This week the Forum for Democratic Change(FDC) split was formalizedwith the calling of an extraordinary delegates meeting that saw the party president Patrick Oboi Amuriat and his secretary general Nandala Mafabi thrown out of office.
The delegates conference called by party chairman Wasswa Birigwa
installed Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago and Harold Kaija in their place.
The Amuriat clique dismissed the move as inconsequential and
as far they are concerned, they are still in place.
It is a sad event, an inevitable one that came as no surprise
to those who have been watching Ugandan politics for the last few years.
"While the opposition’s most obvious challenge is the uphill task of unseating President Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Movement (NRM), maintaining internal cohesion has proven just as, if not more difficult...
Because the promise of power is seems to be drawing further
and further away, the romance of voluntarism is fading away fast.
But first a quick recap. When the NRM come to power in 1986
they froze party activity, which means there was no renewal within those
parties. When party activity was freed again 20 years later, the leaders of
1986 were still in place.
That means a whole generation of leadership that should have
taken over from the party grannies were still waiting and whole a new
generation were pounding the doors for their turn at the pie.
Inevitably tensions mounted in parties, with many decamping to
join new formations like FDC, to short circuit their route to the top.
With Museveni’s continued stay in power, opposition parties
are being forced to renew themselves without having been in power. The tension
between older leaders who think power is around the corner, if only they could
hang on a little bit longer and the young turks, who think the old guard have
failed dismally to wrestle power from the NRM, and should bow out gracefully or
be shoved out with ignominy, is playing out now.
"The net effect is an increasingly fragmented opposition, which will ensure the continued stay of the NRM in power, unless they implode themselves...
The NRM does not suffer such upheavals for now, as they are
the ruling party and can distribute patronage though government to keep
everyone onside, even those who have their own presidential ambitions.
An NRM out of power would struggle like any of these
parties, hence the unity of purpose at Kyagwe road when the elections come
around, regardless of the internal mutterings and grumblings between elections.
Time is not the friend of the party out of power. It took an
almost about face in their ideology away from the left, for the UK Labour Party
to win power in 1997.
The same can be said for a party in power for a long time. It
loses its idealism and dynamism as parochial interests get entrenched, clogging
down service delivery and perpetuating corruption. But the power of incumbency
is such that they can paper over these cracks, longer than the much less
resourced opposition parties can.
Leadership, more so in the opposition than in the ruling
party, has to be unwavering in its commitment to the cause and able to transmit
this conviction to the rank and file. If the leadership are there for their own
personal enrichment and aggrandizement the foot soldiers will feel it quickly
and their own commitment will suffer.
Opposition leaders often sell to their followers the promise
that power is just around the corner. The thing they tell their supporters and
the reality are often different. The trick is to maintain morale when the
promises don’t come through as sold. The leaders own commitment to a far off
vision is what is crucial and will allow him to keep selling a dream to the
supporters.
And finally, the role of the state. No state is going to let you prosper when you are scheming to unseat them. Lost in the current drama is that the straw that has broken the back of the FDC is a quarrel over the distribution of monies whose source is not known, but highly suspected to come from intelligence.
Spreading dissension in enemy ranks is a legitimate tactic of
war and politics. Such tactics find fertile ground in places where the
leadership is infiltrated (stock in trade for the intelligence) or ambivalent
in its commitment.
The death knell for the FDC was sounded with their dismal
performance in the last election where they ceded their leading position in the
opposition to National Unity Platform (NUP).
As a result of all of the above sadly FDC may very well be
going the way of the Democratic Party (DP) and Uganda People’s Conference (UPC),
both of which have succumbed to the inexorable march of time.
