement itself gradually adopted a party-like apparatus and modus operandi. Political reality prompted the NRM ruling group to distance itself from notions of individualized politics and to make crucially important organizational changes. Despite its antiparty ideological claims, the Movement attempted to entrench its hegemonic status, leading it to embark on a continuous series of transformations. With the 1997 Movement Act, these developments reached the point where a full-fledged, if very weak, party-like organization was set up at both the national and the local level for purposes of political coordination and mobilization. Second, although opposition parties were allowed to exist and did try to devise creative organizational strategies, they struggled to survive and retain any 187

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kind of organizational structure. Uganda’s political discourse under the no-party system long revolved strictly around the movementist-versus-multipartyist dichotomy. The multipartyists were largely represented by the country’s two historical political parties: the Uganda People’s Congress and the Democratic Party. Under the no-party regime, the organizational activities of such political parties, rather than the parties per se, were declared illegal. Thus, while the old political parties were legally and practically hindered from operating, they survived; some observers argued that these parties would have flourished had it not been for those restrictions. The organizational paths the parties followed were a direct consequence of the hegemonic context in which they were forced to operate. The Democratic Party’s reliance on the informal politics of kakuyege, on a newly established youth wing, and on the support of an NGO, for example, represented its attempt to cope with, and circumvent, the then prohibitive political environment. Similarly, the early split in the UPC leadership, and the party’s impromptu arrangements, were a reflection of the duress it was under and of its attempts to survive and organize during the period of the Movement’s dominance and repressive measures. The bottom line, however, was that the UPC’s and the DP’s efforts were bound to be frustrated by the Movement’s own hegemonic ambitions; ultimately, opposition parties were to be impeded from having any significant organizational presence inside state institutions and within the electoral arena. Eventually, weak leadership and factional squabbles contributed to the devastation of both the UPC and the DP. Third, an examination of the politics of a parliament that was trying to operate without recognized political parties clearly reveals a systemic drive toward the formation of party surrogate organizations. The formation of caucuses illustrates how alternative organizational forms emerged within parliament in place of Uganda’s political parties. Such arrangements were largely aimed at replacing parties by providing opportunities for legislative, office-seeking, and purposeful collective action. Pro-Movement MPs, for example, were gathered together to form a parliamentary caucus to facilitate the government’s task of orchestrating support for its policies within an individualized assembly. Similarly, groups of moderate MPs, as well as MPs sharing an ethnic origin or other common ground, also organized their own parliamentary forums. Due to the difference between theory and practice, the “hegemonic party system” model grasps the essence of Ugandan politics between 1986 and 2006 much better than the no-party ideal. Indeed, Sartori’s model points to the key features of the country’s politics during that period: dominance by one privileged organization, while minor political organizations were allowed to exist but were systematically, strategically marginalized. The fact that the “no-party” political system is best understood from the point of view of a framework for the analysis of party systems indicates the practical difficulties encountered in

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cases of participatory politics without political organizations. The no-party label was used to conceal what was in reality a semiorganized hegemony. The hegemony of the Movement was manifest at various levels. For a start, control over central institutions and local authorities went virtually unchallenged. Members of the opposition ranks were only allowed the occasional, marginal electoral success insofar as these did not significantly affect the position of the ruling group. Any real, effective challenge to this ruling group was preempted by the selective restriction, and at times repression, of civil and political freedoms—notably through limitations on party activities, but also, for example, through discriminating licensing for the activities of NGOs or the intermittent interference with and clamping down on the free press.1 The individual merit election system legitimized an electoral process that, despite the relatively open nature of constituency elections, hindered the emergence of any sufficiently organized opposition bloc. Relatively isolated “individual merit” politicians were thus easily co-opted to the Movement. The latter’s ascendancy over parliament was then organized through the creation of a progovernment parliamentary caucus, albeit not always in a totally effective manner. The use of the caucus, together with the largely fragmented opposition, favored the ruling group’s dominance of the policy process, as debates and inputs were tolerated only insofar as they did not hinder the achievement of the Movement’s fundamental objectives. In turn, the tight control over state resources permitted the shrewd use of patronage to generate and reinforce support for the regime among both the people and the country’s elite. At the social level, contact was made with the populace, who were cleverly mobilized through the use, in particular, of Mchaka Mchaka political education courses and of the state media, which helped spread pro-Movement political propaganda. These processes of political mobilization were officially coordinated by a well-funded head office and were meant to be boosted by the establishment of local and national party-like organs, although the latter never quite took off. Given a similar situation of hegemonic control, there were thus clear limits to any perception of the no-party model as a “democratic” alternative, as a sound political arrangement and a guaranteed recipe for managing communal conflict. The depth of democratic control and the accountability of the policymaking process were inevitably limited in a no-party system that did not allow the opposition to organize, and this was a critical point that donors increasingly took into consideration when dealing with the regime. Human rights abuses continued, and the enduring political instability of the northern areas of the country was frequently ascribed to the political and economic marginalization of certain forces, groups, and communities, or indeed to their straightforward exclusion (see Ssenkumba 1997, 26; Human Rights Watch 1999, 127–128). Second, in addition to raising questions about the democratic character of the

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regime, the elimination or marginalization of political parties inevitably opened up gaps in the broader political system and focused attention on the need for political organization. Not surprisingly, Ugandans promptly tried to fill some of these gaps with surrogate organizational arrangements. The formation of such arrangements, however, was hindered by the individual merit principle underlying Uganda’s entire political system. Finally, if the no-party system was not functioning in practice, as an organization-free system, the value of no-partyism as a specific conflict management tool was normatively undermined; in fact, the no-party prescriptions were in practice being distorted, and a system that fails to meet its own defining standard is hardly likely to provide an example to others. The limits in the way no-party democracy actually functioned had a further, crucial implication for the subsequent evolution of Ugandan politics. That the idea of no-partyism was never fully implemented, that certain informal arrangements partly surrogated party activities, and that old and new party-like organizations retained a degree of political relevance meant that the country’s subsequent return to multiparty politics—and notably to a kind of party politics in which political parties remain extremely “thin,” weak organizational arrangements, as has so often occurred on the continent—did not mark a radical break but rather only a partial discontinuity with the no-party era. From the end of the twentieth century, Museveni’s rule increasingly came under attack. Parties gradually gained legitimacy in public discourse, and there was growing unease among the Movement’s own leaders and supporters at the ongoing, manipulative confinement of opposition forces. This was most evident during the last electoral campaigns of the no-party era. The run-up to and aftermath of the 2000 referendum on multipartyism was marred by constitutional and parliamentary crises. The following year, Colonel Kizza Besigye’s presidential challenge to Museveni’s leadership originated from within the Movement; not only was this the main political novelty during fifteen years of NRM rule, but it was also a clear sign of uneasiness among members and supporters of the regime. Besigye’s shock challenge to Museveni’s Movement nomination sparked an internal debate over the continuation of both the restrictions on party pluralism and Museveni’s presidency. In the space of a few years, the growth of internal divisions and defections within the ruling group mounted the pressure for change and would ultimately “precipitate the formal abandonment of no-party democracy” (Rubongoya 2007, 191; cf. Makara, Rakner, and Svåsand 2007). The very adoption of the Political Parties and Organisations Act (PPOA), a much-awaited law required by the 1995 constitution to detail the restrictions on political party activities and, therefore, a measure meant to finalize the noparty setup, actually contributed to the latter’s undoing. The PPOA was passed by parliament in May 2002. About sixty MPs, mainly multipartyists and moderate reformists belonging to the Parliamentary Advocacy Forum (Pafo),

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protested by walking out of the House during the vote. PPOA confirmed the ban on party activities and public meetings, except when held in the national headquarters, allowing parties to organize one delegates’ conference a year. The prohibition on setting up local branches was reconfirmed. The law also required that the old parties—the UPC, the DP, and the small Conservative Party, whose existence had already been acknowledged by the constitution— register afresh within six months or face dissolution; moreover, it barred those Ugandans living abroad, or who were over the age of seventy-five, from leading political organizations, thus making Milton Obote’s presidency of the UPC illegal. However, the constitutionality of the PPOA, as noted in Chapter 4, was challenged on several accounts, and a number of its sections were declared null and void by the Constitutional Court. The court also argued that the Movement was in fact a political party and should have been subject to the same restrictions applied to the other parties.2 Western donors had similarly stated that they no longer saw any difference between the behavior of the Movement at election time and that of any other political party. The emperor was wearing no clothes. While the court’s ruling should have implied that the limitations on political parties be eased, in the short term it did not have any substantial practical consequences, and the opposition continued to be hindered and harassed by the regime. However, the pressures for the implementation of political reform were clearly increasing.

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The Transition to Multipartyism: Opening a New Era or Holding the Lid on Real Competition?

When the official results of the 2001 elections were declared, a prominent member of the Movement leadership, Jaberi Bidandi-Ssali, had suggested that it was about time the Movement was transformed into a full-fledged political party, and the political arena opened up in view of the forthcoming 2006 elections. While the outspoken Bidandi-Ssali was quickly sidelined, his opinions were not lost on a ruling group that had always displayed a rather pragmatic approach to political developments. Indeed, to ensure that no radical change actually came about, the Movement was now ready for political reform. At a historic meeting of the Movement’s National Executive Committee at Kyankwanzi, in March 2003, Museveni recommended that the country move toward a multiparty system. This, despite the fact that as recently as the aftermath of the 2001 elections he had once again suggested that those arguing that the Movement be transformed into a political party should be ignored, as multipartyism was “sheer rotten sectarianism based on tribalism and religion.”3 At the NEC meeting, however, the president advanced a comprehensive six-point program that included multiparty reform and the construction of a “new” Movement; a different kind of relationship between parliament and

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the executive; the reform of the judiciary; the reorganization of local government; a new phase of land reform; and, importantly, the removal of the constitutional provision setting a limit on presidential terms.4 Behind an agenda that included several fundamental changes and helped Museveni contain the attention drawn by the deletion of the two-term limit (cf. Mwenda 2007, 24; Makara, Rakner, and Svåsand 2007, 11), the Ugandan leader was evidently proposing an exchange: he would bow to the demands of those calling for competitive politics, provided he could remain in power. Not surprisingly, the NEC endorsed the transition to multipartyism without the need for much debate on the matter; despite the fact that not long before, leading NRM figures had been heard repeating their belief that “the Movement cannot become a political party . . . the whole doctrine and concept of the Movement is anti-political organizations,”5 the “National Resistance Movement Organisation” became the first political party to register and to prepare for the new political phase in October 2003, before the constitution itself had been officially reformed. Following the report of the Constitutional Review Commission, which had been at work since 2001, the government sped up the reform process by publishing a white paper on constitutional reform in September 2004. This blueprint for reform contained several different proposals, including the granting of power to the president to dissolve parliament and granting parliament itself the power to remove any traditional or cultural leaders from office should they violate the constitution. The essence of the white paper, however, consisted in the proposal for a referendum to “decide” on a return to multipartyism and in the proposed repeal of article 105 (2) of the constitution establishing a maximum of two mandates for any one president. The government’s strategy was clearly to put together a reform package—tabled in February 2005—regarding some 114 constitutional sections, and to push this package through parliament at once. The House, however, resented this approach; the relative majority in favor of the reforms was not enough to get the so-called omnibus Constitutional Amendment Bill (2005) passed. As a result, in early April, the bill was withdrawn and replaced by two separate Constitutional Amendment Bills, which were subsequently approved by parliament in August. While the two acts brought about a number of constitutional changes, the central issue was the lifting of the limitation on the president’s terms of office. Museveni had won the battle for the so-called kisanja, or third term. Meanwhile, on 28 July 2005, a referendum was held to decide on the reform of the political system, an issue that had previously been removed from the constitutional amendment proposals tabled in parliament. At this referendum, Ugandans were asked to choose between two symbols: a tree, the symbol of multiparty politics, and a house, the symbol of the Movement system. Paradoxically, after twenty years, the NRM itself was campaigning against Movement politics.6 Thus, even though the opposition forces boycotted the

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polls, a huge 92.5 percent of those votes cast were in favor of a return to multipartyism. To implement the reform, a second Political Parties and Organisations Act (2005) was passed. Under the new act, responsibility for party registration was transferred to the Electoral Commission, and all registered parties were allowed to organize and mobilize voters. Rules were also established governing internal leadership elections and party funding (Gloppen et al. 2006, 11). For the better part of the reform process, the donors, who had essentially backed Museveni’s politics since its inception, largely remained silent, with few exceptions. External actors, therefore, cannot really be considered a primary cause for Uganda’s transition to multipartyism. Indeed, donors only took some limited action after the transition to multipartyism had been initiated. When Kizza Besigye was arrested, in particular, Britain cut its budget-support funds and was soon followed by Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Ireland, while Denmark withdrew election money (Makara, Rakner, and Svåsand 2007, 7). The third-term issue, which had dominated public debate from when it was tabled up until its final adoption, led to opposition to the incumbent president extending well beyond the ranks of the long-standing multipartyists and deep into the NRM camp, furthering the process set in motion by Besigye’s political emergence in 1999 and his presidential bid in 2001. In the process, several Movement politicians—including political heavyweights such as Eriya Kategaya, Bidandi Ssali, and other well-known figures like Miria Matembe and Augustine Ruzindana—had broken ranks and spoken out openly against Museveni’s reelection plans, arguing that the constitution was not to be played with and that it was about time the country saw its first-ever orderly leadership changeover. Besigye’s actions gradually developed into a process whereby members of the opposition and critical movementists coalesced to create a new political force in Uganda. The need for a new political force, and the opportunity to build that force, arose from two factors on which this force was soon to capitalize. On the one hand, there was the weakness of the old parties, riven by continuous internal bickering. On the other hand, there was the unease and dissent within part of the NRM, produced by the numerous corruption scandals and by Museveni’s unwillingness to hand over power. At a July 2004 meeting of over 100 promoters, including about twenty-eight MPs, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) was formed by merging three existing political groupings: Besigye’s Reform Agenda, Ruzindana’s Pafo, and Karuhanga Chapaa’s little-known National Democrats Forum.7 The several prominent figures who became members of the new party included Mugisha Muntu (a former army commander), Suleiman Kiggundu (a former governor of the Bank of Uganda), Sam Njuba and Miria Matembe (former ministers in the NRM government), Winnie

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Byanyima (former MP and head of a directorate at the African Union Commission), Wafula Oguttu (a former editor of the Daily Monitor newspaper), Yusuf Okullo Epak and Ben Wacha (of the Uganda People’s Congress), Regan Okumu and Kassiano Wadri (of the Democratic Party), Morris Ogenga Latigo, as well as many others. Most of these leading members were allegedly brought together by their personal experience of the failure of other political organizations, and by the conviction that the country required organizational arrangements that went beyond individual politicians.8 Many were former members of the ruling party’s inner circle whose belief in the NRM’s underlying democratic and reformist ideals had been weakened by the president’s increasingly intolerant, authoritarian attitude. The new opposition group was spearheaded by a number of figures from Museveni’s home area in southwestern Uganda (including Besigye, Muntu, Ruzindana, Byanyma, and Kategaya, although the latter soon left the FDC to rejoin the government). This was hailed as a breakthrough: “In the past it was unthinkable that you would not support a president from your region. This is a big, important political development, that people begin to think independently of their origin.”9 Indeed, this had been Museveni’s message and declared goal about twenty years earlier. What is certain is that from the very outset, the FDC proved to be the only party truly capable of attracting members from all other political forces—that is, from both the DP and the UPC as well as the NRM—and thus of quickly becoming bigger and stronger. In February 2006, Uganda held its first multiparty elections in twentyfive years. Taken with due caution, the results of the presidential and parliamentary elections, including the regional breakdown of the votes cast, hint at the state of power relations among Uganda’s main political actors at the time they exited the no-party season (see Tables 9.1–9.4). The incumbent president’s electoral campaign focused on three easy catchphrases aimed at the rural masses: boona basome (education for all, the main election promise being the introduction of Universal Secondary Education), bonna bagemwe (immunization for all), and bonna bagaggawale (prosperity for all). As he had done since he had become head of state, Museveni also insisted on the importance of building an East African federation.10 He won almost 60 percent of votes, giving him a large majority in the presidential race; this percentage was down 10 and 16 percent, respectively, from five and ten years earlier. The president’s party also won the parliamentary elections. With the ten army representatives, all de facto NRM, in addition to the MPs elected in ordinary constituencies (142), women elected in reserved seats (49), and representatives of other special interest groups (14), the ruling party could count on an overall parliamentary majority of 69.6 percent of seats. As had been the case five years earlier, the opposition was once again led by Kiiza Besigye, who was nominated FDC leader and presidential candidate on his return in October 2005 from four years in exile in South Africa.

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Table 9.1

Presidential Election Results, 1996–2006 1996a Votes

%

Candidates

Votes

%

Y. K. Museveni P. Ssemogerere M. K. Mayanja — — — — — —

4,800,000 1,400,000 137,000 — — — — — —

75.5 22.3 2.2 — — — — — —

Y. K. Museveni — M. K. Mayanja A. Awori F. Bwengye K. Chapaa K. Besigye — —

5,123,360 — 73,790 103,915 22,751 10,080 2,055,795 — —

69.3 — 1.0 1.4 0.3 0.1 27.8 — —

Y. K. Museveni 4,109,449 J. Ssebaana Kizito 109,583 — — — — — — — — K. Besigye 2,592,954 A. Bwanika 65,874 Miria Obote 57,071

59.3 1.6 — — — — 37.4 0.9 0.8

69.7

6,934,931 295,525 7,230,456

69.2

— — 6,193,816

72.9

— — 7,511,746

Candidates

Votes

%

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Valid votes Rejected ballots Total ballots countedb

2006

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NRM DP Justice Forum Independent Independent NDF FDC Independent UPC

2001a

Source: Electoral Commission (2006, 56, 150). Notes: a. Party labels were unofficial in 1996 and 2001. b. Percentage figures refer to the ratio of ballots counted to the total number of registered voters. DP (Democratic Party), FDC (Forum for Democratic Change), NRM (National Resistance Movement), NDF (National Democrats Forum), UPC (Uganda People’s Congress).

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Table 9.2

Presidential Election Results, 2006: Regional Breakdown (percentage of regional vote)

Y. K. Museveni (NRM) Kizza Besigye (FDC) J. Ssebaana Kizito (DP) Miria Obote (UPC) Abed Bwanika (Independent)

Central Region

Eastern Region

Northern Region

Western Region

61.8 34.7 2.7 0.2 0.6

56.0 41.2 0.9 0.7 1.0

29.6 62.9 2.4 3.0 2.2

78.5 20.0 0.6 0.2 0.5

Source: Adapted from Gloppen et al. (2006, 6). Note: Ugandan voters are distributed as follows: central region 30 percent, eastern region 25 percent, northern region 16 percent, western region 29 percent (Gloppen et al. 2006, 6).

Table 9.3

Parliamentary Election Results, 2006

Political Parties National Resistance Movement (NRM) Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) Democratic Party (DP) Conservative Party (CP) Jeema (Justice Forum) Independents Vacant Total

Constituency Seats

Women MPs

Special Interest Groups

Army MPs

Total Seats

% of Seats

142

49

14

10

215

69.6

27

10

—

—

37

12.0

9

—

—

—

9

2.9

8 1 1 26 1 215

— — — 10 — 69

— — — 1 — 15

— — — — — 10

8 1 1 37 1 309

2.6 0.3 0.3 12.0 0.3 100

Source: Adapted from Gloppen et al. (2006).

Barely a couple of weeks after his return, however, Besigye was arrested and charged with rape, treason, and terrorism. He was released on bail at the beginning of January, but his presidential campaign was significantly disrupted by the constant need to appear in court. Moreover, Besigye no longer enjoyed the support of the old parties as he had in 2001: both the UPC and the DP decided to field their own presidential candidates. The weak leadership and infighting within the UPC and DP played into the hands of both Besigye and the FDC. Despite this, however, the Forum for Democratic Change shared some of the problems besetting the rest of the opposition. The party was short of both funds (the USh600–700 million it spent for the election was less than half the amount deemed necessary) and time (one year was hardly enough to

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Table 9.4

Parliamentary Election Results, 2006: Regional Breakdown Total Seats No.

Northern Region

Western Region

Special Interests

Army MPs

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

69.6

49

67.1

61

73.5

18

31.6

63

88.7

14

93.3

10

100

12.0

4

5.5

15

18.1

16

28.1

2

2.8

—

—

—

—

2.9 2.6 0.3 0.3 12.0 0.3

— 8 1 1 10 — 73

— 11.0 1.4 1.4 13.7 —

1 — — — 6 — 83

1.2 — — — 7.2 —

8 — — — 14 1 57

14.0 — — — 24.6 1.7

— — — — 6 — 71

— — — — 8.4 —

— — — — 1 — 15

— — — — 6.6 —

— — — — — —

— — — — — —

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National Resistance Movement (NRM) 215 Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) 37 Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) 9 Democratic Party (DP) 8 Conservative Party (CP) 1 Jeema (Justice Forum) 1 Independents 37 Vacant 1 Total 309

Eastern Region

7/7/08

Political Parties

Central Region

Source: Adapted from Gloppen et al. (2006, 7).

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establish a functioning, nationwide organization and to mobilize grassroots support, particularly in the absence of substantial funding).11 The difficulty the opposition parties had in reviving, or launching, their organizations in a relatively short period of time was clear from the fact that while the NRM fielded candidates in all 215 constituencies, securing 16 seats unopposed, the FDC only did so in 127, the UPC in 74, and the DP in 68.12 The fragmentation of the opposition, which failed to agree on fielding joint candidates, had a stronger impact on the parliamentary election than on the presidential race, where the personality of individual candidates prevailed over party loyalties.13 Thus, while the party leader, Besigye, was able to win 37.4 percent of the vote in the presidential election, the FDC failed to secure more than 12.4 percent of the seats it could potentially win (that is, excluding army seats).14 Nevertheless, the FDC went on to lead the official opposition in Uganda’s newly elected multiparty parliament, after the Supreme Court had rejected Besigye’s claim of electoral irregularities and malpractice; although a majority of the court (four against three) confirmed that wrongdoings had taken place, they ruled that the impact of such wrongdoings was not sufficient to nullify the election.15 The old opposition parties paid an extremely high price for twenty years of repression, underground activities, and infighting. In the years up to the first open election, it was generally thought that, despite lacking any substantial presence on the ground, these parties would very quickly reestablish that presence as they had done in 1980. Neither the Uganda People’s Congress nor the Democratic Party, however, was able to win ten seats. Led by uncharismatic political leaders now in their seventies, and with so many young voters who could hardly remember their prominence in past elections, both the UPC and the DP struggled to reach out and effectively mobilize the electorate. Amazingly, neither Ssebaana Kizito nor Miria Obote received more than a meager 3 percent of the votes in their own home areas, the central and northern regions of Uganda, respectively. While both the incumbent president, Museveni, and his main competitor, Besigye, hailed from western Uganda, the electoral results confirmed the regionalization of support for the regime and the opposition. In both the presidential and parliamentary elections, opposition candidates prevailed by large margins in the northern districts and in the capital Kampala (securing eight out of nine constituencies in the latter). However, the NRM demonstrated that despite the presence of numerous Banyankole within the FDC leadership, it continued to exercise a firm hold on western Uganda: in fact, the ruling party won a massive 78.5 percent of presidential votes and 88.7 percent of the region’s parliamentary seats. The loyal vote of the Baganda also kept the central region firmly within the NRM camp; the pro-opposition vote in the capital failed to lower the ruling party’s presidential tally below the 61.8 percent mark, con-

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firming the view that the FDC had failed to attract those important Baganda figures needed to test the NRM’s strength in the region. Compared with other regions, voters in the eastern districts were fairly evenly divided, relatively speaking, between Museveni (56 percent) and one or other of the opposition candidates (43.8 percent), although in some areas, electors clearly voted either against the governing party (as was the case in the Teso districts) or in favor of it (as in the Busoga districts) (Gloppen et al. 2006, 8). In the parliamentary elections, however, splits within the opposition ranks helped the NRM win 73.5 percent of the region’s seats. Finally, two small parties, the Conservative Party and the Justice Forum, secured one constituency each. More significantly, however, a considerable number of independent candidates won local elections and made it to parliament as a result. Many of these politicians—largely from the NRM, but also from the UPC—had not accepted their exclusion from the rather controversial process of the party nominations and primaries. Although the 2006 elections seem to have set Uganda firmly on the road to the development of a two-party system, at least two caveats apply here. The first concerns the emerging party system’s principal actors. Once a party system and its constituent parties become established, they are not easily altered. The crystallization of political loyalties and voting patterns helps parties maintain the existing competitive pattern and may even restore that pattern when elections are reintroduced after a period of authoritarian politics. This is what had happened in Uganda in the past: the party system, which emerged during the late 1950s and early 1960s and was centered on the DP and the UPC, essentially reemerged when elections were reintroduced in 1980 after a decade of dictatorial military rule. In this sense, the FDC’s capacity to replace the old parties in the first multiparty election under Museveni’s rule and become Uganda’s main opposition force was a remarkable achievement. However, whether the replacement of the old parties with an NRM-versus-FDC contest is going to remain a permanent feature of Ugandan politics for the foreseeable future, or whether the old party loyalties are going to resurface during coming elections, remains to be seen. The second caveat concerns the actual degree of genuine competition that the NRM is prepared to accept. So far, the leadership of the ruling party has shown no inclination to accept a possible electoral defeat and cede power to the opposition. During his reelection campaign, for example, the president significantly hinted at the fact that he was the only person who could “tame” the army.16 Until such attitudes change, the current party system will remain a hegemonic party system rather than a truly competitive, albeit somewhat unbalanced, two-party system.17 The preservation of party hegemony further testifies to the partial continuity between no-party politics and the outset of a “new” multiparty era.

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Uganda and the Democratization of Politics in Africa

If Uganda’s no-party experiment is assessed in the context of the entire postindependence political history of the country and of the sub-Saharan region as a whole—neither of which has exactly been a hotbed of democracy and political stability—then we must acknowledge the progress Uganda has made over the past twenty years. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water; under the Movement regime, the country managed to make a significant break from the dictatorships and human rights abuses of the past, while considerable progress was made in terms of popular political participation and respect for the rule of law. In particular, the achievement of relative political stability—at least over two-thirds of the country’s territory—and the regularization of electoral practices should not be overlooked. In this sense, one would be tempted to conclude that, while opposing supposedly full-fledged “democratic” states to “non-democratic” ones may be a useful strategy in political prescription, in reality “there exists no simple dichotomy between a few ‘true’ democracies and the rest which are labelled sham or pseudo-democracies” (Giliomee and Simkins 1999, xvi). In the real world, one often finds electoral regimes that combine both coercive and constitutional practices, lying somewhere between authoritarian systems and mature democracies, as the increasingly numerous studies of “hybrid regimes” clearly demonstrate (Diamond 2002; van de Walle 2002; Carothers 2002; Collier and Levitski 1997). Uganda’s political system is one of these hybrid systems. Moreover, while it is true that “tenure strengthens democracy” (Kohli 1990, 8) and that the institutionalization of elections is a crucial aspect of this process, no-party elections may also have contributed to this end. The fact is, however, that in spite of all the obstacles that the democratization process still encounters in Africa, a number of sub-Saharan countries made progress toward the establishment of functioning multiparty democracies between the late 1980s and the beginning of the new millennium. When compared to the timing of political reforms adopted elsewhere on the continent, Uganda embarked on its experiment with no-party democracy relatively early on. Yet, while Uganda certainly became a very different country from the one it had been in the mid-1980s, the official restrictions on political rights implemented for two decades, certain authoritarian practices of the governing regime, and the war that ravaged the northern regions of the country inevitably weigh heavily on any comparative assessment of Kampala’s democratic progress. This is clear if we look at the widely used Freedom House surveys on democracy. The Freedom House data are certainly not a flawless measure and may be of limited utility when looking at a single country at a given point, but they are a useful tool for comparing the state of the protection of civil and po-

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litical rights across different countries and across time. If we look at the state of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa in 2006, according to the Freedom House survey, the degree of democracy in Uganda was below the average for the entire region (with twenty-five countries ranking higher than Uganda, nineteen ranking lower, and three achieving the same average scores), an average that certainly does not set too high a standard.18 To the extent that such data can help establish a comparative basis for assessing individual experiences, the path Uganda chose to follow twenty years ago does not appear to have produced any really significant democratic advancement. This leads us back to the very assumptions underlying the no-party experiment, that is, the notion that doing away with political parties would free the country’s politics from many of its worst historical features. Under certain specific circumstances, political parties and party-based competition may indeed constitute dysfunctional vehicles favoring the emergence of electoral polarization, the development of communal conflict and political instability, the weakening of democratic institutions, the continuation of authoritarian practices, and the spread of clientelism and political corruption. However, while modern democratic politics needs political parties as indispensable organizational agencies, none of these negative phenomena requires political parties in order to flourish. Thus, doing away with political parties may be just enough to do away with democracy altogether but is far from being enough to do away with other political trends. The history of Uganda over the past two decades demonstrates that, while the participatory politics underlying the no-party experiment inevitably created pressures for the development of party-like organizational structures and for the opening up of the political system, Museveni’s regime’s resistance to such pressures saw the country gradually slip toward the polarization of its political life, the spread of political corruption, and the systematic affirmation of authoritarian practices, to the detriment of liberal institutions and democratic politics.

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Acronyms

ANC BBC CA CCM CDU CP CSC DA DANIDA DFID DP ERP FAD FDC FES FOWODE FRELIMO FRONASA GDP GNI GNP HIPC HSM ICC IEC IGG IMP IPFC IRIN

African National Congress British Broadcasting Corporation Constituent Assembly Chama Cha Mapinduzi Christian Democratic Union Conservative Party Constitutional Steering Committee district administrator Danish International Development Agency (British) Department for International Development Democratic Party Economic Recovery Programme Foundation for African Development Forum for Democratic Change Friedrich Ebert Foundation Forum for Women in Democracy Frente de Libertação de Moçambique Front for National Salvation gross domestic product gross national income gross national product Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Holy Spirit Movement International Criminal Court Interim Executive Council Inspector General of Government International Monetary Fund Inter-Political Forces Co-operation Integrated Regional Information Network 203

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KY KAS LC LEGCO LRA MOF MP NAWOU NCD NDF NEC NGO NPC NRA NRC NRM NRM/A NRM-O PAFO PAPSCA PEAP PEs PGB PPC PPOA PPU PRA PRC RC RDC SPLA/M TANU TFM UCC UNC UNDP UNLF/UNLA UNM UPC UPDA

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Kabaka Yekka (“the King alone”) Konrad Adenauer Foundation local council (equivalent to RC) Legislative Council Lord’s Resistance Army Milton Obote Foundation member of parliament National Association of Women’s Organisations in Uganda National Caucus for Democracy National Democrats Forum National Executive Committee nongovernmental organization national political commissar National Resistance Army National Resistance Council (1986–1996 interim parliament) National Resistance Movement National Resistance Movement/Army National Resistance Movement–Organisation Parliamentary Advocacy Forum Programme for the Alleviation of Poverty and the Social Costs of Adjustment Poverty Eradication Action Plan Public Enterprises Presidential Guard Brigade Presidential Policy Commission Political Parties and Organisations Act Presidential Protection Unit People’s Redemption Army Party Representatives Council Resistance Council/Committee resident district commissioner Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement Tanzania African National Union The Free Movement Uganda Constitutional Commission Uganda National Congress United Nations Development Programme Uganda National Liberation Front/Uganda National Liberation Army Uganda National Movement Uganda People’s Congress Uganda Peoples Democratic Army

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UPDF UPE UPM UPU USAID USE USh UWONET UWPA UYD YPA

Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces Universal Primary Education Uganda Patriotic Movement Uganda People’s Union United States Agency for International Development Universal Secondary Education Ugandan shillings Uganda Women’s Network Uganda Women Parliamentarians Association Uganda Young Democrats Young Parliamentarians Association

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Chapter 1: No-Party Democracy

1. The regime established by the National Resistance Movement soon came to be known as the “Movement system.” Under the 1995 constitution and the 1997 Movement Act, the NRM itself was formally renamed “the Movement”: NRM and Movement are used as interchangeable terms in this book. 2. Political developments in Nepal between 1961 and 1990 were strikingly similar to Uganda’s politics during the past twenty years: a four-tier, hierarchical panchayat system based on no-party, elected local councils was established in 1961, which involved the participation of 50,000–60,000 Nepalese; the system culminated in a weak, indirectly elected legislature in Kathmandu, until direct, no-party national elections were introduced in the 1980s; the decentralized arrangement worked as a protection of the highly concentrated and discretionary powers of the king and developed into a source for local patronage; opposition parties, which went through numerous splits over the entire period, boycotted the no-party panchayat elections; yet, the system was officially sanctioned by a popular referendum in 1980. After thirty years, the panchayat system was abandoned in the face of mounting prodemocracy protests, and a new multiparty constitution was adopted in 1990. See Matles Savada (1991). On Ghana, see Crook (1999); on Rwanda see Integrated Regional Information Network of the UN (9 March 2001) and The Economist (London, 3 April 1999). 3. Cf. Apter (1965, pp. 192, 206); Bartolini (1986); Diamond et al. (1995, p. 41); Dunleavy (1991); Huntington (1968, pp. 401, 412); Kohli (1994); Lijphart (1985, p. 107); Mainwaring (1993); Panebianco (1988); Sartori (1968, p. 273). “Issue dimensions” refer to the main lines of conflict that shape a party system, such as rural versus urban interests, social-democratic versus liberal principles, and so on. Cf. Lijphart (1984). 4. Consociational democracies adopt four principles designed to regulate communal conflict: power sharing in the executive, proportional representation, (territorial or nonterritorial) autonomy for communal groups, and veto power for minorities (cf. Lijphart 1977, 1985, 1999). The term power sharing itself is often used as a synonym for consociationalism, not only because the key aspect of the latter is executive power sharing, but because the other three elements as well imply some kind of “participation” in the exercise of political power in its broadest sense (e.g., through legislative

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representation). For counterproposals aimed at “electoral integration,” see Horowitz (1991, p. 163). 5. The dependence of the stability and governability of democratic regimes on effective political parties has been illustrated by comparative studies focusing not only on African politics but also, for example, on the Indian case and on Latin American experiences. Cf. Diamond et al. (1995, p. 33ff.); Shugart and Carey (1992); Kohli (1990, 1994); Mainwaring (1993, pp. 222–223); Linz (1990, 1994); Sartori (1994). 6. The terms ethnic and communal are adopted interchangeably here to indicate identities and solidarities based on beliefs in a shared past and in “real or putative” kinship relationships. Such identities may refer to different attributes indicating group membership (e.g., language, religion, color or “race,” region, “nationality”), but to a certain extent, their activation and politicization can be a function of both intergroup relationships and political manipulation. Cf. Hutchinson and Smith (1996), Horowitz (1985), Young (1976), Kasfir (1976). 7. While the British polity is formally based on bicameralism, a key feature of the so-called Westminster model is the clear predominance of one chamber over the other (as in the case of Britain), if not a situation of pure unicameralism (as, for example, in New Zealand). See Lijphart (1999, p. 24). 8. On the question of whether the Democratic Party was formed in 1954, before the new Katikkiro was appointed, or in 1956, after the post had been given to a Protestant, see Karugire (1980, p. 157ff.). 9. Karugire (1980, p. 185; emphasis in original); cases of harassment and malpractices in the 1962 Lukiiko election are also mentioned by Mugaju and OlokaOnyango (2000, p. 19). Another constitutional conference was to follow just before independence, without changing to any great degree the arrangements that had been agreed the previous year (Karugire 1980, p. 188). 10. Kasfir (1976, p. 126). “Floor crossing” involved the DP as well: all but six of its twenty-four MPs had, by 1966, crossed to the UPC (Mugaju 2000, p. 21). 11. The president was to be the leader of the party winning over 40 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections, but new elections never actually took place (Regan 1995b, p. 172). 12. Ondoga Ori Amaza (1998, p. 9). On the international powers backing the coup, see Karugire (1988, p. 71) and Okoth (1995, p. 260). 13. Ondoga Ori Amaza (1998, p. 17), Mutibwa (1992, p. 134). Onyango Odongo (2000, p. 67) also refers to the Mayumba Kumi alternative political system, which was being devised when Binaisa was ousted. 14. For a revealing autobiographical episode, see Ondoga Ori Amaza (1998, pp. xiii–xx). For a general account, see Amnesty International, Human Rights Violations in Uganda: Extra-judicial Executions, Torture and Imprisonment, September 1982. 15. Eryia Kategaya, former national political commissar of the NRM, preface to Ondoga Ori Amaza (1998, p. xi). 16. The emergence of the Nubi was a remarkable example of the change in the saliency of communal identities. Amin claimed that “everybody in Africa is free to become a member of the Nubian tribe,” and many people deliberately “converted” to Islam and the Arabic language in order to share the benefits of a privileged connection with the ruling elite. See Kasfir (1976, pp. 30, 220). 17. The institutions introduced by the NRM included not only the “Movement” (whose structures had been constitutionalized through Legal Notice No.1/1986) and the local Resistance Councils, but also others such as the Inspector General of Government and the Human Rights Commission. The ban on party activities was never passed as

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ordinary legislation (save for the reference to party campaigning in the 1993 Constituent Assembly Statute) but only as a decree. 18. Article 70(1), Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995); emphasis added. 19. Article 269, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995), stated that “until parliament makes laws regulating the activities of political organisations . . . political activities may continue except: (a) opening and operating branch offices; (b) holding delegates’ conferences; (c) holding public rallies; (d) sponsoring or offering a platform to or in any way campaigning for or against a candidate for any public elections; (e) carrying out any activities that may interfere with the movement political system for the time being in force.” 20. Article 75, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995).

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Chapter 2: Building a No-Party State in Uganda

1. See, for example, World Bank (1981), Jackson and Rosberg (1982b), Doornbos (1990), Clapham (1996), Reno (1998), Herbst (2000), and Young (2004). 2. Museveni (1997, p. 189). In his perceptive analysis, Kasfir notes that for the first time, village officials were elected throughout NRA-controlled territories in mid1982, and this process was extended to the new western front after April 1985. However, during the alternate phases of the five-year war, those organs guaranteeing the involvement of the civilian population actually functioned only during periods when the rebels had sufficient control over the “safe zones” they had established, whereas such structures were removed during times the rebels were being besieged and had to withdraw for military survival, as happened in March 1983 (Kasfir 2005, p. 271ff., 287–288). Cf. Brett (1994b), Ngoga (1998), Golooba (1999), and Green (2007). 3. Former NRA political commissar, quoted in Kasfir (2005, p. 288). 4. Article 183ff., Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995). The Local Governments Act (1997) regulated the details of the reform (procedures for the direct election of district chairs, shift from nine- to ten-member committees at all levels, etc.). 5. See Article 189(3) and Schedule 6 of the 1995 constitution for the list of functions of the central government, which included: external relations and domestic law and order; the judiciary; currency, taxation, and trade regulation; educational, health, industrial, agricultural, land, and environment policies; and energy, transport, and communications. One of the main weaknesses of the decentralization framework was to be found on the fiscal front. While unconditional grants were constitutionally guaranteed, the fiscal powers of local authorities were subject to parliamentary legislation, which raised questions as to the districts’ financial autonomy and solidity. 6. Article 260, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995). 7. “Except for the districts of West Nile, Bugisu, Bukedi, Toro, and Kigezi where the ethnic units were not considered viable,” Lwanga-Lunyiigo (1989, p. 31). 8. Mamdani (2001, p. 262). Mamdani, however, notes that, at the district level, “the practice was to invest leadership in only those with ancestral claim to the land,” and that the radicalism of “the reform held for the duration of the guerrilla war, but not much longer” (Mamdani 2001, p. 172; italics added.) 9. Article 179(4), Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995). 10. Green (2007). Between 1990 and 1994, Kalangala, Kibaale, Kiboga, Kisoro, Pallisa, and Ntungamo were added to the thirty-three districts inherited by the NRM. In 1997, five new districts were carved out (Bugiri, Busia, Katakwi, Nakasongola, and

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Sembabule), bringing the total to forty-five. In 2000, this total reached fifty-six with the addition of Kamwenge, Kayunga, Pader, Kyenjojo, Mayuge, Sironko, Wakiso, Yumbe, Kaberamaido, Kanungu, and Nakapiripirit. In 2005, there was some confusion as new districts were “announced” (fourteen to be established in 2005, seven in 2006), bringing the total number of districts on paper to about eighty, of which only seventyseven were actually functioning as of early 2007 (the new districts included Ibanda, Kabingo, Kiruhura, Kaabong, Kaliro, Koboko, Butaleja, Nakaseke, Budaka, Amuria, Mityana, Manafwa, Amolatar, Bukwa, Oyam, Dokolo, Busiki, Abim, Bulisa, Kilak, Maracha-Terego, and Tororo). I would like to thank Elliott Green for clarifying this particular point. See New Vision, 8 August 2005. 11. Wasswa Lule, MP, quoted in The Monitor, 31 May 1995, p. 16. 12. “A Case for the Restoration of Buganda as a Single Unit,” The Monitor, 22 July 1994. 13. Article 178(3). Cf. New Vision, 2 June 1998. A number of functional areas with regard to which interdistrict cooperation is possible are listed by the constitution in Schedule 5, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995). 14. The Constitutional Court, for instance, ruled that legislation banning the activities of political parties was to prevail over constitutional rights (Regan 1995b, p. 163). 15. UCC Report (1993, p. 4; emphasis added). The UCC was established by a Constitutional Commission Statute (No. 5 of 1988); it first met on 9 March 1989 and presented its Report and Draft Constitution to President Museveni on 31 December 1992. 16. Hauser (1999, pp. 627–631). Out of a total 288 delegates, 214 were directly elected from county constituencies and another 39 women were indirectly selected by special district electoral colleges. The remaining delegates were appointed by interest groups and by the president: 10 were appointed by the head of state, 10 were representatives of the National Resistance Army, 8 represented the four recognized political parties, 4 were youth representatives, 2 were trade union representatives, and 1 delegate represented the interests of the disabled. 17. In addition to the draft constitution, the report of the Constitutional Commission provided some evidence of what views people held on a number of issues. It claimed, for example, a broad consensus in favor of the Movement system and of a degree of representation of the army within parliament (UCC Report 1993, p. 12). On those issues for which the popular consultations failed to indicate any clear majority view, the commission submitted its own proposals. For example, the public was reportedly in favor of adopting a national language, but it failed to agree on whether this language should be Swahili or Luganda. The Constitutional Commission suggested that English be retained as the official language, with the promotion of the use of other major languages and their possible elevation to official status at a later stage (UCC Report 1993, p. 80; Waliggo 1994, p. 34). 18. The Baganda, who in the past had been weakly represented at the military level, also demanded that recruitment to the army be proportional to the size of each community, a measure that in the end was not included in the constitution. Nsibambi (1996, p. 15). 19. On the vice-president, see Article 108 of the 1995 constitution and Article 106(2)(a)/112 of the draft constitution; on district chairs, see Article 183 of the 1995 constitution and Article 207 of the draft constitution; on the powers and duties of central government, see Article 189 and Schedule 6 in the 1995 constitution, together with Article 211 and Schedule 4 in the draft constitution; the idea of “interdistrict cooperation” (Article 178 and Schedule 5 of the 1995 constitution) does not appear in the draft constitution. 20. These issues are addressed in some detail in Chapter 5.

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21. Article 271, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995). 22. New Vision (4 July 1999, p. 5). On the way the controversial bills were passed in 1999 and 2000, see New Vision, 25 June 1999, pp. 2–3; 4 July 1999, p. 5; 4 November 1999; and 16 August 2000; see also The Monitor, 4 July 1999; 9 June 2000; and 28, 30, 31 August 2000. 23. On Ugandans’ attitudes toward the referendum, see Bratton and Lambright (2001). 24. Not surprisingly, the constitution does not mention any political functions when it defines the tasks of the Ugandan army. On the contrary, it specifies that it should be “non-partisan, national in character, patriotic, professional, disciplined, productive and subordinate to the civilian authority” (Article 208, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995; emphasis added). 25. Amin and his fellows were partly the expression of the low level of education of Uganda’s army officers, partly resulting from the fact that a military career was not an attractive option for educated people (cf. Brett 1994a, p. 87; Okoth 1995, p. 258). 26. Hesselbein, Golooba-Mutebi, and Putzel (2006, p. 29) contrast Uganda’s and Rwanda’s cases with that of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the absence of a single force able to prevail militarily deepened the country’s problems of integration. 27. New Vision, 22 January 2006, p.14. 28. Mudoola (1991, p. 239ff.), Ondoga Ori Amaza (1998, p. 215ff.). In March 2007, a court ruling ordered the government to pay a staggering US$2 billion in back pay and compensation over the course of twenty years, to about 45,000 troops who had served under former presidents Idi Amin and Milton Obote, and who had never been properly dismissed from the army by subsequent regimes (BBC, 19 March 2007). 29. Major General (Rtd.) Mugisha Muntu, interview (Kampala, 21 October 2004). 30. Andrew Mwenda, in The Monitor, Special Issue, “Milton Obote,” October 2005, p. 5. The only army commander not from Ankole was Major General Jeje Odongo, an Itesot from Soroti. Cf. Green (2005, p. 138ff.). 31. When James Kazini, allegedly a close confidant of Museveni, but also “accused of being arbitrary, undisciplined, reckless and . . . deeply unpopular among some senior officers,” was appointed army commander, well-known political commentator Charles Onyango-Obbo wrote an article whose title was quite telling: “Should We Run, Hide or Stay Put Because Kazini Is Now Army Chief?” (The Monitor, 7 November 2001). Two years on, Kazini was facing a court martial for corruption.

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Chapter 3: The Political Economy of Support for the New Regime

1. Brett (1994b, p. 54); Holmgren et al. (2001, pp. 103, 136); Robinson (2006, pp. 18, 24). For example, the liberalization of the foreign exchange market actually went beyond the conditions set by the IMF. 2. Xinhua, 1 July 2006. 3. The PEAP was largely funded through direct budget support (notably by the World Bank’s annual Poverty Reduction Support Credits and by the UK) and was based on four cornerstones (Piron 2004, p. 13): creating a framework for economic growth and transformation (this largely coincided with the neoliberal prescriptions of classic structural adjustment policies such as macroeconomic stability and economic openness); making improvements in the areas of governance and security (e.g., reducing insecurity, ensuring the rule of law, fostering transparency and combating corrup-

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tion, improving service delivery); adopting income-generating initiatives in favor of the poor (including a plan for the modernization of agriculture through education, rural finance, etc., together with land reform and the implementation of the 1997 Land Act; and the enhancement of the road system and the electrification of rural areas); and improving the lives of the poor (access to water and sanitation, free primary education, improved healthcare, plans for dealing with demographic growth and the AIDS crisis). Toward the end of 2004, the third, revised version of the PEAP was completed. 4. Uganda AIDS Commission (www.aidsuganda.org) and UNAIDS/WHO, AIDS Epidemic Update, December 2006, p. 17ff. 5. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (2003, p. 89). For the 1998–2003 period, UPE was partly financed by a US$132 million contribution from the British Department for International Development. 6. Holmgren et al. (2001, p. 134). Ten years after the pledge had been made to guarantee UPE, Museveni promised during the run-up to the 2006 elections to go a step further by introducing free Universal Secondary Education (USE), a program that was implemented one year into the president’s new mandate in the case of 700 public and 280 private schools (Integrated Regional Information Network [IRIN], 8 January 2007). 7. Piron (2004), United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (2003, p. 84), Hickey (2005, p. 997), Uganda Bureau of Statistics (2006a, p. 3). The PEAP set the ambitious target of reducing the proportion of people living below the poverty line to less than 10 percent by 2017. 8. Matia Baguma-Isoke, MP, minister of state for lands and environment, interview (Kampala, 29 May 2000). 9. Charles Onyango-Obbo, East African, 3 June 1998. 10. Africa Confidential (London), 23 June 2006, p. 4. 11. Filippo Ciantia, Associazione Volontari per il Servizio Internazionale (AVSI), Kampala, 7 October 2006. 12. BBC website, 29 April 2005; IRIN, 13 January 2006. Cf. Mwenda and Tangri (2005, p. 466); Tangri and Mwenda (2006, p. 121). 13. IRIN, 14 May 2004. 14. Green (2005, pp. 108–250; 178). Cf. Rubongoya (2007, pp. 115–118). The government repeatedly stated that return of land to Buganda first required acceptance of the regional tier of government introduced by a 2005 Constitutional Amendment Act. The new Article 178 of the constitution recognized the districts of Buganda as having formed a regional government. These districts were to be led by a directly elected Katikkiro (prime minister) as the highest authority in the region; also to be set up was a Buganda land board with control over the controversial 9,000 square miles of land (and 1,500 square miles of forest) that Mengo had been asking be returned from the central government to Buganda. Mengo, however, had always opposed the idea of a directly elected Katikkiro and thus, in February 2006, Mengo rejected the regional tier pointing that it was not the same as federo. The Monitor, 11 November 2007. 15. See the 2006 election results in Chapter 9. 16. Article 31, Constitutional Amendment Act (11/2005). 17. Information about the overall number of Uganda’s MPs at any given point over the past twenty years is often contradictory. This is partly because the multiplication of districts gradually increased the official number of women district representatives, but the actual election of such representatives was at times delayed (in 2001, for example, a woman representative was at first elected in fifty-three out of fifty-six districts only, while in three new districts the election was postponed; thus there were initially 292 MPs in parliament instead of 295). An additional reason may lie in the fact

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that, according to the 1995 constitution, “the Vice-President and Ministers . . . if not already elected Members of Parliament, shall be ex officio members [of parliament] without the right to vote” (Article 78.1.d). Since ex officio members sit in parliament but do not vote, it makes sense not to count them. Yet, some observers at times do count them. This not only increases the overall number of MPs, but it also makes such figures vary according to government reshuffles and how many ministers in a new executive are picked from among sitting MPs. 18. IRIN, 14 January 2005; Tangri and Mwenda (2006, p. 105ff.). 19. Africa Confidential, 9 June 2006, p. 7. The Monitor, 11 April 2007. 20. New Vision, 11 November 2001, p. 12. 21. Interim Report of the United Nations Expert Panel on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, United Nations, January 2001; Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, United Nations, October 2003. 22. Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2006, www .transparency.org. 23. IRIN 13 January 2006. 24. Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda (2006, p. 8). 25. Ssenkumba (1997, p. 26). Mamdani is also quoted by HRW as supporting this idea. A similar claim was also made to account for the emergence of another armed opposition that was active in the country for a few years from 1996, when it began operating from bases in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. The Allied Democratic Front (ADF) was seen as a reaction to the denial of organized political opposition and, more specifically, to the ban on an Islamist and a Baganda political party (Human Rights Watch 1999, p. 129). 26. For a summary of different views, see Branch (2005, p. 4ff.). 27. The Monitor, 8 November 1998; Reuters, 2 July 1998. 28. The Monitor, 5 February 2007. 29. The question of the ICC involvement in the Ugandan crisis is addressed in depth by Allen (2006).

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Chapter 4: Museveni’s Political Trajectory

1. Cf. Arditi (2004, p. 138) and Canovan (1999) on political leaders and redemptive politics. 2. William Pike, managing director of New Vision newspaper, interview (Kampala, 8 October 2004). Wafula Oguttu, former editor of The Monitor, made similar comments in a separate interview (Kampala, 13 October 2004). 3. The kind of charm Museveni traditionally exerted on Western diplomats and journalists, as well as its gradually waning effects, are brightly portrayed by Michela Wrong, “Tea with the Messiah,” New Statesman, 18 September 2006. 4. Quoted from a speech by Museveni to the NRC, undated, www.museveni .co.ug. 5. See Chapter 3. 6. Cf. Weyland (2003, p. 1096), who stresses the compatibility of populism and liberal economic reforms. See Kjaer (1999) on Museveni’s move from revolutionary to neoliberal economic policies.

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7. Delivered on 31 December 1981, Rawlings’s address is reproduced in A Revolutionary Journey: Selected Speeches of Flight LL Jerry John Rawlings (Accra, Information Services Department, 1982) and quoted in Nugent (1995, p. 15). 8. The Monitor, 4 November 1999. 9. The Monitor, 12 January 2007. The dispute concerned the proposal of an expensive financial scheme for buying new cars for MPs. 10. Charles Onyango-Obbo, “How Far Is Rwakitura, and What’s the Cost of Museveni’s One Way Bus Ticket There?” The Monitor, 14 November 2001. 11. Republic of Uganda, Government of the (2004). In the case of a deadlock, the president could call fresh presidential and parliamentary elections and thus restate his mandate. The presidential power to dissolve parliament, which is a feature of Latin American countries such as Chile, Peru, Paraguay, and Uruguay, contravenes the principle of the separation of powers that lies at the heart of presidential systems and which, according to Shugart and Carey (1992), is one of the factors responsible for the political instability often displayed by such regimes. As for the appointment of High Court and Supreme Court judges, the proposal made was to loosen professional requirements (e.g., the minimum period of professional service was reduced from ten to seven years for High Court judges, and from fifteen to ten years for Supreme Court judges), while other provisions strengthened the Ministry of Justice’s role in administering and supervising the judiciary. 12. Republic of Uganda, Government of the (2004, p. 116). Along the same lines was the proposal that the Constitutional Court should not declare unconstitutional any law if such law has been repealed, expired, or “has [already] had its full effect” nor any such declaration shall affect retrospectively “anything duly done . . . prior to the date” (p. 136). This explicitly follows the ruling that the government sought from the Supreme Court through its Constitutional Appeal No. 3/2004 (Attorney General v. Dr. Paul Ssemogerere and Zachary Olum). 13. Report of the Commission of Inquiry (Constitutional Review): Findings and Recommendations, 10 December 2003, pp. 16, 26. 14. Emphasis added. IRIN, 2 July 2004. 15. Constitutional Appeal No. 3/2004 (Attorney General v. Dr. Paul Ssemogerere and Zachary Olum), 29 June 2004. 16. Africa Confidential, 9 June 2006:7; BBC, 31 January 2006, 5 March 2007. 17. Charles Onyango-Obbo, “Black Mamba II Was the Birth of a New Kisanja,” The Monitor, 7 March 2007. See also The Monitor, 5–7 and 12 March 2007); and BBC News website, 5 March 2007. 18. Letter dated 12 May 2004 and signed by Museveni, addressed to VP Gilbert Bukenya, cc. Cabinet Ministers and Ministers of State, written with reference to Wapakhabulo’s letter of 19th November 2003. It was quite telling that, when repeatedly quoting Article 1 of the 1995 constitution, Museveni left out the second part of a clause which in full read: “All power belongs to the people who shall exercise their sovereignty in accordance with the constitution.” 19. Some of the points made in this paragraph were raised by Mugisha Muntu, MP in the East African Legislative Assembly and former army commander, interview (Kampala, 21 October 2004 and 17 October 2006). Andrew Mwenda, interview (Kampala, 26 October 2004); Eryia Kategaya, New Vision, 17 April 2005, p. 20; OlokaOnyango (2004, p. 34). 20. Mugisha Muntu, interview (Kampala, 21 October 2004). 21. Timothy Kalyegira, The Monitor, 18 October 2006, p. 25. 22. Constitutional Appeal No. 2/2002 (Charles Onyango-Obbo, Andrew Mujuni Mwenda v. Attorney General).

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23. “Uganda Report 2004,” East African Journal of Human Rights and Democracy 2 (4): 43. 24. IRIN, 13 January 2006. 25. BBC News website, 10 August 2005. 26. The Monitor, 12 October 2006. Cf. Juma Okumu, The Monitor, 10 October 2004, p. 10. 27. Augustine Ruzindana, interview (Kampala, 6 October 2004). An anonymous Ugandan journalist elaborated the point in the following way: “His failures are bigger than those of other African presidents because of the expectations he created. In his prime, there was no one in his league except for Mandela. His failures set back the whole of Africa because he has denied the continent a role model.” Quoted in Michela Wrong, “Tea with the Messiah,” New Statesman, 18 September 2006.

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Chapter 5: The Movement: A Partisan Organization in Disguise

1. “The definition of ‘political organization’ shall not include . . . the movement political system . . . and the organs under the movement political system; pressure groups; civic organisations.” Republic of Uganda, Political Parties and Organisations Act No. 18 (2002), Article 2(2). 2. Article 70, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995 (emphasis added). 3. See, for example, Kasfir (1991, p. 270). Most NRM top leaders, including Museveni, were UPC up to around 1970 (see The Monitor, 5 January 1997, p. 17). 4. See also Museveni’s (1997) own reconstruction of how the NRA/NRM emerged. 5. Joe Oloka-Onyango, paper presented at the Free Movement seminar, Kampala, October 1998. 6. Mamdani (1995b), Kasfir (1994, p. 173). In June 1995, Museveni wrote a famous letter to the movementists of the CA in which he suggested that the NRM might have to transform itself into a different political organization in the near future, if competition for power should require it. Contextually, a Movement parliamentary caucus was “specifically created to bring in ‘discipline’ . . . a whipping process, which is why it expressly excludes multipartists (although all Ugandans are members of the Movement) . . . all Movement politicians have rallied without a squeal to the party line” (Charles Onyango-Obbo, columnist, The Monitor, Kampala, on Ugandanet, 1998, exact date missing). 7. James Wapakhabulo, national political commissar, interview (Kampala, 19 July 1999). 8. The original NEC consisted of thirty-eight “historicals” (the NRM leaders of the bush days), ten presidential nominees, and one representative per district (elected by the NRC members of each district). James Wapakhabulo, interview (19 July 1999); Dicklitch (1998, p. 78). 9. For this paragraph, including the quoted recommendation by the Commission of Inquiry into Local Government System, I rely on Golooba-Mutebi (1999, p. 3, footnote). 10. The Movement Newsletter, Kampala, 2 November 1998, p. 5. 11. In the run-up to the 2000 referendum, for example, New Vision (28 May 2000) published a full front page announcement that “4,000 Lira UPC Join Movement,” while The Monitor (23 May 2000) reported smaller-scale moves in the opposite direction. As

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we have said, at least as far back as the Constituent Assembly election of 1994, the Movement had presented election results in strictly partisan terms. In 1998, for example, Museveni claimed that Movement candidates had won 88.9 percent of districts counting all local government bodies (New Vision, 22 April 1998). 12. Village-level Movement committees officially included the entire local population, but they were chaired by the LC1 or village chair, who was also the ex officio (unelected) representative of the village on the parish-level Movement committee. 13. The Movement’s budget was first drafted by the NEC and then submitted to parliament by the minister of finance; it was finally approved as part of Uganda’s consolidated fund with the rest of the national budget. James Magode Ikuya, deputy director for information at the Movement secretariat, interview (Kampala, 1 July 1999). 14. Magode Ikuya, interview (Kampala, 1 July 1999). 15. The full conference would have been attended by around 2,000 Movement members: the president of the republic; the Movement chair, vice-chair, and national political commissar; all MPs; all members of district executive committees (local governments) and all resident district commissioners; chairs of division/municipal/subcounty and town Movement committees; ten members each elected by the army and private business; five each for the police, women, youth, trade unions, veterans, and the disabled; and three for the prisons service. See the Movement Act of 1997. 16. See, for example, East African, 29 June 1998, and Charles Onyango-Obbo, The Monitor, 24 June 1998. 17. Fred Kirungi, “Ouganda: La loi arrêtera-t-elle Museveni?” ANB-BIA Supplement 353, 21 August 1998. 18. Cf. Kasfir (2000, p. 73); Magode Ikuya, interview (1 July 1999). 19. In addition to the six directorates (Mobilisation, Gender, Youth, and Interest groups; Information; External Relations; Research; Economic Affairs; and Legal Affairs) a permanent secretariat was placed in charge of finance and administration. 20. Matia Kasaija, deputy director for Mobilisation, interview (Kampala, 28 May 1999); Magode Ikuya, interview (1 July 1999). See also The Monitor, 28 May 1999. Cf. Crispus Kiyonga, national political commissar, New Vision, 20 January 2006. 21. James Wapakhabulo, interview (Kampala, 19 July 1999); The Monitor, 28 May 1999. The measures were controversially implemented by the director of mobilization, Mulindwa Birimumaso. 22. Beatrice Lagada, deputy director for mobilization, interview (Kampala, 16 June 1999); The Voice, Kampala, 12 June 2000, p. 2. 23. Matia Kasaija, interview (Kampala, 5 May 1999). 24. Ibid. 25. Cf. New Vision, 7 December 1999. 26. Human Rights Watch (1999, p. 68) refers to a “continuing convergence between NRM and state structures.” While the report is, generally speaking, a very useful and well-researched one, this particular point is incorrect. As we have seen, there was, on the contrary, a degree of “discontinuity” in the dynamic relationship between state and Movement, where an initial process of progressive separation was halted and partly reversed by the overlapping bodies established by the 1997 act. 27. Norbert Mao, an MP from Gulu district, reportedly attended a meeting of the Movement caucus in which the controversial Political Organisations Bill was discussed (New Vision, Kampala, 4 November 1999). 28. Regan (1995b, p. 161). To tighten central control and internal discipline in the new local and national structures, the Code of Conduct for Movement Leaders was adopted at the NEC meeting of April 1999. The code applied to all persons holding office in the Movement’s bodies, and it established a number of general rules against cor-

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ruption, “sectarianism,” and the like, and established disciplinary committees at district and subcounty/municipal levels. The committees symbolized the operational dilemma posed by an all-inclusive membership and reflected the same rationale underlying the creation of a parliamentary caucus: the need to promote discipline without the official option of expelling people. Exposure of wrongdoings and bad conduct was one of the few ways of exerting pressure. However, the way these disciplinary committees were organized was almost as telling. At the local level, they consisted of the chair and the secretary of the local Movement committee, together with five members elected by the other members from among their numbers. Likewise, a national disciplinary committee included the Movement vice-chair, the NPC, and seven members of the National Conference appointed by the chair of the Movement and approved by the NEC. This setup made it considerably difficult to distinguish between those who did the monitoring and those who were supposed to be monitored. See Movement Newsletter, Kampala, 23 April 1999, p. 2. 29. Magode Ikuya, interview (Kampala, 1 July 1999). 30. James Wapakhabulo, quoted in New Vision, 14 July 1998. After a few years of inactivity, toward the end of 1998, the secretariat restarted countrywide courses at Kyankwanzi political school for mobilizers drawn from district executives (New Vision, 21 October 1998 and 6 January 1999) as well as those for students who completed senior six; the latter were told by the NPC Wapakhabulo “to register with the RDC’s offices with immediate effect” (New Vision, 24 July 1998). 31. New Vision, 10 September 1992, p. 2, quoted in Dicklitch (1998, p. 72). 32. The statement is by an NRA official and is quoted in Human Rights Watch (1999, p. 66). 33. Report of the Sessional Committee on Presidential and Foreign Affairs on the 1999/2000 Budget Proposals, cited in Kayunga (2001, p. 94). The political propaganda of the Movement was further disseminated by means of the general media as well as specific publications. The mouthpiece of the organization was an irregular newsletter that was launched as a weekly paper in late 1998 but, allegedly because of limited funding, was being published only once a month. About 10,000 copies of the Newsletter were supposed to reach downward and be distributed to all lower committees. Much more influential than the Newsletter, however, was the state-funded and formally independent New Vision, which, with a circulation of about 25,000–35,000 copies a day, was the most widely read newspaper in the country. On occasions, New Vision has been quite critical of the regime. But, on balance, the paper is an openly pro-Movement tool that also hosts regular commentaries as well as occasional interventions by top Movement leaders. Finally, the secretariat made use of slots on the radio, notably on Radio Star, which was “established specifically to counter ‘attacks’ from ‘hostile’ private radio stations, especially CBS (a.k.a. Radio Buganda) whose anti-NRM rhetoric reached new heights during the land reform controversy” (Golooba-Mutebi, personal communication). In exceptional cases, such as in Gulu district, radio programs were also used by local committee chairs to publicize Movement activities (Charles Odora Oryem, chairman of Gulu district Movement committee, interview, Gulu, 6 July 1999). 34. James Wapakhabulo, interview (Kampala, 19 July 1999). Cf. Kayunga (2001, p. 87). 35. Beatrice Lagada, interview (Kampala, 16 June 1999). 36. Magode Ikuya, interview (Kampala, 1 July 1999). An additional reason for the budgetary increase was that the 1998/1999 budget was based on the funding of four directorates, whereas the NEC subsequently met and established seven such directorates, so the new budget had to provide for all seven. James Wapakhabulo, interview (Kampala, 19 July 1999).

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37. Parliamentary Hansards, 7 November 2000; New Vision, 9 September 2000; East African, 24 July 2000. 38. “Until the first parliamentary elections for the purpose of the multiparty political system are held, the organs under the movement political system shall remain in force,” Article 294, Constitutional Amendment Act (11/2005). Cf. Crispus Kiyonga, national political commissar, in New Vision, 20 January 2006. 39. New Vision, 19 October 2004, p.1; The Monitor, 3 and 6 October 2004. 40. Angelo Izama, interview (Kampala, 16 October 2006). 41. New Vision, 18 July 2005. 42. Article 8.2, NRM constitution, 2003. 43. New Vision, 15, 18, and 20 November 2005. 44. New Vision, 13 and 20 November 2005, p. 13. 45. Cf. Weekly Observer, Kampala, 1 April 2004. 46. New Vision, 14 October 2006. 47. Cf. The Monitor, 31 January 2007. 48. Andrew Mwenda, in The Monitor, 8 October 2004. 49. New Vision, 11 October 2006; The Monitor, 10 December 2006; Angelo Izama, interview (Kampala, 16 October 2006). 50. New Vision, 11 October 2006; The Monitor, 29 and 31 January 2007. In March 2007, a meeting of the NRM caucus chaired by Museveni decided that members of the party occupying leadership positions would have to make monthly contributions to fund party activities (e.g., each MP would donate 10 percent of his or her salary, or USh110,000, while other officials—including the party chair, the speaker, ministers, presidential advisers, LC5s/LCC3 chairs, NRM chairs, vice-chairs, and members of the executive committee—would variously contribute between 17 percent and 19 percent). The Monitor, 20 March 2007. 51. Emphasis in original. Sartori (1976, pp. 230–231). While Sartori holds Poland and Mexico to be the best examples of hegemonic party systems, among the other cases he examines is Portugal, particularly when Marcelo Caetano succeeded António de Oliveira Salazar and organized elections in 1969 and 1973; one party only was allowed to exist, but “during the one-month preelectoral period independent candidates were permitted to campaign and present opposition slates. Since this opposition did not have a party status, it was disbanded after the election” (Sartori 1976, p. 236). 52. Quoted in Simkins (1999, p. 50). James Coleman and Carl Rosberg identified two tendencies among the uniparty and one-party-dominant African states of the 1960s, one being a revolutionary-centralizing type, the other a pragmatic-pluralistic type. With regard to the latter, they pointed to the characteristic climate of “tolerated but controlled pluralism” that echoes certain aspects of Sartori’s “hegemonic party system,” Coleman and Rosberg (1966, p. 6). 53. Wapakhabulo, in New Vision, 10 May 1999, p. 29.

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Chapter 6: The State of the Old Parties in a No-Party State

1. There were at least nine UPC members, for example, on the NRC, and it was publicly stated that party supporters were free to run for election to the Resistance Councils on the understanding that they would not represent the UPC (New Vision, Kampala, 20 February 1992; cf. The Monitor, Kampala, 7 September 1993, p. 16). On occasion, UPC stalwarts even joined the executive: Daniel Omara Atubo, for instance,

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was minister of state for foreign affairs and regional cooperation between 1987 and 1991 (he rejoined the executive in the wake of the 2006 election, after about fifteen years as a leading opposition figure), while Philemon Mateke became minister of state for industrial relations in 1999. 2. The Monitor, 11 October 1998 and 2 May 1999, p. 2. 3. Augustine Ruzindana, MP, interview (Kampala, 28 April 1999). A similar point was made by Michela Wrong, with regard to Ugandans at large, after the 2006 election: “The road from Kampala to the airport in Entebbe illustrates why Ugandans are unlikely to do anything more than rail at M7’s refusal to take his final bow. On one hillside sits the new Serena Hotel, replacing the Nile Hotel where Idi Amin tortured his opponents to death. Above the busy roundabouts, billboards advertise insurance, mobile phones, beer and other products, many produced by the Asian families Amin expelled and Museveni invited back. Along the roadside, where banana groves alternate with brightly painted bungalows, piles of red bricks attest to the building work taking place. Ugandans in their forties and fifties, who lost family and friends under Amin and Obote, know what a rogue state is capable of. They are not about to put what still feels like a relatively short period of stability and prosperity at risk. ‘It’ll take another ten or 20 years,’ the [Ugandan] journalist said, ‘before anyone seriously challenges the state’” (Michela Wrong, “Tea with the Messiah,” New Statesman, 18 September 2006). 4. Damiano Lubega, organizing secretary of the DP, interview (Kampala, 19 May 1999). 5. See, for example, The Monitor, 12 November 1993 and 29 March 1996; New Vision, 12 June 1993 and 1 June 1998; Weekly Topic (Kampala), 18 June 1994. 6. Lubega, interview (Kampala, 19 May 1999). Michael Mabikke, secretarygeneral of UYD, interview (Kampala, 24 June 2000). See, for example, “Multipartists Defect to Movement,” New Vision, 8 May 2000. 7. Kerubino Uma, DP branch chair for Gulu district, interview (Gulu, 5 July 1999). 8. John Mugisha, DP youth leader for Mbarara district, interview (Mbarara, 15 July 1999). 9. Robert Kitariko, former secretary-general of the DP, interview (Kampala, 13 May 1999); Mariano Drametu, secretary-general of the DP, interview (Kampala, 12 May 1999). 10. Museveni (1997, p. 211) refers to kakuyege as a “method of mobilization” to reach out to the lowest and most marginalized sectors of society, notably the peasants. According to some, Museveni himself is the one who gave the word a political meaning. 11. Mutagamba, interview (Kampala, 4 June 1999). 12. Drametu, interview (Kampala, 12 May 1999). 13. A DP representative in Mbale who requested anonymity, interview (Mbale, 9 July 1999). 14. Anthony Ssekweyama, late administrator of the Foundation for African Development and publicity secretary of the DP, interview (Kampala, 6 June 1999). 15. Mabikke, interview (Kampala, 24 June 2000). 16. Low (1962, p. 23). A partnership similar to the DP-FAD one used to exist between the UPC and the social-democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation up to the early 1980s. 17. Kitariko, interview (Kampala, 13 May 1999). 18. Ssekweyama, interview (Kampala, 6 June 1999). 19. Lubega, interview (Kampala, 19 May 1999). 20. Drametu, interview (Kampala, 12 May 1999). 21. Ssekweyama, interview (Kampala, 6 June 1999).

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22. Drametu, interview (Kampala, 12 May 1999). 23. The Monitor, 8 December 1999. 24. Leander Komakech, president of UYD, interview (Kampala, 19 May 1999). 25. Komakech, interview (Kampala, 19 May 1999). 26. See, for example, New Vision, 22 July 1998. In an attempt to infiltrate the UYD at its very top level, the authorities also corrupted the UYD president, Joseph Luzige (and later co-opted him to work in President Museveni’s office), who was caught by his colleagues and dismissed. 27. Komakech, interview (Kampala, 19 May 1999). 28. The intervention of the security forces to disperse specific seminars—notably between June and July 1998 in the towns of Tororo, Mbarara, Kamuli, and Masaka— is documented, for example, in Human Rights Watch (1999, pp. 4, 76ff.). 29. It should be pointed out that, within the space of a few months in 2000, the DP had lost two of its most skilled organizers, namely Maria Mutagamba, who defected to the Movement and was duly appointed to a cabinet position, and Anthony Ssekweyama, who died in one of Uganda’s all too frequent road accidents. 30. Issa Kikungwe, MP for the Democratic Party, interview (Kampala, 9 October 2006). On the factional divide, see, for example, The Monitor, 20 July, 5 September, 25 November 2000; 11 and 25 January 2001; and 16 October 2004. See also New Vision, 2 August and 14 December 2000; and 16–17 October 2004. 31. Patrick Musisi, MP for the Democratic Party, in Weekly Observers, 14 October 2004, p. 26. 32. The Monitor, 19 December 2005. 33. Ssebaggala was persuaded to quit the presidential race and support the party’s official nominee when he was promised the DP ticket for the upcoming Kampala mayoral election. He went on to win the election as an independent after the promise turned false. 34. Kikungwe, interview (Kampala, 9 October 2006). 35. Patrick Rubaihayo, member of the UPC Presidential Policy Commission, interview (Kampala, 12 June 1999). 36. Uganda People’s Congress, The Uganda Peoples Congress Position on the Political Organisations Bill 1998, UPC, Kampala, February 1999. 37. James Rwanyarare, chair of the UPC Presidential Policy Commission, interview (Kampala, 5 May 1999). 38. The Monitor, 29 May 1995, p. 1. 39. At the time, Ben Wacha and Patrick Mwondha were leading members of Ogwal’s faction, while Sam Odaka, James Rwanyarare, Badru Wegulo, and Patrick Rubaihayo belonged to Obote’s. The following reveals the aging character of the UPC’s leadership: “The vice-chairman [of the PPC] shall be elected from among the Youth in the PPC. For this purpose only, Youth is someone under 45 years” (A. Milton Obote, Message to the Presidential Policy Commission, Lusaka, 9 June 2000, p. 13, emphasis added). Badru Wegulo pointed out that “the Young Congress is not within our constitution. It’s a creation of Ogwal. She was trying to copy the Uganda Young Democrats. We do have a youth wing in the constitution, but it cannot operate. Exactly as the branches cannot operate. . . . There is no activity organized by the youth. And, you know, the youth are difficult to manage. In Soronko, in Mbale district, for example, they recently stoned the Movement bus. Those were UPC youth, but they were not organized, they just did it out of their heads. Oh no, we were not happy. That’s not our policy. They were acting like babies. But the problem is that they don’t have jobs, or they see that things around them, the administration, is not working.” Wegulo, interview (Kampala, 22 June 2000).

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40. Abna Natifu, former UPC chair of the IPFC for Mukono, interview (Mukono, 24 June 1999). 41. James Akena, MP for the UPC, interview (Kampala, 11 October 2006). 42. Patrick Mwondha, secretary of the UPC Interim Executive Council (Ogwal faction), interview (Kampala, 22 June 1999). 43. See, for instance, The Monitor, 1 February 1994 and 23 January 1995. 44. A. Milton Obote, Message to the Presidential Policy Commission, Lusaka, 9 June 2000, pp. 6–7. 45. Mwondha, interview (Kampala, 22 June 1999). 46. Rubaihayo, interview (Kampala, 12 June 1999). 47. Mwondha, interview (Kampala, 22 June 1999). 48. Wacha, interview (Kampala, 9 June 1999). 49. Sam Odaka, member of the UPC Presidential Policy Commission, interview (Kampala, 2 June 1999). 50. “Any tendency to create a cabal or to undermine any member [of the PPC] shall be a cause for termination of appointment. . . . Your tenure is at the pleasure of the Party President but shall not be less than three years” (A. Milton Obote, Message to the Presidential Policy Commission, Lusaka, 9 June 2000, p. 13, emphasis added). 51. See, for example, New Vision, 30 January, 5 March, and 5 November 1993; The Monitor, 11 May 1993. Although no other party leader mentioned anything similar, Ogwal claimed that national party representatives also toured the country between October 1998 and March 1999. Ogwal provided details of ten different occasions on which she was detained without charges during the period 1991–1993. Human Rights Watch (1999, p. 37). 52. Wacha, interview (Kampala, 9 June 1999). Cf. Weekly Topic, 28 May and 13 August 1993. 53. New Vision, 12 June 2000; Badru Wegulo, UPC national chair and chairman of the Party Representatives Council, interview (Kampala, 22 June 2000). 54. Frederick Wako, UPC branch chair for Mukono district, interview (Mukono, 24 June 1999); Darlington Sakwa, Uganda House UPC representative in Mbale and, since May 2000, member of the UPC Presidential Policy Commission, interview (Kampala, 10 July 1999); Isabirye Fremont, youth representative in Mukono for Uganda House UPC, interview (Kampala, 17 July 1999). 55. Edward Ochwo, Uganda House UPC chief administrative secretary, interview (Kampala, 3 May 1999). 56. Mustafa Masaba, representative of Uganda House UPC in Mukono and, since May 2000, member of the UPC Presidential Policy Commission, interview (Kampala, 28 June 1999); Peter Labara Oola, chair of Obote-UPC for Gulu district, interview (Kampala, 23 June 1999); James Otto, vice-chair of Obote-UPC for Gulu district, interview (Gulu, 7 July 1999). 57. Ogwal, interview (Kampala, 7 June 1999); Wacha, interview (Kampala, 9 June 1999); UPC interim chair for Mbarara district (who requested anonymity), interview (Mbarara, 14 July 1999). UPC primary elections were reported, for instance, in The Monitor, Kampala, 13 July 1993 and 19 June 1996. 58. Mwondha, interview (Kampala, 22 June 1999). 59. Wegulo, interview (Kampala, 22 June 2000). 60. Rwanyarare, interview (Kampala, 5 May 1999). 61. Odaka, interview (Kampala, 2 June 1999); Rubaihayo, interview (Kampala, 12 June 1999). The Party Representatives Council was supposed to meet twice a year. 62. Hajo Lanz, head of Friedrich Ebert Foundation, interview (Kampala, 17 May 1999).

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63. Masaba, interview (Kampala, 28 June 1999). 64. Rubaihayo, interview (Kampala, 12 June 1999). 65. Anakur (2005). The creation of the CSC gave rise to a wrangle within what had long been the inner circle of Obote’s closest allies. Left out of the new body for allegedly being an “out of touch” leader who lacked mobilization capacities, the leader of the PPC, James Rwanyarare, challenged the legality of the president’s decision to dismiss the whole PPC and to create the steering committee, on the grounds that the latter committee was not envisaged by the party statute. Backed by Ogwal, he called for an immediate restoration of the party’s original organs. A court ruling was pending on the dispute, but the case was dropped in the wake of Obote’s death. 66. Akena, interview (Kampala, 11 October 2006). Cf. The Monitor, 15 February 2007.

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Chapter 7: The Electoral Politics of No-Partyism

1. The 214 constituencies were also used to elect delegates to the Constituent Assembly in 1994; see Chapter 2. In addition to directly elected MPs, the 282-strong sixth legislature (1996–2001) comprised forty-five women representatives (one per district, indirectly elected by an electoral college made up of selected members of the district’s local government bodies), ten representatives of the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces, five youth representatives, five representatives of the disabled, and three workers’ representatives. For the seventh legislature (2001–2006), the number of district women and workers’ representatives rose to fifty-six and five respectively, thus increasing the total number of MPs from 282 to 295. (Actually, the new parliament initially counted only 292 MPs, as the election of three women in the new districts of Kanungu, Kaberamaido, and Nakapiripirit was postponed to a later stage.) As pointed out, the membership of the House also included Uganda’s ministers as ex officio members without a right to vote. 2. New Vision, 13 June 2001. 3. The Monitor, 10 June 2001. 4. Matia Kasaija, deputy director for mass mobilization at the Movement secretariat, interview (Kampala, 28 May 1999). 5. Ibid. 6. James Wapakhabulo, national political commissar, article in New Vision, 25 June 1999. 7. Wapakhabulo, interview (Kampala, 19 July 1999). 8. Paul Ssemogerere, president of the DP, interview (Kampala, 12 July 1999). 9. Ssemogerere, interview (Kampala, 12 July 1999); with regard to the 2001 election, the same point was made by Zachary Olum, MP and member of the DP, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004). 10. James Otto, UPC vice-chair for Gulu district, interview (Gulu, 7 July 1999). 11. Patrick Musisi, MP and member of the DP, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004). In 2001, the Reform Agenda, the “pressure group” set up by Kizza Besigye for the purposes of his presidential bid, only acted as a task force for the presidential election, with no attempt to field candidates for parliament; Reagan Okumu, MP and member of Reform Agenda/FDC, interview (Kampala, 19 October 2004). 12. Musisi, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004); Omodi Okot, MP, interview (Kampala, 12 July 1999).

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13. John Livingstone Okello-Okello, MP, interview (Kampala, 11 June 1999). 14. Dick Nyai, MP, interview (Kampala, 14 June 1999). 15. Kaggwa, MP, interview (Kampala, 14 May 1999). The comment was made with regard to the Constituent Assembly election. 16. Johnson Nkuuhe, MP, interview (Kampala, 28 April 1999). Cf. Kasfir (1994, p. 165) with regard to the Constituent Assembly election. 17. The Monitor and New Vision, 19 June 2001. 18. Wandera Ogalo, MP, interview (Kampala, June 14, 1999). Similar remarks by Nkuuhe, interview (Kampala, 28 April 1999). 19. New Vision, 26 and 27 June 2001. 20. New Vision, 11 June 2001. 21. Cf. New Vision, 27 June 2001. 22. Mutagamba, interview (Kampala, 4 June 1999). 23. Issa Kikungwe, MP and member of the DP, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004); Musisi, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004). 24. Olum, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004); Stephen Mallinga, MP and member of the UPC, interview (Kampala, 21 October 2004). 25. Nkuuhe, interview (Kampala, 28 April 1999). 26. Falling outside the normal range of around 30,000–60,000 registered voters, some of Uganda’s constituencies comprised only around 10,000 or fewer voters, while a few other constituencies came close to, or even surpassed, 100,000 voters, notably in Kampala. See Interim Electoral Commission (1996, p. 79) and Electoral Commission (2001a, Appendix 9B). 27. Nsubuga Mayanja, MP, interview (Kampala, 31 May 1999). 28. Kaggwa, interview (Kampala, 14 May 1999). 29. Benedict Mutyaba, MP, interview (Kampala, 26 May 1999). 30. New Vision, 1 July 2001. 31. Mallinga, interview (Kampala, 21 October 2004); Musisi, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004); Olum, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004). Cf. Economist Intelligence Unit, quoted by Integrated Regional Information Network, 28 July 2001. 32. The distinction between these three aspects of a political party is drawn by Key (1964, p.19); see Chapter 1, this book.

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Chapter 8: The Parliamentary Politics of No-Partyism

1. Article 91, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (1995). Museveni repeatedly used his veto power to block bills passed by parliament, asking the latter to reconsider them. In 2001, for example, he refused to sign the Parliamentary Elections Bill, claiming that the proposed nomination fee—raised from 200,000 Ugandan shillings in 1996 to 2 million shillings (US$1,200)—would benefit sitting MPs, and he also asked for the restoration of electoral colleges for the election of district women MPs and other minor changes. The Movement caucus agreed to the president’s proposals (The Monitor, 19 February and 22 March 2001). Shortly afterwards, Museveni returned an approved version of the Political Organisations Bill to the House; while still prohibiting parties from sponsoring candidates (and even from holding seminars or meetings below the district level), this new version allowed them to open district-level branches. The president asked that party activities remain confined to the “national headquarters,” “in line with

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the decision of the National Executive Committee and the National Conference of the Movement. . . . Political organisations . . . should not be allowed to operate at district level and below” (New Vision, 19 April 2001). 2. Presidentialism has been identified as an important variable in explaining the breakdown of several democratic regimes, especially in the case of Latin American countries, due to the conflicts and deadlock that can develop between separate legislative and executive majorities, to the temporal rigidity of their mandates, to the somewhat exclusive nature of a monocratic executive, and to the potential abuses of power by such an executive. See, for instance, Linz (1990, 1994), Lijphart (1992), Mainwaring (1993), and Sartori (1995, pp. 185–186). Horowitz (1991, p. 205ff.) and Shugart and Carey (1992), however, argue that it is not presidentialism per se, but rather certain specific features thereof—such as presidential elections based on the plurality system, party system fragmentation, a weak degree of separation between the legislature and the executive, or excessively strong executive powers—that may cause the collapse of certain presidential regimes. 3. Despite the electoral success of Moise Tshombe’s Conaco, which won 122 out of 167 seats in the legislative elections of 1965, President Joseph Kasavubu picked his prime minister from the opposition party Front Démocratique Congolais, and as a result the government failed to gather the parliamentary support it required. On CongoKinshasa, see Vanderlinden (1995, p. 989). In Niger, the former single party MNSD led the opposition front that won a majority in the 1995 parliamentary election; a power struggle with the presidency ensued, which was ended by a coup in 1996 (Sandbrook 1996, p. 78; Bratton and van de Walle 1997, p. 244). 4. New Vision, 28 October 2005, p. 12. 5. The Monitor, 4 November 1999 (emphasis added). To remarks made by the president at a World Bank conference, some MPs replied by inviting Museveni to stop using parliament as a scapegoat for Uganda’s alleged economic decline and to “wake up” to the realities of democracy. Later that same month, the president restated his position saying that if Uganda had been Britain, he would have dissolved parliament and called new elections over the privatization issues that were on the table, for “it is not acceptable to go on paralysing the country” (The Monitor, 24 November 1999). 6. This paragraph is largely based on Kayunga (2001, p. 159ff.), who provides the figure of twenty-two members of the NRC in 1986 and ninety-eight members since 1987. Mwenda and Tangri (2005, p. 459) talk of thirty-eight members in the original NRC and of eighty in 1988, while other sources use different figures. See Chapter 3. 7. Senior Movement politician who requested anonymity, interview (Kampala, 11 October 2004). 8. Cf. James Wapakhabulo in New Vision, 10 May 1999, p. 29. According to McAuslan (1998a, p. 19), “While there is a movement caucus in Parliament consisting of backbench MPs, there is no party discipline and MPs cannot be whipped into the Government lobby. . . . It is an ironic commentary on the notion of democracy that the Ugandan system is regarded by donors as not fully democratic because political parties cannot contest seats in Parliament yet, as a result, the Executive has far less control over the Legislature than in most Western European states.” 9. Dick Nyai, MP, interview (Kampala, 14 June 1999). 10. John Livingstone Okello-Okello, MP, interview (Kampala, 11 June 1999). 11. See The Monitor, 25 June 1997, 4 March 1998, 18 April 1999, and 2 June 1999; New Vision, 5 March 1999; ABN-BIA Supplement no. 367, 1 May 1999; IRIN, 6 April 1999. 12. While the quote is from an article by the national political commissar, James Wapakhabulo (New Vision, 28 May 1999, p. 15), he only makes this point in order to

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summarize a view commonly held by the opposition, and to argue against this view in the rest of his article. 13. The Monitor, 24 November 1999. 14. See, for example, The Monitor (15 July 1994) and New Vision (17 July 1994 and 11 April 1995). The highest estimates of the number of multipartyists among the delegates elected to the Constituent Assembly put the figure at 100, against a 114 proNRM majority (Weekly Topic, Kampala, 15 July 1994). In addition to a majority of elected members, however, the NRM also enjoyed the support of most of the seventytwo special representatives, and that of some multipartyists who crossed the floor. Charles Onyango-Obbo, a renown observer of Ugandan politics, estimates that roughly eighty elected delegates were multipartyists, with 130 (plus special representatives) supporting the NRM (The Monitor, 27 March 1996, p. 8). Kayunga (2001, p. 191) refers to an apparently official list of NDC members and fixes the figure at sixty-three as of 20 October 1994. 15. John Nasasira, MP, in New Vision, 20 March 2005, p. 20. The same point was made by Grace Akello, MP, interview (Kampala, 9 June 1999). 16. Despite the fact that the Buganda parliamentary association included nonBaganda MPs from the region (Sam Kuteesa and Israel Kayonde, for instance, are both Banyankole), the members’ focus was in fact on questions relating to ethnicity. This ran counter to the Movement’s beliefs concerning political groupings, as expressed, for example, in the constitutional provisions stating that, in the case of a shift to multiparty politics, “membership of a political party shall not be based on sex, ethnicity, religion, or other sectional divisions” (Article 71, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995). 17. New Vision, 2 September 1994; The Monitor, 10 July 1999. 18. Elly Karuhanga, MP, interview (Kampala, 8 June 1999); Sam Lyomoki, MP, interview (Kampala, 8 June 1999). 19. Most of South Africa’s antidefection clauses were in place only between 1994–1999 and were subsequently dropped with the full implementation of the country’s “final” constitution. As Uganda shifted toward a multiparty system, similar “antidefection” provisions came into effect in order to avoid the kind of defection of opposition MPs to the ruling group that had occurred so often in the past. See Article 83(1)(g)/(h) and (2), Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995. 20. In assessing the presence of voting discipline in the House, the fact that a roll call analysis could not be carried out should be considered an important limitation of the inquiry in question. An analysis of the votes cast by each MP on specific issues could not be conducted for three different reasons: a precise map of the caucus affiliations of Uganda’s MPs was never available; the average MP was affiliated with several different caucuses; and roll call records were not available. The outcome of most parliamentary votes was assessed by the speaker without any precise count being performed, let alone a record being made of how each MP voted: “When the question has been put by the Speaker . . . the votes shall be taken by voices of ‘Ayes’ and ‘No’ and the result shall be declared by the Speaker.” A division may be ordered either by the speaker “in his or her discretion,” or if, after a result is declared, forty or more members “stand in their places signifying their disapproval.” In either case, “the Speaker . . . shall direct the ‘Ayes’ into the lobby on his or her right and the ‘Noes’ into the lobby on his or her left and appoint two tellers for each lobby to count the votes,” but only the names of members who abstain would be recorded. Secret voting was adopted for constitutional amendments, for the election or removal of individuals holding constitutional offices, and for any other matter “if the House so decides” (Articles 73, 76–77, Rules of Procedure of the Parliament of Uganda). In view of a vote on the removal of

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the presidential term limit, the rules of procedures were crucially amended in 2005 to extend open roll call voting to all issues, thus putting at risk the autonomy of MPs on those issues where such autonomy was previously protected by secret voting (Kasfir and Twebaze, forthcoming, 25). 21. Gilbert Bukenya, MP, chair of the Movement’s parliamentary caucus, interview (Kampala, 2 July 1999). 22. Karuhanga, interview (Kampala, 8 June 1999). 23. Ibid. 24. As has been pointed out, in addition to the MPs that were directly elected through single-member constituencies, every district also chose a women’s representative (MP) through an electoral college made up of selected members of the district’s local governing bodies. 25. Arthur Bagunywa, MP, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 26. New Vision, 4 November 1999. 27. Bukenya, interview (Kampala, 2 July 1999). 28. Ibid. 29. Mondo Kagonyera, MP and minister of state at the Office of the Prime Minister, interview (Kampala, 9 June 1999). 30. Hellen Amongin Aporu, MP, interview (Kampala, 28 June 1999). 31. Bagunywa, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 32. Peter Logiro Ngorok, MP, interview (Kampala, 30 June 1999). 33. Ibid. 34. Norbert Mao, MP, interview (Kampala, 7 June 1999). 35. Lyomoky, interview (Kampala, 8 June 1999). 36. Logiro Ngorok, interview (Kampala, 30 June 1999). 37. Kagonyera, interview (Kampala, 9 June 1999). 38. New Vision, 10 June 2000, p. 25. 39. Bukenya, interview (Kampala, 2 July 1999). 40. Logiro Ngorok, interview (Kampala, 30 June 1999). 41. Ibid.; Amongin Aporu, interview (Kampala, 28 June 1999). 42. New Vision, 21 June 2000, p. 1. 43. The Monitor, 8 November 2004; Africa Confidential, 15 April 2005, p. 3; Sunday Vision, 31 October 2004. Cf. The Legal and Institutional Context of the 2006 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Uganda. Parliamentary/Executive Relations, February/March 2005, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen; available at www.cmi.no, 2005, p. 13. 44. Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda, minister in charge of the presidency, in New Vision, 25 February 1999. 45. Logiro Ngorok, interview (Kampala, 30 June 1999). 46. The Monitor, 9 September 1994, p. 1. 47. Kinobe, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 48. Logiro Ngorok, interview (Kampala, 30 June 1999). The idea that party-based parliamentary majorities may be no more than “conditional coalitions” (i.e., they reflect existing agreements among elected delegates, rather than being able to impose party leadership decisions upon them) has been used to describe the inner politics of the US House of Representatives. See Cox and McCubbins (1993, p. 5). 49. Juliet Rainer Kafire, MP, interview (Kampala, 15 June 1999). 50. In 1998, Francis Ayume became the new speaker of the House, with 152 votes. Multipartyist Ben Wacha obtained ninety-four votes, most of which must have come from the Movement side. The importance of the speaker was evident, for example, when Ayume had the 1999 Referendum Bill passed without a quorum. It is unlikely that

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this would have happened had Wacha been elected: as one MP put it, Wacha had “been seconded by ourselves, not by any power. His allegiance is clearly to this House and not to somebody else” (New Vision, 29 July 1998). 51. Wambuzi, interview (Kampala, 8 June 1999). 52. The story of the caucus positions on Besigye’s case can be found in The Monitor, 10 December 1999. The paper that kicked off the controversy was Kizza Besigye, “An Insider’s View of How the NRM Lost the ‘Broad Base,’” New Vision, 7–8 November 1999. A member of the caucus made this comment on Gilbert Bukenya’s style of chairmanship: “I left the movement and caucus after two and a half years after Gilbert Bukenya became its chief mobilizer and began bulldozing members of the Movement caucus” (Winnie Babihuga, MP, in Ngalombi 2004, p. 77). 53. The Monitor, 10 December 1999. 54. The following MPs explicitly subscribed to the need for a multiparty reform: UPC members Daniel Omara Atubo (Lira), Aggrey Awori (Busia), Okulo Epak (Apac), Dick Nyai (Lira), Cecilia Ogwal (Lira), B’Leo Ojok (Lira), Livingston Okello-Okello (Kitgum), Omodi Okot (Apac), and Ben Wacha (Apac); DP members Juliet Rainer Kafire (Pallisa), Wasswa Lule (Kampala), Norbert Mao (Gulu), Reagan Okumu (Gulu), and Zachary Olum (Gulu); and CP members John Ken Lukyamuzi (Kampala) and Yusuf Nsubuga Nsambu (Kampala). See Ngalombi (2004, p. 65ff.). 55. Nsubuga Mayanja, MP, interview (Kampala, 31 May 1999). 56. Mao, interview (Kampala, 7 June 1999); Nyai, interview (Kampala, 14 June 1999). 57. Amongin Aporu, interview (Kampala, 28 June 1999). 58. Nyai, interview (Kampala, 14 June 1999). 59. Juliet Rainer Kafire, MP, interview (Kampala, 15 June 1999). 60. Patrick Musisi, MP and member of the DP, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004); Zachary Olum, MP and member of the DP, interview (Kampala, 18 October 2004). 61. Med Sozi Kaggwa, MP, interview (Kampala, 14 May 1999). 62. Salamu Musumba, MP, interview (Kampala, 16 June 1999). 63. Onyango Kakoba, MP, interview (Kampala, 16 July 1999). 64. Lieutenant James Kinobe, MP and secretary of the Movement parliamentary caucus, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 65. Kakoba, interview (Kampala, 16 July 1999). 66. As Strøm (2000, p. 181) observes with regard to political parties, “it is not sufficient that parties perform some political function if the benefits of this function are not worth the costs to those who sustain the party.” 67. George Wambuzi, MP, interview (Kampala, 8 June 1999). 68. Kinobe, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 69. Mayanja, MP, interview (Kampala, 31 May 1999). 70. Kakoba, interview (Kampala, 16 July 1999). 71. Nyai, interview (Kampala, 14 June 1999). 72. Kinobe, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 73. Kakoba, interview (Kampala, 16 July 1999). 74. Ibid. 75. Adolf Mwesigye, MP, interview (Kampala, 17 June 1999). 76. Kakoba, interview (Kampala, 16 July 1999). 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. Cf. Kayunga (2001, p. 197). YPA, for example, backed the candidature of Gilbert Bukenya to the chairmanship of the Movement caucus to counter the influence of the historicals (Kayunga 2001, p. 204).

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79. Ben Wacha, MP, interview (Kampala, 9 June 1999); Kakoba, interview (Kampala, 16 July 1999). 80. Mao, interview (Kampala, 7 June 1999). 81. Wandera Ogalo, MP and chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, interview (Kampala, 14 June 1999). 82. Okello-Okello, interview (Kampala, 11 June 1999). 83. The Monitor, 19 May 1999, p. 9. 84. Bagunywa, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 85. Ogalo, interview (Kampala, 14 June 1999). 86. Okello-Okello, interview (Kampala, 11 June 1999). 87. Ibid.; Kaggwa, interview (Kampala, 14 May 1999); Bagunywa, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 88. Omodi Okot, MP, interview (Kampala, 12 July 1999). 89. Lyomoki, interview (Kampala, 8 June 1999). 90. Kinobe, interview (Kampala, 3 June 1999). 91. Augustine Ruzindana, MP, interview (Kampala, 28 April 1999). Given the comparative weakness of information networks—due partly to the absence of party structures—individual MPs found it useful to rely on the expertise of the specialized parliamentary committees. The lack of a whip system implied that officially the Movement had little say in the assignment of committee membership and chairs: committees were elected by parliament from among those members who submitted their names, and no minister could be a member (Robert Law, legal consultant at the Office of the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, personal communication, 29 May 2001). Committees thus enjoyed quite a good reputation not only for their careful examination of the issues tabled in parliament, but also for their relative independence from external interference. Their reports and recommendations were often a good indicator of the views of parliament as a whole, and they also significantly shaped the way MPs voted. Since committees had to mediate between the various positions, however, they presented what were in theory “technical” analyses—to the extent that the term can be used with reference to the parliamentary process. While a committee’s work may have had important political implications, its role was not that of providing an alternative way of forming voting blocs. 92. Golombiewski, quoted in Bowler, Farrell, and Katz (1999, p. 13). 93. New Vision, 17 May 1998; see also New Vision, 30 May 1998. This was made possible by the fact that, against the separation of executive and legislative authorities of an archetype presidential system, the Ugandan president can and does pick his ministers from among MPs. 94. Ogalo, interview (Kampala, 14 June 1999). 95. Benedict Mutyaba, MP, interview (Kampala, 26 May 1999). 96. Kakoba, interview (Kampala, 16 July 1999); Omodi Okot, interview (Kampala, 12 July 1999).

■

Chapter 9: The Demise of a Democratic Model

1. All tertiary sector organizations were required to apply to the National Board for NGOs for registration. The board was used to control nongovernmental organizations, for example, by delaying or suspending registration or by interfering with details of NGO activities. This, in turn, was used by the authorities as an excuse to curtail workshops or similar activities. As an NGO activist put it, “They often remind us of

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our registration, which requires us to be nonpolitical, nonpartisan, noneverything” (Human Rights Watch 1999, pp. 104, 105). On 27 May 1999, for example, the police stopped the NGO Forum at the International Conference Centre in Kampala, as they claimed it was operating illegally. Despite the fact that the forum had presented its papers to the NGO board two years before and had subsequently paid its registration fees, the registration procedures had still not been completed (New Vision, 10 December 1999). This kind of control further weakened the political impact of NGOs (cf. Dicklitch 1998). For details of the control of press freedom, see Chapter 4. 2. New Vision, 10, 13, and 26 May 2002; East African, 13 May 2002; Africa Confidential, 12 September 2003, p. 7. 3. New Vision, 1 July 2001. 4. Joe Oloka-Onyango, in The Monitor, 18 May 2003, pp. 26–27. 5. Colonel Kahinda Otafiire, MP for Ruhinda, quoted in New Vision, 30 June 2001. 6. The only exception was Museveni’s maverick senior political adviser, Major Kakooza Mutale, who campaigned for the Movement. See Kiiza et al. (2005, p. 10). 7. Augustine Ruzindana, MP, interview (Kampala, 6 October 2004). See Kiiza et al. (2005, p. 7). There was a significant overlap between two of these three groups, as the majority of the thirteen MPs associated with the Reform Agenda were also members of PAFO (Regan Okumu, interview, Kampala, 19 October 2004). 8. Mugisha Muntu, MP for East Africa and former army commander, interview (Kampala, 17 October 2006). 9. Muntu, interview (Kampala, 21 November 2004). 10. The Monitor, 29 January 2006. 11. Morris Ogenga Latigo, MP and leader of the opposition, interview (Kampala, 11 October 2006); Kassiano Wadri, MP, interview (Kampala, 11 October 2006). 12. The Monitor, 8 February 2006. 13. Besides the weakness of traditional party loyalties, religion also appeared to play a minimal role in the elections. Cf. Gloppen et al. (2006, p. 8). 14. No figures for the total parliamentary votes of political parties are available. 15. BBC, 6 April 2006. 16. Africa Confidential, 3 February 2006, p. 3. Similarly, in 2001, Museveni had remarked: “I’m not ready to hand over power to people or groups of people who have no ability to manage a nation. . . . Why should I sentence Ugandans to suicide by handing over power to people we fought and defeated? It’s dangerous despite the fact that the constitution allows them to run against me. . . . At times the constitution may not be the best tool to direct us politically for it allows wrong and doubtful people to contest for power” (quoted in Human Rights Watch 2001). 17. Mainwaring and Scully (1995, p. 21) talk of “hegemonic party systems in transition” for cases such as, at the time, Mexico and Paraguay, where it was difficult to establish the extent to which fully competitive party systems were being institutionalized or else where authoritarian hegemony remained the dominant feature. 18. Freedom House, Freedom in the World (www.freedomhouse.org).

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Abim, 210 (n10) Accountability, 22, 32, 62, 70, 89, 189 Acholi: people, 21, 71–75, 177; districts, 12, 33, 34, 143; Acholiland, 70; region, 71, 147–148; within the army, 18, 20, 71; parliamentary group, 164, 164 (table), 178, 182 Action for Development (ACFODE), 179 Administration and Urban Authorities Decree (1971), 18 Administration of Parliament Act (1997), 159 Advanced democracies, 60, 162, 200 Affirmative action, 179–180 Afghanistan, 3 African Development Bank, 60 Africanization, 13 African leaders, 17, 88 African National Congress (ANC), 165, 203 African parties, 93, 117, 121 African politics, 24, 30, 208 African state, 19, 30, 49, 51–52, 60, 81, 83, 218 African Union: commission, 194; peacekeepers, 61; Afro-Shirazi Party, 95 Agenda setting, 4, 162 Agricultural Enterprises, 53 Agricultural output, 56 Aid: Foreign 25, 50–51, 60–63 AIDS: HIV/AIDS, 57, 63, 69, 212 (n4) Allied Democratic Front (ADF), 212 (n25)

Allimadi, Otema, 127 Al-Qaida, 61 Alternation: in power 105 Ayume, Francis, 40, 226 (n50) Amin, Idi, 8, 18–22, 31, 33, 42, 54, 60, 78, 80, 90, 208 (n16), 211 (n25, n28), 219 (n3) Amnesty, 75; law, 98; bill, 178 Amolatar, 210 (n10) Amuria, 210 (n10) Anglican, 21 Angola, 61 Ankole: kingdom, 10, 178; districts 33–34; region, 46–47, 58, 76, 164; people, 92; 211 (n30). See Banyankole Antidefection clauses, 165, 225 (n19) Antiparty, 3, 26–27, 30, 78, 81, 91, 101, 117, 143, 187 Antipolitics, 77, 192 Argentina, 80 Armed Forces Decree, 18 Armed insurgency, 1, 9, 19–20, 25, 29, 31–32, 41–43, 46, 50, 58–59, 64, 71–72, 76, 78–80, 90, 93, 100, 111, 126, 136, 209 (n8) Army: Ugandan Army, 16–18; Uganda National Liberation Army 18–20, 25, 29, 31, 38, 43, 71; Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF), 44–47, 61, 69–70, 72, 74–75, 147, 222 (n1); army commanders, 18, 46, 69–70, 193, 211 (n30, n31), 214 (n19); demobilization, 44; dictatorship in Uganda, 17, 22, 41; decisionmaking,

243

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44, 46; Military Commission, 19; political role, 38, 44; procurement, 44; professionalization, 44; rebuilding the army, 40–47; recruitment, 74; relationship with the people, 79; representatives in parliament, 44, 178, 194; size of, 40; army coup, 18, 20–21, 41, 208 (n12); coup in Niger, 224 (n3); into the Congo, 46 Arua, 123, 131 Asians: expulsion of, 18; businesses, 10, 14, 68; properties, 18, 54, 80, 219 (n3) Atomisation: of politics, 138; of parliament, 27, 161, 266 Atubo, Daniel Omara, 113, 218 (n1), 227 (n54) Awori, Aggrey, 113, 134, 195 (table), 227 (n54) Ayume, Francis, 40, 226 (n50) Bahima, 20, 46 Bakkabulindi, Charles, 169 Bakonzo, 164 Bamba, 164 Ban, on activities of political parties: 6, 17–18, 23, 26, 62, 78, 99, 101, 105, 112, 117, 133, 142, 148–149, 187, 191, 208 (n17), 213 (n25) Banamawanga, 124 Banking sector 53 Bantu, 64 Banyankole, 20, 64–65, 71; within NRM leadership, 24, 65; within the army, 47, 64; within the FDC, 198; within Buganda parliamentary association, 225 (n16) Banyarwanda, 20, 47, 64 Banyoro, 15, 64 Baruli, 164 BBC, 79 Belarus, 69 Besigye, Kizza, 24, 47, 68, 83–84, 99, 124–125, 151, 170, 190, 193–196, 198, 222 (n11), 227 (n52) Bidandi-Ssali, Jaberi, 19, 68, 99, 191, 193 Bill: Political Organisations (1998), 39–40, 159, 170, 173, 184, 216 (n27), 223 (n1); Referendum (1999), 40, 160, 184, 226 (n50); Referendum

(2000), 168, 170; Movement Amendment (2003), 161; Constitutional Amendment (2005), 161, 192; Land, 170; Local Governments, 170; Amnesty, 178; Domestic Relations, 182; Sexual Offences, 182; Parliamentary Elections, 223 (n1) Binaisa, Godfrey, 18, 19, 208 Birimumaso, Mulindwa, 69, 216 Black mambas operation, 84, 214 Black market, 54 Boycott: of no-party elections, 40, 109, 111, 127; of 1996 parliamentary elections, 112, 114, 142–143, 148, 152; of 2000 referendum, 3; in Buganda (1958, 1961), 13, 15; against Asian businesses, 14 Botswana, 70 Britain, 12, 18, 60, 183, 193, 208 (n7), 224 (n5); prime minister, 60; Labour Party, 121; High Commission, 175; See Department for International Development British: political system, 9, 66, 208 (n7); colonial authorities, 9–11, 33, 41; Department for International Development (DFID), 181, 212 (n5); endorsement of Amin’s coup, 18; High Commissioner, 175; suspension of aid, 63 Broad-based government, 3, 36, 63, 91–92, 109, 111, 114–115 Budaka, 210 (n10) Budget: national, 44, 60, 63, 95, 103, 216 (n13); Budget Act (2001), 159; of the Movement, 101, 216 (n13), 217 (n36) Buganda: kingdom, 10–17; Buganda Agreement (1955), 12; region, 12, 16, 19, 21, 31, 38, 58, 65, 76, 171; elite, 12–13; crisis, 16, 126; districts, 34–35; and the Democratic Party, 124; parliamentary group, 164, 178–179, 183, 225 (n16); land board, 212 (n14); radio, 217 (n33). See Mengo Bugiri, 177, 209 (n10) Bugisu, 209 (n7) Bukedi, 209 (n7) Bukenya, Gilbert, 166, 169, 214 (n18), 227 (n52)

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Bulisa, 34, 210 (n10) Bunyoro, 10, 15–16, 33, 34, 58 Bureaucrats, 82, 157 Burkina Faso, 70, 83 Bukwa, 210 (n10) Burundi, 9 Bush, George W., 61 Bush war, 20, 25, 29, 31, 41, 43, 64, 78–80, 97 Bushenyi, 34, 178 Busia, 209 (n10), 227 (n54) Busiki, 210 (n10) Business, 68, 79, 86, 102, 135, 169, 179, 216 (n15) Busoga, 33, 65, 177, 199 Butaleja, 210 (n10) Bwengye, Francis 124, 195 (table) Byanyima, Winnie, 68, 99, 151, 159, 180, 194 Cabinet, 3, 65–66, 69, 84, 109, 156, 214 (n18), 220 (n29); meetings of, 97; reshuffles, 65, 160, 184; size, 66 Caetano, 218 (n51) Campaigns, electoral: 27, 37, 101, 118, 122, 139, 145, 146, , 147, 149, 152, 192, 209; campaign manager, 125, 149–150 Candidates: parliamentary, 125, 134, 137, 147, 22 (n11); presidential, 83, 128, 194, 196; independent, 139, 199, 218 (n51) Cargo terminal, 102 Castro, Fidel, 61 Catholic, 12, 14–16, 21, 114, 124 Catholic Action movement, 12 Cattle, 74, 164, 178 CBS, 217 (n33) Central government, 17, 33, 35, 38, 45 (table), 65, 209 (n5), 210 (n19), 212 (n14) Censure votes, 68–69, 159–160 Chad, 83 Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), 95 Charisma, 13, 46, 49, 71, 79, 81–82, 85, 87, 91, 185 Chavez, Hugo, 81 Chiefs, in Buganda, 12–13, 15 Chile, 214 (n11) Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 119 Churches, 120, 139, 149, 152

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Citizenship, 94 Civil defense militias, 72 Civil service, 13, 32, 52, 54, 98, 179; civil servants, 24, 100, 147 Civil society, 162, 213, 232; civil organizations, 24, 179, 215 (n1) Cleavages, sociocultural, 8, 15, 21–22 Clinton, Bill, 61 Coalition building, 4, 115 Code of conduct: of the NRA, 43; of Movement leaders, 168, 216 (n28) Coffee: production, 10; liberalization, 52–53, 58, 80; Coffee Marketing Board, 52 Cold War, 31 Collapse of the state, 31, 85, 87 Collective action, 138, 153, 165, 188 Commercial enterprise, 102 Commission of Inquiry on the Global Fund, 69 Commission of Inquiry into Local Government System, 216 (n9) Committee on Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, 39 Conoco, 224 (n3) Conditionalities: by World Bank, 51; by IMF, 211 (n1) Congo, Democratic Republic, 46, 61, 70, 75, 80, 86, 97, 156, 184, 211 (n26), 213 (n25), 224 (n3) Conservative Party (CP), 38, 109, 151, 171–172, 191, 196 (table), 197 (table), 199, 227 (n54). Consociationalism, 5, 207 (n4). See Power sharing Consolidated fund, 216 (n13) Conspiracy theories, 74, 86 Constituent Assembly (CA): 1, 24, 35, 36–39, 62, 93–94, 96, 101, 109–110, 112–114, 125, 127–128, 131–132, 142, 144, 146, 159, 163–165, 169, 171–172, 180–181, 209 (n17), 216 (n11), 222 (n1), 223 (n15), 223 (n16), 225 (n14) Constitution (1966),16, 40 Constitution, draft, 37–39, 210, 239 Constitutional Amendment Act, 35, 50, 66, 69, 77, 212 (n14), 218 (n38) Constitutional Amendment Bill, 161, 192 Constitutional Commission Statute, 210 (n15)

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Constitutional Commission, Uganda (Odoki Commission), 36, 38, 210 (n17) Constitutional Court, 40, 83–84, 191, 210 (n14), 214 (n12) Constitutional crisis, 40, 156, 168, 185 Constitutional reforms, 12, 37, 83, 169, 192 Constitutional review process, 85 Constitution making, 25, 30, 37, 94, 117, 121, 125, 135, 163, 180, 181 Consultative democracy, 37 Convention People’s Party (CPP), 14 Corruption, 25, 47, 50, 53, 62–63, 65, 68–70, 78, 158–160, 164, 174–177, 193, 201, 211 (n31) Côte d’Ivoire, 80 Council of state, 39 County, 32, 95–96, 100, 140, 210 (n16) Coup, 16–18, 20–21, 41, 47, 82, 101, 131, 180, 196, 208 (n12), 224 Courts, 26, 30, 83, 123, 179 CP. See Conservative Party Credit, 42, 47, 52, 54, 59, 78, 82, 104, 211 (n3) Crimes against humanity, 75 Cuba, 61 Cultural monarchy, 64 Customary land tenure, 58, 178 Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), 175, 181 Danze, 102 Dar es Salaam, 18, 95 Debt, 51, 56, 56 (table), 150; debt relief, 56; debt cancellation, 56 Decentralization: 31–33, 35, 38, 68, 80–81, 100, 209 (n5); decentralization policy, 65, 81; decentralization secretariat, 68; Decentralisation Statute (1993), 93 Decisionmaking: 82, 85 Defence Council, 18 Defence Forces Council, 46–47 Defense spending, 63 De Gaulle, Charles, 3 Degree of organization, 113 Deinstitutionalization of the state, 77 Democracy promotion, 59 Democratic culture, 37, 87

Democratic Party (DP): 21, 23–24, 26–27, 37, 110, 112, 114–125; origins, 12; in the Legislative Council, 13; in 1961 and 1962 elections, 16; in 1980 election, 19; publications, 79; local elections, 93; broad based government, 109; funding, 112; National Council, 116; National Executive, 116; delegates’ conference, 115–116, 123–124; headquarters, 114; Mobilisers Group, 115; internal democracy, 115; recruitment, 116; national delegates’ conference, 124; membership, 116; membership cards, 117, 121; national executive committee, 116, 168, 217; newsletter, 217 (n33); party statute, 115; credentials committee, 116; workshops, 119; seminars, 119; party funding, 121; factional divisions, 123–125; Foundation for African Development, 119–123; Uganda Young Democrats, 119–123; strategic plan 2006–2011, 125; rejuvenation, 113, 115, 121, 130. Denmark, 60, 193 Development fund, 175, 178 Departicipation strategies, 17 Department for International Development (DFID), 63, 181, 212 (n5) Developmental activities, 43, 174–175 Director of information, 103 Disabled, 181, 210 (n16), 216 (n15), 222 (n1) Dissolution of parliament, 156, 192, 214 (n11), 224 (n5) Districts: 10, 32–35, 38, 39, 44, 67, 83, 95–99, 103, 116–118, 120–121, 130–132, 134, 140, 147, 153, 164, 168, 179, 184, 209 (n4), 209 (n8), 210 (n16), 210 (n19), 212 (n17), 215 (n8), 216 (n15), 217 (n28), 217 (n30); creation of new, 33–35, 67–68, 134, 209–210, 212, 222; residual powers, 32; civic service, 32; fiscal powers, 209 (n5); interdistrict cooperation, 38, 210 (n13), 210 (n19); residual functions, 38 District Administrators (DAs), 44, 97

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District councillors, 95, 98, 103, 134 Development aid. See Aid Divestiture and Reform Implementation Committee, 53 Division lobby method, 169 Dokolo, 210 Domestic Relations Bill, 182 Dominant party, 106 Dominant party system, 106 Donations to political parties, 101–102, 121, 123, 132, 146 Donors, 25, 49–52, 57, 59–64, 66, 68–69, 76, 87, 101, 111, 189, 191, 193, 224 (n8) DP. See Democratic Party Drametu, Mariano, 124 Eastern Uganda, 147 Economic growth, 51, 54, 56, 59, 70, 211 (n3) Economic reconstruction, 51 Economic dependency, 60 Economic development, 42, 50–51, 59, 178 Economic exclusion, 49, 59 Economic recovery, 49, 51–52, 59–60, 79, 87 Economic Recovery Programme (ERP), 52 Economic reforms, 50–52, 57, 80, 87, 213 (n6) Economy: modernization of, 56; size of, 52 Education policies, 57 Educational qualifications for local councillors, 184 Ekemu, Joseph, 68–69 Elders, 139, 144, 146, 152 Elections: of 1980, 19, 157; of 1996, 57, 66, 127, 131, 144, 150, 151; of 2001, 108, 148–152, 171, 173, 191, 222 (n9); of 2006, 35, 65, 67, 103, 125, 135, 191, 199, 212 (n6), 219 (n1), 219 (n3) Election agents, 128, 149–151, 153, 172 Election campaigns, 92, 102, 107–108; costs, 150 Election observers, 19, 37, 62 Election violence, 148 Electoral Commission, 19, 138, 180, 193 Electoral democracy, 105

247

Electoral machine, 137, 139, 150, 152–153 Electoral system, 106, 153 Engola, Sam, 151 Epak, Okulo, 134, 194, 227 (n54) Eritrea, 61, 87 Ethiopia, 61, 87 Ethnic groups: ethnicity, 6–9, 12, 22, 33–34, 164 (table), 177–179, 225 (n16); ethnic politics, 3, 8, 22, 33; ethnically-based parties, 3, 5, 8, 23; ethnic conflict, 8; ethnically divided societies, 22; ethnic composition of governments, 65; ethnic favoritism, 63, 68; ethnic group, 6, 7, 17–18, 25, 34, 41, 65, 106, 178; ethnically based caucuses, 164, 177 European Union, 60 European parliament, 121 Exclusion, 3, 6–9, 21–22, 49, 59, 71–73, 137, 189, 199 Exile: kabaka, 12, 16; Ugandans in, 18; Besigye, 86, 194; Obote, 109, 125–130, 135, 159 Exports, 52–53 External debt, 51. See Debt Factions, 23, 111, 113, 123–130 Farmers, 10–12, 53–54, 58; Federation of Ugandan African Farmers, 11. See Peasants Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda (FEDEMO), 43 Federalism: federal arrangements, 10, 16, 33, 38, 64; federalist platform, 14; federal systems, 33; federo, 34, 64, 212, (n14); federalists, 179 Federation of East Africa, 12, 194 Federation of Ugandan African Farmers, 11 Federo, 34, 64, 212, (n14) Fifteen-Point Program, 97 Finance Minister, 53 Foreign aid, 25, 60, 62. See also Aid Foreign exchange: bureaus, 54; market, 211 (n1) Foreign policy, 85, 97 Foreign support, 31 Former Uganda National Army (FUMA), 43

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Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), 125, 135, 171, 173, 193–199 (also in tables) Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE), 181 Foundation for African Development (FAD), 115, 119–123, 132–133, 135, 219 (n14) Freedom: for MPs, 162, 182–183; of political association, 36, 40, 83; of assembly, 83; of choice, 161; of expression, 86; of information, 86, 229; political, 117, 127, 146, 189 Freedom House, 106, 200–201 Freehold land, 58 Frente de Libertaçao de Moçambique (FRELIMO), 20 Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), 119, 133, 175, 181, 219 (n16) Front Démocratique Congolais, 224 (n3) Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), 18, 78, 90 Front pour la Démocratie au Burundi (Frodebu), 9 Fundamental change, 20, 68, 81, 88, 192 Fujimori, Alberto, 80–81 Gabon, 70, 83 Garang, John, 75, 86 Genocide, 74–75 Germany, 60 Ghana, 3, 14, 51, 81, 207 (n2) Ghost soldiers, 54, 69 Ghost workers, 54 Gleneagles summit, 56 Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, 63, 69 Good Governance, 10, 62 Governance, 10, 27, 62, 78, 176, 211 (n3), 237, 240 Government: functions of central government, 209 (n5) Grassroots, 35–36, 50, 97, 99, 113, 117–118, 120, 129, 131, 134, 148, 179, 198 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 45 (table), 52, 54–57 (including tables), 60–61 (including tables) Gross National Income, 56 (including table)

Guerrilla, 19, 20, 25, 29, 31, 42, 50, 58–59, 64, 71–72, 75, 78–80, 90, 93, 100, 111, 126, 136, 157, 209 (n8) Guerrilla movements, 31, 59 Guerrilla takeover, 19, 31, 111 Guinea, 83 Gulu, 17, 19, 34, 70, 74, 118, 122–123, 131, 177–178, 216 (n27), 217 (n33), 227 (n54) Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), 56 Hegemonic party system, 27, 95, 104–106, 188, 199, 218 (n51), 218 (n52), 229 (n17) Hegemony, 9, 26, 90, 106–108, 155, 174, 189, 199, 229 (n17) Helicopter gunships, from Belarus, 69 Heritage Foundation, 102 Heritage Terminal (HT), 102 High Command, 46, 45, 69, 165 High Court, 84, 214 (n11) Historicals, 46–47, 96, 157, 174, 215 (n8), 227 (n78) HIV/AIDS. See AIDS Hoima, 19, 34 Holy Spirit Movement (HSM), 71–72, 111 House of Representatives, of the US, 226 (n48) Human Rights Commission, 208 (n17) Hutu, 9 Ibanda, 34, 178, 210 (n10) Iganga, 177 Illegal gold trafficking, 86 Illiberal attacks, 82 Inclusiveness, 8, 24, 91–92 India, 11, 208 (n5) Indian National Congress, 11 Individual merit, 3, 22–23, 27, 65, 89, 91, 104, 106–107, 128, 132, 137–141, 144–146, 153, 158, 160–166, 171, 182, 187–190 Individual rights, 40 Inflation, 51, 54–55 Inland port, 102 Insecurity, 71, 73, 212 (n3) Inspector General of Government (IGG), 68–69, 208 (n17)

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Institution building, 25, 30, 68, 85, 111 Institutional change, 30 Institutional constraints, 77, 87 Institutional development, 30, 77 Interdistrict cooperation, 38, 210 (n13), 210 (n19) Inter Political Forces Co-operation, 127–128, 142, 148, 171 Internally displaced persons (IDPs), 72 International Development Association, 56 International Criminal Court (ICC), 75 International financial institutions (IFIs), 50–51, 63 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 50–52, 56–57, 60, 63, 211 (n1) Investment Code, 54 Iraq, 61 Ireland, 63, 193 Islamic penetration, 60 Israelis, 18 Issue dimension, 4, 207 (n3) Japan, 60 Jinja, 59, 177 Journalists, 79, 86, 213 (n3), 215 (n27), 219 (n3) Judges, 83–85, 214 (n11) Kaabong, 210 (n10) Kabaka: 12, 16, 35, 38, 65, 179; kabaka crisis, 12; Kabaka Yekka, 14–16, 21 Kabaka crisis, 12 Kabakaship, 64 Kabaka Yekka (KY), 14–16, 21 Kabale, 34 Kaberamaido, 210 (n10), 222 (n1) Kabingo, 34, 178, 210 (n10) Kafire, Juliet Rainer, 227 (n54) Kafu river, 19 Kagera river, 18 Kagonyera, Mondo, 166 Kajijuka, Richard, 160 Kakoba, Onyango, 174, 176 Kakuyege, 107, 113, 117–118, 122–123, 125, 188, 219 (n10) Kakwa, 21, 164 Kalangala, 209 (n10) Kaliro, 177, 210 (n10)

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Kampala, 18–20, 24, 31, 35, 41, 46, 53, 58–60, 63, 71–72, 74–75, 78–80, 86, 95, 107, 111–122, 124, 127–128, 131–135, 141, 143, 148, 151, 198, 219 (n3), 220 (n33), 227 (n54), 229 (n1) Kamuli, 177, 220 (n28) Kamwenge, 210 (n10) Kanungu, 210 (n10), 222 (n1) Karamoja, 33, 164 Karimojong, 164 Kasavubu, Joseph, 224 (n3) Katakwi, 209 (n10) Kategaya, Eriya, 19, 68, 97, 102, 193–194 Kathmandu, 207 (n2) Katikiro, 12 Kayonde, Israel, 225 (n16) Kazibwe, Speciosa, 160, 180 Kazini, James, 46–47, 69–70, 74, 211 (n31) Kazoora, John, 176 Kenya, 56, 62 Khartoum, 75 Kibaale (also Kibale), 33, 209 (n10) Kibanda, 54 Kiboga, 209 (n10) Kigezi, 33, 209 (n7) Kiggundu, Patrick, 174 Kiggundu, Suleiman, 193 Kigongo, Moses, 96, 103–104 Kikosi maalum, 18 Kilak, 71, 177, 210 (n10) King’s African Rifles, 41 Kinshasa, 224 (n3) Kiruhura, 34, 178, 210 (n10) Kisanja, 30, 82–83, 192 Kisekka, Simon, 35 Kisoro, 209 (n10) Kitariko, Robert, 109 Kitgum, 34, 61, 144, 177, 178, 227 (n54) Kivejinja, Kirunda, 159 Kiwanuka, Benedicto, 13, 15, 124 Kiyonga, Cryspus, 103 Kizito, Ssebaana John, 24, 124–125, 195–196 (table), 198 Koboko, 210 (n10) Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS), 119, 121, 123 Kony, Joseph, 72, 75, 111

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Kuteesa, Sam, 159, 225 (n16) Kyadondo Road, 104 Kyankwanzi political school, 100, 191, 217 (n30) Kyenjojo, 210 (n10) Lakwena, Alice Auma, 71, 111 Land: Land Act, 65, 182, 212 (n3); Land Bill, 170; customary tenure, 58, 178; landlords, 80; question, 33, 80; redistribution, 58; reform, 58, 80, 178, 182, 192, 212 (n3), 217 (n33); rights, 80; tenure security, 58 Langi, 8, 18, 20–21, 128 Lango, 12, 33, 71, 143 Latin America, 208 (n5), 214 (n11), 224 (n2) Leadership Code, 168 Leasehold, 58 Latek, Odong, 71 Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee, 84, 159 Legal Notice No. 1/1986, 36, 78, 208 (n17) Legislation, 26, 39–40, 89, 92–93, 97, 130, 156–161, 165, 209 (n17, n5), 210 (n14) Legislative Council (LegCo), 10, 13 Legitimacy, 4, 8–9, 20, 22–23, 31, 37, 47, 49, 56, 62, 72, 74, 81, 84, 88–89, 96, 106, 110–111, 116, 134, 136, 155–156, 158, 190 Liberal discourse, 87 Liberalization: of trade, 51–52; of foreign exchange, 54, 211 (n1) Liberated areas, 32, 41 Libya, 50, 61 Lira, 128, 131–132, 151, 215 (n11), 227 (n54) Lobbying, 6, 115, 162, 164, 183 Local authorities, 20, 107–108, 118, 146, 148, 168, 189, 209 (n5) Local branches, 3, 22, 104, 110, 117, 131–132, 135, 148, 153, 191 Local councillors, 99–100, 144–147, 184 Local Defence Units (LDUs), 43, 147 Local governments, 17, 32, 67, 93, 179, 216 (n15) Local Governments Act (1997), 32, 93 Local Governments Bill, 170

Local Governments (Resistance Councils) Statute (1993), 32 London, 15, 60, 133 London Constitutional Conference, 15 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA): 72–75, 87, 111, 178; military assistance to, 75; political agenda, 73 Lost amendment, 181 Lost counties, 15–16 Lubega, Damiano, 124 Luganda, 42, 118, 123, 210 (n17) Lukyamuzi, Ken, 151, 227 (n54) Lukiiko, 12–16, 35, 178, 208 (n9) Lule, Yusuf, 18 Luo, 8, 20–21 Luwero, 19–20, 31, 64, 71, 74, 122, 126 Mabikke, Michael, 151 Madi, 164 Makerere University, 100, 122 Malawi, 62, 80, 83 Malaysia, 106 Manafwa, 210 (n10) Mandela National Stadium, 103, 124 Mandela, Nelson, 215 (27) Mao, Robert, 124–125, 159, 166, 175, 216 (n27), 227 (n54) Maoist, people’s war, 90 Maracha-Terego, 210 (n10) Masaka, 34, 47, 220 (n28) Masindi, 34 Mass Mobilisation, directorate for, 100–101, 216 (n19), 216 (n20) Matembe, Miria, 180–181, 193 Mauritania, 70 Mayanja-Nkangi, Jehoash, 39, 109 Mayoral elections (Kampala), 24, 95, 107, 113–114, 122, 141, 220 (n33) Mayuge, 177, 210 (n10) Mayumba Kumi, 208 (n13) Mbabazi, Amama, 103–104 Mbale, 131, 140, 148, 220 (n39), 237 Mbarara, 34, 123, 131, 148, 151, 178, 220 (n28) Mchaka Mchaka, political education courses, 98–101, 189 Media, 24, 70, 79, 81, 84, 86, 122, 125, 175, 177, 189, 217 (n33) Menem, Carlos, 80 Mengo, 13, 15, 16, 212 (n14)

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Messenger, The, 119, 121 Mexico, 95, 106, 218 (n51), 229 (n17), 233 Microscope, 123 Military. See Army Milton Obote Foundation (MOF), 129, 132–134 Ministry of Defence, 19 Ministry of Justice, 109, 214 (n11) Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, 109 Mityana, 210 (n10) Mixed economy, 51 Mobilisers Group, 115 Model of democracy, 22, 89 Mogadishu, 61 Mogi, Pen, 178 Monetary and fiscal management, 54 Moroto, 164 Moshi Conference, 18 Movement. See National Resistance Movement (NRM) Movement system, 22, 39–40, 49, 83, 94, 128, 142, 181, 192, 207 (n1), 210 (n17). See No-party system Mozambique, liberation war, 20 Mpigi, 34 Muhwezi, Jim, 69, 159 Mukono, 131, 148 Mulira, Eridadi, 13–14 Multiparty politics, 5, 22, 27, 62, 73, 83, 166, 171, 173, 190, 192, 225 (n16) Multiparty reforms, in Africa, 24 Multiparty system, 39, 95, 106, 138, 191, 225 (n19), 236 Munnansi, 79, 121, 123 Muntu, Mugisha, 46, 47, 68, 194 Musazi, Ignatius, 11, 13–14 Museveni, Yoweri: and the Movement, 89–91, 96–97, 103–104, 146; and UPM, 19; bush war, 20, 26; control of the armed forces, 41, 46–47; corruption, 70, 74; economic reforms, 50–51; elections, 24, 114, 147, 151, 169, 171, 184, 195–196, 198–199; inaugural speech, 20; leadership style, 77–88; multiparty reform, 191; political outsider, 26, 77–78; regime, 4, 21, 25, 29, 36, 39–40, 77, 115, 178; relationship with parliament, 140, 157, 160–161, 167, 169, 176, 185;

251

support for, 25, 34, 58, 64, 126; takeover, 20, 36, 111; third-term reform, 30, 62, 192; vice-chair of military commission, 18 Muslim, 21, 124, 144 Musoke, Kintu, 102 Mutesa, Edward, 12, 16 Muwanga, Paulo, 19, 130 Mujaju, Akiiki, 113, 140 Mwenda, Andrew, 86 Mwinyi, Ali, 96 Nakapiripirit, 210 (n10), 222 (n1) Nakaseke, 210 (n10) Nakasero, 104 Nakasongola, 209 (n10) Nakawa Inland Container Depot, 102 Nakawa University, 122 Namboole, 103, 124 Namibia, 80, 83 Namugongo, 100 National Assembly, 15–16 National Association of Women’s Organisations in Uganda (NAWOU), 181 National Caucus for Democracy, 38, 128, 163, 171 National Democratic Institute, 133 National Gender Policy, 181 National language, 36, 210 (n17) National political commissar (NPC), 96, 103, 176, 216 (n15) National Referendum Committee, 169 National Resistance Army (NRA): armed insurgency, 5, 25, 26, 29, 42–43, 46, 209 (n2), 210 (n16), 215 (n4); ethnic composition, 47; in the north, 73. See National Resistance Movement National Resistance Council, 36, 54, 66, 92, 109 , 127, 157, 213 (n4), 215 (n8), 218 (n1), 224 (n6), National Resistance Movement (NRM), or Movement: bus, 90, 220 (n39); caucus, 40, 99, 141, 153, 160, 163–165, 167–169, 176–177, 182, 185, 215, 216 (n27), 223 (n1), 224 (n8), 227 (n52, n78); directorates, 97, 101, 216 (n19), 217 (n36); disciplinary committees, 216–217; election candidates, 140–141, 146–147, 216 (n11); election results,

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195–197 (tables); Fifteen-Point Programme, 97; headquarters, 101; internal democracy, 104, 126; internal discipline, 95, 216 (n28); local committees, 93, 217; membership fees, 95, 104, 184; military takeover, 1; Movement Act (1997), 39, 92–96, 99, 102, 105, 107, 146, 166, 187, 207 (n1), 216 (n15); Movement Amendment Bill (2003), 161; national conference, 96, 103, 216 (n15), 217 (n28), 224 (n1), 229, 237; national executive committee (NEC), 92, 96–97, 103–104, 170, 191–192, 215 (n8), 216 (n13, n28), 217 (n36), 224 (n1); National Resistance Movement– Organisation (NRM-O), 92, 102–104, 157, 192; organs, 94–99; relationship with the state, 92–93, 98, 216; secretariat, 92, 103–104, 216 (n13); staff, 97; structures, 30, 39, 93; TenPoint Programme, 20, 22, 51, 58. See also NRA National Resistance Movement Organisation (NRM-O), 92, 102–104, 157, 192, 103. See also National Resistance Movement (NRM) Native authorities, 33 Ndadaye, Melchior, 9 Neoliberal reforms, 25, 51–52, 58–59, 80, 211 (n3), 213 (n6) Neopatrimonialism, 35, 50, 66, 68, 76 Neotraditionalists, 14 Nepal, 3, 207 (n2) Nepotism, 174 Netherlands, 60, 63, 193 Newspapers, 24, 40, 79, 86, 217 (n33) New Vision, 40, 53, 86 New Vision Printing and Publishing Corporation, 53 New Zealand, 208 (n7) Niger, 156, 224 (n3) Nigeria, 83 Nile Republic, 74 Njuba, Gertrude, 180 Njuba, Sam, 193 No-party democracy: model 1, 3–4, 6, 22, 29–30, 40; practice, 25, 26, 35, 49, 70, 190, 200 No-partyism, 27, 77, 113, 127, 137, 152, 15, 163, 183, 190

No-party parliament, 27, 68, 109, 158–159, 161, 177 No-party politics: 8, 24, 26–27, 37, 39, 107, 110, 149, 155, 157, 165, 199 No-party system, 1, 3, 6, 25, 30, 65, 76–77, 85, 87, 90, 110, 135, 14, 152, 156, 163, 180, 189–190 No-party thinking, 90–91 Northern Uganda: 17, 21, 196–197 (tables); Civil Defence Units, 43; councils, 147; districts, 12, 107, 143–145, 178, 198; political marginalisation, 25, 65, 70–71; political opposition, 98, 112, 124, 129, 132, 143–146, 171, 178, 198; US military, 61; war in, 12, 41–43, 50, 59, 70–76, 86, 111, 129, 161, 189, 200 Norway, 63, 193 Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): 6, 24, 57, 123, 146, 189, 228 (n1) Northern Ireland, 9 NRM. See National Resistance Movement Nsambu, Yusufn Nsubuga, 227 (n54) Ntungamo, 34, 178, 209 (n10) Nubi, 21, 208 (n16) Nubians, 8, 208 (n16) Nyakairima, Aronda, 46 Nyerere, Julius, 17, 18, 96 Nyai, Dick, 175, 227 (n54) Obote, Milton: abolition of traditional kingdoms, 33; and the army, 18–20, 41–42, 78, 211 (n28); death of, 125, 134, 222 (n65); government harassment, 115, 219 (n3); and the Langi people, 20, 64; Milton Obote Foundation, 134; ousting of, 18, 20, 41; return to Uganda, 19; second regime, 20, 60, 90; son, 134; selfcoup, 16–17; Ugandan leader, 8, 13, 17, 126; UPC leader 16, 78, 109, 111, 113, 127–133, 159, 191, 220 (n39), 222 (n65); war against the NRM, 71, 78, 90; widow, 134 Odaka, Sam, 113, 127, 129, 134 Odoki, Benjamin, 36, 38 Odongo, Jeje, 211 (n30) Ogalo, Wandera, 99, 159 Ogoola, James, 84

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Oguttu, Wafula, 194 Ogwal, Cecilia, 23, 38, 113, 126–134, 143, 151, 180, 220 (n39), 221 (n42, n51), 222 (n65), 227 (n54) Ojok, B’Leo, 227 (n54) Okello, Tito (Gen.), 18, 20–21, 41, 132 Okello, Bazilio, 20–21, 41, 132 Okello-Okello, John Livingstone, 73 Okot, Omodi, 227 (n54) Olum, Zachary, 109, 124, 178, 227 (n54) One-arena model, 161 One-party system, 11, 17, 21, 24, 83, 95, 105, 218 (n52). See also Single-party system. Onyango-Obbo, Charles, 211 (n31), 225 (n14) Open roll call voting, 160, 169, 226 (n20) Operation Iron Fist, 75 Opinion leaders, 35, 100, 144 Opondo, Ofwono, 103 Organizational development, 23, 26, 27, 44, 112, 136 Otafiire, Kahinda, 103 Ottoo, Richard Ebil, 124 Otunnu, Olara, 74 Oyam, 210 (n10) Oyte-Ojoko (Brig.), David, 18 Pader, 71, 177, 210 (n10) Pallisa, 164 (also table), 209 (n10), 227 (n54) Panchayat, 207 (n2) Paraguay, 214 (n11), 229 (n17) Parish, 32, 37, 96, 100, 145, 147, 150, 216 (n12) Parliament: conflicts with government, 155; individualized assembly, 155–156, 178, 188; method of voting, 169; number of legislators, 66; parliamentary building, 100; parliamentary caucuses, 6, 27, 29, 164, 165, 174; parliamentary committees: 110, 158–160, 162, 228 (n91); parliamentary committee on Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, 39, 130, 184; parliamentary committee on privatizations, 53; parliamentary groups, 160–166; parliamentary majority, 140, 147, 156–158, 168, 171, 194; parliamentary networks,

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164; seventh (2001–2006), 82, 140, 151, 155, 157, 160–161, 168–170, 173, 180 (table), 222 (n1); sixth (1996–2001), 82, 151, 155, 157, 159, 161, 164, 168–170, 173, 180 (table), 181, 222 (n1); speaker, 40, 96, 160, 168, 170, 218 (n50), 225 (n20), 226 (n50); walkout from, 38, 181 Parliamentary Advocacy Forum (PAFO), 171, 173, 190, 193, 229 (n7) Parliamentary Pastoralists Association, 164 Parliamentary system, 155–156, 184 Participatory democracy, 22, 81, 87 Parti du Mouvement de l’Émancipation Hutu (Parmehutu), 9 Party system: 1, 4–5, 207 (n3); fragmentation, 207 (n3), 224 (n2); hegemonic, 27, 104–106, 188, 199, 218 (n52); with three parties, 105; with two parties, 199 Party surrogates, 117, 119, 125, 133, 153, 163, 163, 175, 188, 190 Patriotism, 80 Patronage, 25, 49–50, 62, 65, 68, 91, 107–108, 150, 169, 183, 185, 189, 207 (n1) Peasants, 42, 53, 58, 76, 80, 219 (n10). See also Farmers Peace: 42, 86; among DP factions, 124; domestic, 52, 63; in the north, 72–76, 87 Penal Code Act, 86 People with disabilities, 181. See also Disabled People’s Redemption Army (PRA), 84 Personal campaign machine, 149 Personal merit, 37, 106 Personal rule, 82 Peru, 80–81, 156, 214 (n11) Pigeonhole constitution, 16, 40 Pike, William, 86–87 Plebiscitarian, 26, 77, 81, 83 Pluralism, 17, 22, 104, 105, 120, 122, 190, 218 (n52) Poland, 218 (n51) Police, 84, 106, 216 (n15), 229 (n1) Policymaking, 6, 93, 127, 139, 153, 161–163, 189 Political economy, 25, 49, 63, 76 Political education. See Mchaka Mchaka

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Political instability: in the north, 70–74; in Uganda, 3, 6, 41, 43, 59, 70, 78, 189, 201, 214 (n11) Political monopoly, 105 Political Organisations Bill (1998), 39, 159, 170, 173, 178, 184, 216 (n27), 223 (n1) Political participation, 1, 4, 78, 200 Political parties: ban on delegates’ conferences, 3, 22–23, 110, 153, 191, 109 (n19); ban on parties, 6, 17, 23, 26, 62, 78, 99, 105, 112, 117, 133, 142, 148–149, 187, 191, 208 8n17), 213 (n25); competition among, 105; and democratic politics, 4–6; institutionalization of, 23; membership, 103–104, 110, 117, 131–132, 149; platforms, 89, 104; registration of, 109, 124, 191–193; symbols, 151; under no-partyism, 109–136. See also Democratic Party, Uganda People’s Congress Political Parties and Organisations Act (2002) (PPOA), 83, 190–191, 215 (n1); (2005), 193 Political rights, 101, 120, 200 Political socialization, 43, 100 Political system: 4, 6, 9, 38–39, 41–42, 63, 71, 121, 161, 174, 190, 200, 201; Mayumba kumi, 208 (n13); Movement, 3, 26, 89, 94, 209 (n19), 215 (n1), 218 (n38); multiparty, 172, 181, 218 (n38); no-party, 1, 33, 187–188; referendum on, 40, 120, 192; Westminster, 9 Political stability, 5, 9, 22, 27, 31, 43, 59, 62, 70, 78, 111, 136, 200, 208 (n5), 219 (n3) Popular support, 34, 42, 64, 72, 78–79, 91, 111, 137 Populism, 10, 27, 29, 78–82, 87–88, 92, 124, 213 (n6) Portugal, 218 (n51) Poverty, 53, 57–58, 72–73, 80, 153, 168; Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), 57, 211 (n3), 212 (n7); Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), 57; level, 58, 80; line, 212 (n7); the poor, 42, 57–58, 80, 152, 212 (n3); reduction, 53, 57, 211 (n3)

Power of the people, 78, 81–81, 88 Power sharing, 5, 207 (n4) Presidency, Ugandan, 24, 26, 38, 65, 83, 88, 92, 96, 112, 158–160, 169, 184, 190, 224 (n3); President of the Republic, 156, 216 (n15); President’s Office, 86, 98, 101; decrees, 157 Presidential Economic Council, 51 Presidential Guard Brigade (PGB), 47 Presidential Policy Commission (PPC), 128–130, 134, 220 (n39), 221 (n50), 222 (n65) Presidential Protection Unit (PPU), 47 Presidential systems, 156,184, 214 (n11), 228 (n93) Presidentialism, 224 (n2) Pressure group, 10, 122, 175, 215 (n1), 222 (n11), 235 Pretrial detention, 141 Prices, liberalisation of, 52–53 Primaries, 103–134, 132, 134, 143, 145, 199, 221 (n57) Primary education, 57, 98, 212 (n3) Prisons, service, 216 (n15) Private Member’s Bill, 159 Privatizations, 53–54, 68, 80, 158–159, 161, 224 (n5) Privatisation Unit, 68 Programme for the Alleviation of Poverty and the Social Costs of Adjustment (PAPSCA), 57 Progressive Party, 13 Property rights, 180 Protected camps, 72 Protestant, 12, 14, 15, 21, 124, 208 (n8) Protracted people’s war, 19, 90 Provincial governors, 33 Public Accounts Committee, 68, 159 Public debate, 53, 87, 193 Public Enterprise Reform and Divestiture (PERD) Statute, 53 Public enterprises, 52–53, 80 Public office, 12, 95 Public rally, 106, 115 Public sector: collapse, 80; downsizing, 62; employees, 54; modernization of, 51; services, 54 Public Service Review and Reorganisation Commission, 54

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Qaddafi, Muammar, 50, 61 Quorum, 40, 184, 226 (n50) Radio, 79, 81, 86, 150, 217 (n33) Rakai, 34 Rationalization: of administrative and financial management, 42; of land tenure systems, 80; of Movement secretariat, 97 Rawlings, Jerry, 51, 81, 214 (n7) Rebellion: 26, 31–32, 41, 43, 58, 64, 72–74; rebel groups, 29; rebel insurgencies, 31 Recruitment, 74 42, 95, 103, 116, 118, 120, 125, 151, 210 Referendum: Referendum Act (1999), 40, 160, 161, 168, 170, 184, 226 (n50); Referendum Bill (2000), 168, 178; Referendum (Political Systems) Act (2000), 40, 83, 97, 168, 170; campaign, 40, 90, 101, 169; as direct participation, 82; in Nepal, 207 (n2); on the political system (2000), 3, 36, 39, 40, 101, 108, 115, 120, 168, 190, 211 (n23), 215 (n11); on the political system (2005), 83, 108, 192; on the “lost counties,” 16 Reform Agenda, 193, 222 (n11), 229 (n7) Regional Government, 35, 212 (n14) Registrar general, 124 Religion, 22, 41, 149, 191, 208 (n6), 225 (n16), 229 (n13) Representative democracy, 8, 81 Reserved seats, for women, 180 (table), 181, 194 Resident District Commissioners (RDCs), 83, 95, 97–98, 100, 106, 118, 147, 168, 184, 216 (n15), 217 (n30) Resistance Councils (RCs), 20, 32–33, 35, 43, 78, 80, 90–93, 97, 100, 179, 208 (n17), 218 (n1) Resistance Councils and Committees Statute (1987), 32 Responsiveness, 106 Revenue, 53–54, 56, 68, 102 Revolution, 20, 82 Rubaihayo, Patrick, 127, 129, 220 (n39) Rule of law, 30, 82, 84, 200, 211 Rules of the game, 91 Rules of procedures, 169, 225 (n20)

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Russia, 156 Rural areas, 31, 59, 76, 112, 212 (n3) Rukikaire, Matthew, 160 Ruzindana, Augustine, 68–69, 159, 193–194 Rwanda, 4, 9, 61, 87, 207 (n2), 211 (n26) Rwakitura, 160, 214 (n10) Rwanyarare, James, 113, 129–130, 220 (n39), 222 (n65) Sakwa, Darlington, 129 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 218 (n51) Saleh, Salim, 46–47, 70, 74, 170 Samia, 164 Sectarian, 3, 10, 22, 63, 90, 96, 164 Sectarianism, 191, 217 (n28) Secret voting, 225 (n20) Secretary general: of the NRM-O, 103–104; of the UPC, 113, 126; of the DP, 124; UN under-secretary general, 74; of UYD, 219 Security, 20, 31, 41–43, 58, 71, 73, 79, 86, 100, 115, 161, 164, 178, 211 (n3) Self-selection, 139, 152 Sembabule, 210 (n10) Senior six, 217 (n30) Separation of powers, 214 (n11) Seven-point election program, 103 Sexual Offences Bill, 182 Single member constituencies, 138, 140, 175, 226 (n24) Single party system, 105, 224 (n3). See also One-party system Sironko, 210 (n11) Social policies, 57 Social services, 52, 58 Social spending, 57 Somalia: Ethiopian invasion of, 61 South Africa, 70, 80, 83, 106, 121, 165, 194, 225 (n19) Southern Sudan, 71, 75 Speaker, 40, 96, 160, 168, 170, 218 (n50), 225 (n20), 226 (n50) Special Interests Groups Caucus, 181 Sri Lanka, 9 Ssebaggala, Latif, 151 Ssebaggala, Nasser,124, 220 (n33) Ssekweyama, Anthony, 119, 220 (n29)

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Ssemogerere, Paul, 24, 38, 40, 109, 112–116, 119, 122–124, 128, 159, 195 (table), Stanbic Bank, 54 State: building, 29, 31, 35, 87; capacity, 56; crisis, 30; expenditure, 52; in Africa, 19, 30, 49, 51–52, 60, 81, 83, 218 (n52); officials, 96, 99; size, 54; Ugandan, 16, 19, 30–31, 35, 62, 92, 94, 152 Street-level politics, 87 Strikes: lawyers’, 84; at Makerere, 100 Structural adjustment, 52, 57–58, 211 (n3) Subcounties, 32, 95, 96, 150, 216 (n15), 217 (n28) Sub-Saharan Africa, 56, 81, 149, 201 Sudan, 59, 61, 70–71, 74–75, 86 Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), 75 Sudanic, 21 Suspension of Political Activities Decree (1971), 18 Supreme Court, 83, 86, 198, 214 (n11, n12) Swahili, 99, 210 (n17) Swaziland, 3 Sweden, 60, 63, 193 Taiwan, 106 Tanzania, 11, 17, 18, 56, 80–81, 95, 96 Tanzania African National Union (TANU), 11, 17, 95, 96 Tax: import taxes, 53; revenues, 56; evasion, 102 Taxi Drivers’ Association, 10 Teachers, 57, 100, 144 Television, 78–79 Ten-Point Programme, 20, 22, 51, 58 Teso, 33, 71, 164, 199, 211 (n30) The Free Movement (TFM), 175 Tinyefuza, David, 47 Togo, 83 Toro, 10, 33, 209 (n7) Toronto, 133 Tororo, 122, 131, 210 (n10), 220 (n28) Tourism, 53 Trade, 51–53, 209 (n5), 210 (n16) Trade unions, 53, 216 (n15) Traditional African societies, 95

Traditional institutions, 13, 15, 38, 164 Traditional kingdoms: 10, 12–15, 17, 33, 38, 46, 64–65, 178; abolition of, 17, 38 Traditional Rulers (Restitution of Assets and Properties) Statute, 38 Transition to democracy, 156, 237–238 Transition to multipartyism, 27, 92, 156–157, 191–193 Treasury, 95, 101 Tribalism, 68, 178, 191 Tshombe, Moise, 224 (n3) Tumukunde, Henry, 47 Tumwine, Elly, 46 Tutsi, 9 Two-arena model, 162 Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB), 54, 159 Uganda Constitutional Commission: Draft Constitution, 210; Report, 210; Uganda Development Corporation, 101 Uganda Farmers’ Association, 10 Uganda Fisheries Entreprises, 53 Uganda House, 113, 125, 128–132 Uganda Investment Authority, 68 Uganda Land Alliance, 175 Uganda Media Centre, 86 Uganda Muslim Supreme Council, 144 Uganda National Congress (UNC), 11–13 Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), 18, 71 Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLA), 18, 43 Uganda National Movement (UNM), 13–14 Uganda National Rescue Front, (UNRF), 43 Uganda Parliamentary Technical Assistance Project, 158 Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM), 19, 90 Uganda People’s Congress: 125–135; Agenda 21, 131; delegates’ conference, 126, 128, 134; and elections, 143, 195–196; factions, 113, 123–130; improvisation of structures, 130; in parliament, 171; Interim Executive Council (IEC),

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129–130; internal split, 127; National Task Force, 129–130; one-party rule, 11; origins and rule, 13–21, 23; party funding, 132; Party Representatives Council (PRC), 130, 132, 134, 221 (n61); party statute, 130, 222 (n65); Presidential Policy Commission (PPC), 128–130, 134, 220 (n39), 221 (n50), 222 (n65); Uganda House headquarters, 113, 125, 128–132; Youth Congress, 133 Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF), 44, 147, 222 (n1); UPDF Act, 46; commanders, 74; High Command, 69; in Somalia, 61; in the Congo, 70; in the north, 72–75; mechanized unit, 47 Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA), 71–72 Uganda People’s Union (UPU), 13 Uganda Reform Party, 13 Uganda Revenue Authority, 54, 68, 102 Uganda Taxpayers’ Party, 13 Uganda Women’s Network (UWONET), 181 Uganda Women Parliamentarians Association (UWPA), 181 Uganda Young Democrats (UYD), 115, 119, 121–123, 220 (n26), 222 (n39) Ugandan Broadcasting Council, 86 Unemployed people, 150, 153 UNICEF, 72 Union Nationale Rwandaise (UNAR), 9 Union of African Parties for Democracy and Development, 121 United Kingdom (UK), 49, 63, 69, 161, 211 (n2). See also Britain United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 58, 61, 60, 175 United States (US), 49, 60–61, 75, 158, 163, 226 (n48) Unity network, 151 Universal Primary Education (UPE), 57–58, 98, 212 (n5, n6) Universal Secondary Education (USE), 103, 194, 212 (n6) University students, 100 UN, 70, 74

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UNDP. See United Nations Development Programme UPC. See Uganda People’s Congress Urban areas, 59 Uruguay, 214 (n11) US Agency for International Development (USAID), 158, 181 Venezuela, 81 Verona Fathers, 12 Veterans, 216 (n15) Veto, 128, 141, 156, 207 (n4), 223 (n1) Vice-president, 35, 38, 86, 124, 127, 130, 160, 166, 178, 180, 210 (n19), 213 (n17) Village, 32, 96, 144, 150, 152, 209 (n2), 216 (n12) Voting behavior, 155, 160, 165, 183 Voting discipline, 165, 177, 225 (n20) Voting patterns, 4, 199 Wacha, Ben, 113, 134, 175, 194, 220 (n39), 226 (n50), 227 (n50) Wages, 101 Wakiso, 210 (n10) Wananchi, 100 Wapakhabulo, James, 96–97, 103, 159, 217 (n30) War, civil, 1, 9, 19, 20, 29, 31, 46, 51, 59, 111, 115 War crimes, 75 Washington, 60–61 Washington, George, 3 West Nile, 12, 20, 71, 118, 143, 148, 209 (n7) West, the, 3, 59, 112, 143 Western diplomats, 213 (n3) Western representative democracy, 8 Western Uganda, 21, 47, 92, 98, 107, 123, 171, 198 Westminster Foundation, 121, 133 Westminster-like, political system, 9 Westminster model, 20, 208 (n7) Whipping, 158, 168, 183–184, 215 (n6), 224 (n8), 228 (n91) White paper, 83, 192 Whites, 10 Women in parliament, 179–182 Women’s rights, 164 (table), 179

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Workers, 54, 69, 181, 222 (n1) World Bank, 32, 44, 45, 49–52, 55–57, 60, 63, 67, 209, 211 (n3), 224 (n5) Xenophobic appeals, 80, 87 Young Parliamentarians Associations (YPA), 96, 153, 164, 173–177, 182–183, 227 (n78)

Youth, 19, 78, 103, 113, 121–124, 133, 135, 150, 181, 188, 210 (n16), 216 (n15, n19), 220 (n39), 222 (n1) Yumbe, 210 (n10) Zambia, 83, 125 Zimbabwe, 61, 80

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About the Book

ARE POLITICAL PARTIES AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF DEMOCRACY? Or can a no-party system constitute a viable democratic alternative? Giovanni Carbone examines the politics of Museveni’s Uganda to illustrate the achievements, contradictions, and limitations of participatory politics in the absence of partisan organizations. At a time when multiparty reforms were sweeping the globe, Uganda opted for a controversial, no-party democratic model. The country’s politics over the past two decades thus provide an extraordinary opportunity for addressing the many questions—theoretical, empirical, and comparative—that the notion of a no-party system of elected government raises. Carbone’s analysis of how a no-party electoral regime actually works (or doesn’t) in Uganda fills a gap in both democracy studies and the study of African politics. Giovanni Carbone is lecturer in political science in the Dipartimento di Studi Sociali e Politici of the Università degli Studi di Milano, as well as visiting fellow in the Crisis States Research Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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