Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni. PHOTO FILE | NATION
It is a comedy of acceptance and rejection. I mean the ongoing
consultations in Uganda regarding how old a presidential candidate ought
to be.
For the past few weeks, the country has been
treated to scenes where large crowds have turned up at consultations
convened by opposition politicians and in striking unanimity, rejected
the proposal to make it legal for 18-year-olds and over-75-year-olds to
contest.
The issue has really not been whether the idea
of amending the Constitution is in itself good or bad. Rather, those
rejecting the proposal have done so because they do not like the idea of
President Yoweri Museveni running for office again at the age of 77,
after leading the country for 35 years.
They are, in
short, feeling Museveni fatigue. Truth be told, there are signs of this
fatigue even within his party, the National Resistance Movement.
That
became clear when some ministers and other officials went to their
rural home areas to “consult” local leaders on removing the age limit,
and were told in no uncertain terms to not even think about it.
Much
of this, however, was before MPs were handed large sums of money
ostensibly to spend on the consultations, and before the NRM deployed
some of its leading luminaries to go around the country, region by
region, and do their own consultations.
Such is the
vigour with which opposition politicians began their anti-amendment
campaign and such was the enthusiastic support they got, that when the
NRM began touting their regional teams, one could have laughed them out
of town.
Of late, however, there is a confusing flurry
of media reports pointing to the NRM’s consultations returning
overwhelming endorsements. In some cases, this is happening in the same
areas where before, opposition politicians met with resounding
rejections. There is an interesting catch, however.
The
NRM’s indoor consultations are exclusively with selected local big men
and women, convened in choice venues, almost certainly over refreshments
to wet their throats.
Meanwhile, the opposition has
been convening everybody, including local riff-raff, among them
unemployed youth who have no time for a president (the only one they
have known in their lives) who may have brought back stability, but who
can’t give them jobs, let alone hope that their circumstances will
improve.
There are, of course, many reasons why the
local political, social and economic elite are endorsing the proposal.
They include the specious argument that the status quo is discriminatory
and therefore unfair.
There is also the fear, almost
never stated but hardly difficult for a perceptive observer to detect,
that without the charismatic Museveni as the NRM’s candidate, defeating a
growing opposition would be that much more difficult.
The
issue then becomes: Why risk defeat if he still wants to hang around,
which he evidently does? There are other considerations as well, and
these have come out clearly of late.
Some of the local
bigwigs just want something in return for supporting the constitutional
amendment. There are places where they want their areas to be upgraded
from whatever they are now, to district status. And so they say, “We
shall support mzee (old man) but he should also consider this thing of ours.”
A
district is no small thing. It comes with, among other things, jobs and
associated perks and elevated status for those that get them. And the
people who are likely to get these things in the event that an area is
declared a district, are the same people being consulted.
Although
by law district status ought to be conferred on an area after it has
been found to fulfil a number of criteria, increasingly when politics
comes in, those can be disregarded. The good men and women interacting
with the party’s emissaries know this well.
In other
places, the delegates have been asking for “industrial parks” to be set
up in their areas in exchange for their consent. Why they would imagine
that industrial parks can be set up just anywhere and everywhere is
unclear, but then that is what they want if they are to open the way for
the possibility that weighty matters of state could be put in the hands
of teenagers and old men and women with diminished mental and physical
capacity.
The same goes for some people who, after
years of arguing for a federal system of government, now want it
re-examined, with the possibility of giving Museveni what he wants and
they in turn getting what they want. In recent times, this kind of
reasoning has been appearing on social media, the central argument of
those who are pushing it being that this is the moment to “force
Museveni to listen.”
Perhaps most striking was a
request by a local leader somewhere in northern Uganda that, in return
for area supporting the proposal, a former army chief of staff, the late
brigadier David Oyite Ojok, a prominent son of the area, be “recognise”
for his role in the war that toppled Idi Amin’s government. And the
comedy rolls on.
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com
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