The result of Uganda’s election could have been determined before it was conducted. “[It] is not going to be free and fair; neither is it going to be credible,” Nicholas Opiyo, a Ugandan human rights lawyer said, predicting a smooth cruise for President Yoweri Museveni, three months before the polls even opened. It turned out as predicted. Museveni was declared winner of the February 18 polls after already spending 30 years in office.
The interest in the polls was not whether it would be free and fair, but rather the measurability of how unfree and partial they would be. In this regard, the authorities surprised even the most pessimistic by how unjust the elections were. Not only was Museveni’s main challenger arrested on the day of the poll—his third arrest in a week—he was arrested while trying to expose electoral rigging. The largely peaceful elections also turned violent by the very same policemen who were supposed to forestall violence; all of this was carried out to ensure that Yoweri Museveni, the Ugandan President for over three decades, would continue to rule the country. It is an ambition that has been exerted by all of Uganda’s post-independence leaders, from Milton Obote, the country’s first Prime Minister to Museveni, the current president.
The fact that Yoweri, whose three decade rule has been increasingly repressive, pervasively corrupt and largely undemocratic, is undoubtedly the best president Uganda has had, speaks volumes to the country’s post independence political climate. The first of this bad crop of leaders was Milton Obote, whose rule as Prime Minister triggered the first crisis in the newly independent Ugandan state after his desire for arbitrary rule led him to sack the Ceremonial President of Uganda, Mutesa II of Buganda, and declare himself Executive President without an election. Obote was eventually removed in a coup d’état led by the infamous Idi Amin, whose eight-year rule still stands out as one of the worst periods of unjust rule in modern African history. Amin seemed to revel in two things; killing and obtaining titles. As well as being accused of human right crimes of virtually every title, including cannibalism, he also conferred on himself every title he could lay his hand on, including ‘Conqueror of the British Empire’. He was eventually conquered by Tanzanian forces and Ugandan rebels, but things were not about to get better for Uganda, because returning to the presidency was Milton Obote.
Obote’s second coming was worse than his first. His reign, this time for five years, was marred by repression and his regime’s responsibility for over 300,000 civilian deaths in the civil war known as the Ugandan Bush War, of which Yoweri Museveni was one of the warlords. The fall of Obote brought in another warlord, Tito Okello, but he lasted for less than a year before he was pushed out by Museveni.
Museveni’s ascendance to the presidency—after the calamitous regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, bestowed upon him the image of Uganda’s saving grace and, at first, he seemed to live up to it. The international community looked on the warlord-turned-president as a member of the new generation of African leaders set to liberate their countries and the continent from the tyrannies and violence that followed the early years of independence.
For many parts of his rule, Museveni seemed like the advocate for democracy and development that he claimed to be. His early years in office were spent wading off violent rebellions especially from the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony. He succeeded in severely weakening the group and thus largely ensured the stability that Uganda had lacked for about a quarter of a century. The Ugandan economy also rebounded under Museveni although development has continuously been skewed towards the central and western regions while the rest of the country lags behind. However, one of the greatest successes of Museveni’s leadership came through its response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic where its campaign led to the fall of infection rates from 30 percent of the population in the 1980s, to less than 7 percent by the end of 2008. His regional exploits, in support of South Sudan’s independence and against al-Shabaab’s terror in Somalia, won him the reputation as an African statesman although some others, such as his involvement in the invasion of the DRC and the second Congo War, did tarnish parts of this image.
Museveni also started relatively well in the efforts to democratise Uganda. In 1995, he signed a new constitution which stipulated a maximum of two presidential terms of five years each. In 1996, he won over 70 percent of the votes in an election that though challenged by his fellow contestants was accepted by the international community as relatively credible and largely reflective of the wishes of the people. Museveni also won a second term in office, albeit with allegations of election rigging. Although a majority of the Supreme Court upheld the result of the election, all of the judges agreed that “there was evidence that in a significant number of polling stations there was cheating” and that in some areas of the country, “the principle of free and fair election was compromised.” However, noticing that democracy may succeed where militant rebellion failed with regards to wresting power from him, Museveni began to thwart the democratic process which he had put in place. 10 years of martial rule and a further 10 years of democratic rule could not satisfy his lust for power. Thus, in 2005, he had the parliament amend the constitution to remove the constitutional limit on the presidency and continued to elongate his rule through what many Ugandan and international activists have described as sham elections.
The latest of Museveni’s sham elections have just taken place and, as expected, it produced a result to perpetuate his stay in power. This obsessive lust for power reinforces the notion that Museveni, Idi Amin and Milton Obote are cut from the same cloth after all. While Museveni did gain his legitimacy from fighting against the destructive regimes of both men, his staunch desire to remain president for life, at the expense of the country he rules, shows he has a lot more similarities than differences with his predecessors. Unfortunately the ultimate losers remain the Ugandan people who have, since independence, moved on from one repressive regime to the next. One suspects that for them, the worry is not just about ending Museveni’s life presidency but more importantly breaking the cycle of having megalomaniacs as leaders.
