WHY THE OPPOSITION IS STILL IN THE WILDERNESS

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.

 

FDC AND WHY POLITICS IS NOT A TEA PARTY

In the 1985 Wimbledon tennis championships opponents of German teen sensation Boris Becker complained that at the changeovers he tended to bump into them and generally not give way. When the complaint was raised with his manager the bearish Ion Tiriac his reply was “This is not a tea party”

In the last two weeks differences within the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) that have been festering under the surface for years came into public view. The boil burst this week spewing out its fetid contents for all to see...

Like in the body, this should be a good thing, as the toxic contents of the boil may have gone on to infect other parts of the body if it had not oozed out.

For us on the sidelines of the action, it looks like an internal dispute that erupted but had to be aired out for progress to be made for better or for worse.  But we do not put it past the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) to have lanced the boil open.

Beyond this being a natural progression of development anyone who has been watching the FDC from its inception and even before when it was the pressure group Reform Agenda should not be surprised.

There are many reasons things are unfolding the way they are but two jump to mind.

Like with most political organisations FDC was founded on the personality of the Dr Kizza Besigye. Following his run for the presidency in 2001 the consensus was that he was still the one who could go toe to toe with President Yoweri Museveni in the polls. This was in 2005 just before the 2006 elections, which saw the return of multi-party elections to Uganda.

"When Besigye stepped down as party president in 2011, it was always going to be an uphill task to find a leader of similar global appeal. In addition, Besigye never went away. He hovered around Najjanankumbi like a bad smell, making it impossible for his successor Major General Mugisha Muntu to stamp his authority on the leading opposition party. Mugisha Muntu’s successor has fared no better, ceding the leadership of the opposition to Robert Kyagulanyi in the process.

Besigye has argued of course that there is no time/term limit in the struggle to remove Museveni, which makes sense, but one can see how his shadow remains a problem in FDC.

Given that he has been there from the start it would be unrealistic to expect Besigye be an indifferent observer to the goings on.

The second issue which is related to the first is the long-term dominance of the political scene by the NRM in general but Museveni in particular.

Just as at Wimbledon politics is not a tea party. Any ruling party worth its salt will be monitoring the opposition and looking to counter any maneuvers they maybe making. Spreading dissension in the enemy ranks is legitimate political tactics, never mind what the moralists say. Both factions in FDC accuse the other of receiving financial aid from the NRM. I believe them, both.

Beyond that the example of Museveni at the helm of the NRM for decades is causing much discomfort in the opposition. The opposition feel some moral pressure to show they are different from the NRM, to have term limits for their leaders,  which is good for the optics but does not allow anyone to gather momentum and pose a potent threat to Museveni. No sooner has leader gained traction than he has to step aside for “good governance”.

The challenge with this therefore is that every so often there is jostling for position in opposition parties, each contest factionalising and disenfranchising members, weakening them meaning they find it hard to present a united front to the public. FDC suffered this in 2016 and again in 2021.

It is no tea party in the opposition, especially with Museveni pulling the strings across the road. It means there will be no smash and grab rush for the leadership in Uganda. That the road to statehouse – whatever the politicians tell their minions will always be a marathon and not a sprint.

Given the internal tension in opposition parties time is not something they have in any meaningful supply. Their fragility is exposed with the passing of time, more so than with the NRM.

Ideally all political actors should be working towards creating a robust and an enduring democracy. But politics is about the attaining and retaining of power, which often plays counter to the development of democracy. This is the brutal honest truth about politics.

But it is also why democracy is not an event but an evolution. Believe it or not the natural progression is towards individual freedom which is democracy. The nature of each country’s democracy is determined by how they resolve the contestation between the ruling party and the opposition.

The fracas in FDC is excruciatingly painful for those involved but seen against the greater schemes of things and inevitable occurrence in the progress towards democracy.