The NRM at 29 --- a retrospective By Timothy Kalyegira It was a revolutionary organization founded and structured in the mode of Maoist Communism grassroots, peasant-led movement. The founder of the NRM, Yoweri Museveni, had come from a complicated, underprivileged background that made him both resentful and envious of any semblance of privilege. His first and most loyal supporters, the Rwandan Tutsi refugees in Uganda starting in 1959, had a similar motivation for joining him, self-conscious of their underdog status in Ugandan society and also hoping to use the NRM as a springboard for a future armed return home to Rwanda. A third group, Baganda loyalists, had a separate motive for joining the NRM. The NRM was fighting the UPC government of Milton Obote and, after the traumatic events of May 1966 in which the Kabaka of Buganda had fled into exile in Britain, anyone or group fighting Obote was always going to earn their support. However, the elitist tendencies among its intellectual leaders and commanders and their contempt for the peasantry soon came to the fore in Luwero Triangle, as several accounts of officers and commanders enjoying privileges as the foot soldiers lived harshly and ate leanly. The NRM leaders discovered, within the first year, that their only long-term viability depended on external support. This crucial support started coming in 1982 when the Libyan strongman Col. Muammar Gaddafi, still incensed at the role Tanzania played in the ouster of his friend Idi Amin, resorted to the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” principle. Gaddafi sought initially to support the Uganda National Rescue Front (UNRF) group headed by a former Minister of Finance under Amin, Brig. Moses Ali, a fellow Muslim. The reality was that although Ali was Gaddafi’s first choice, he did not have the troop strength and organizational capacity such as Museveni’s NRM had. The Libyan compromise was to support a joint NRM-UNRF anti-Obote effort, with Museveni as Chairman and Moses Ali as Vice President should the NRM ever come to power. By 1984, with Gaddafi’s regime coming under international condemnation from the West after the shooting dead of a British policewoman reportedly from the Libyan embassy in London, the NRM had realized that it could not hope to come to power in Uganda without some form of British or American support. It started to tone down on its hardline Marxism, invited British and other western journalists to visit its training camps in Luwero. To the locals and pro-Obote group, the NRM in Luwero and elsewhere could be ruthless and massacre thousands without compunction. To the western journalists, diplomats and government officials, the NRM presented a courteous, intellectual face. A military coup had in the meantime ousted the Obote government in July 1985, a fractured remnant of that government formed a military junta hoping for some kind of continuity, but was overwhelmed by the Museveni group, which took part in Kenyan-mediated peace talks mainly as a delaying tactic. The NRA, the NRM’s fighting arm, did eventually seize state power on Jan. 25, 1986, delayed the announcement until the next day, Jan. 26, 1986, and Moses Ali did not become the Vice President. It was not long before the contradictory goals of the anti-Obote groups started to come to the fore. The essentially Republican and Marxist NRM core could not entertain the monarchist aspirations of many Baganda who had lent the NRM their support. The NRM could not really share power with former armed rivals headed by Andrew Kayira of the Uganda Freedom Movement. The NRM, however, also could not take charge of and rehabilitate the war-shattered economy without western aid and so came one of its major policy about-turns, handing Uganda over to the International Monetary Fund’s supervision and direction. The accumulation of Museveni’s childhood experiences meant that once he had secured power, he was not going to relinquish it for as long as he could. Being president helped expunge the lifelong feelings of insecurity and humiliation that he had suffered. Conflicts began, between the NRM government and the influential Buganda kingdom after an initial honeymoon period from 1986 to 1993. Reports of corruption ran rampant, much of it directly traceable to the President, started making the rounds in Kampala media, reports of rigged presidential elections after 1996 came in, reports of torture taking place in secret army and intelligence safe houses also filtered through. The southern half of the country, by and large, felt that the 1986 change of government had at last brought civility to the state while the northern and northeast half experienced a scale of brutality at the hands of the NRA soldiers starting from 1986 to about 2006 that has yet to be fully documented and acknowledged. The economy, with heavy western aid and investment, started to grow in many places, the media was flung open to private investment and later the entire economy as well. The tax base expanded significantly. Foreigners came to be seen as enjoying greater investment incentives than the indigenous Ugandans. Institutions of state that had survived wars and economic crisis started to crumble under the NRM government: public hospitals, schools, libraries, cooperative societies, government departments. By 2015, it was clear, if it had not already been so for 20 years, that the NRM was firmly on the way not just to being a one-party state, but in many ways a one-man, one-family state in the mode of Togo, Gabon and Cameroon. ENDS
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 13:40:08 +0000
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