A week or so ago another political group, the People’s front for Transition (PFT) was launched and promptly announced Kizza Besigye as its leader.
Something had been brewing for some time. Besigye it has been
reported, has been holding meetings with opposition leaders since the January
election in which President Yoweri Museveni retained his seat and Robert
Kyagulanyi came in second. This was the first election since 2001 that Besigye
has not been on the ballot paper, an omission that maybe prompting his latest maneuvers.
The public reaction to this latest move is mixed. On one
hand Besigye’s critics think he really cannot stand to be out of the center of
Uganda’s political stage. People were clamouring for him to step aside, which he
did and see what happened. His successor flag bearer at the forum for
Democratic Change (FDC) Patrick Amuriat polled under five percent of the vote
in the January presidential polls.
Those sympathetic to Besigye see him as the only credible
counter to Museveni, never mind he has lost in all the four challenges he has
mustered. They think he is too important a political figure to be left out in
the cold as seemed was happening in recent months.
For the neutral observer Besigye’s most recent reincarnation
raises some disturbing questions.
"If one of the biggest criticisms of the National Resistance
Movement (NRM) is Museveni’s dominance, near omnipotence in the party and how
it has stifled the upward mobility of other potential replacements to him. In
Besigye they see a similar trajectory in the FDC and in the opposition as a
whole....
Kyagulanyi’s challenge for the presidency while it ended in
defeat, served to reconfigure the composition of parliament, with his nascent
National Unity Platform (NUP) uprooting FDC as the leading opposition party,
while at the same time engineering an ejection of all NRM’s bigwigs in central
Uganda. That being said there are doubts about whether Kyagulanyi has the
stature of Besigye and the ability to similarly carry the opposition on his
shoulders.
Relatedly what does the opposition’s over dependence on
Besigye do for attempts to build institutional capacity in the opposition? If
there was any proof that FDC is institutionally weak was the dismal performance
of the FDC at the beginning of this year.
It was a double loss for the opposition. By finessing Mugisha
Muntu out of FDC and replacing him with Amuriat, the general was out at sea
without FDC’s near top of mind awareness country wide and failed to make an
impression.
This ambivalence has allowed Besigye to step back into the
limelight in a way his predecessor Paul Ssemogerere was unable to do.
Ssemogerere run for the presidency in 1996.
But Besigye is not the irresistible force to Museveni’s immovable object. A rethink of how to unseat Museveni has long been overdue and with Besigye’s reemergence we can expect such plans to build up party capacity will not get much voice...
Besigye it seems has worked out that all he has to do is bid
his time, remain relevant for the day that Museveni steps off the stage. As the
second most recognized politician in the country the presidency would be in
better sight than before, whatever the NRM can throw against him.
Of course, whether Kyagulanyi can sustain his momentum for
the next few years may very well put paid to Besigye’s assumed strategy.
So Besigye’s return to the center has a net negative effect
on the opposition, especially the ability to build their internal capacity.
In recognition of this there is rumour that plans are afoot
to cause a constitutional amendment that would return Uganda to a parliamentary
system. Under this system there would be no direct elections of the President but
the party with the most seats in the house would have the right to choose the
country’s president.
With one stroke this change – if true, would force parties
to build up internal capacity, while reducing reliance on dominant
personalities. And very well play into the NRM’s hands.
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