This review essay considers three recent monographs on politics in Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda. On coming to power in 1986, Museveni declared that National Resistance Movement (NRM) rule represented a genuine break with post-colonial Uganda’s anarchic past. The NRM managed to contain fractious socio-military currents within the country but did not create durable administrative structures. Instead, the Museveni family captured both the party and state to perpetuate their personal rule. The following synthesis of these three works demonstrates how the capture of public institutions by private interests in Uganda created strong oligarchs and an instrumentalised party state.
Moses Khisa’s edited volume views the Museveni regime’s resilience as a product of autocratic adaptability. According to Khisa, autocratic adaptability consists of three core components: manipulating Uganda’s institutional mosaic through the selective co-optation or persecution of sub-national elites, targeted patronage to shifting coalitions of supporters and periodic reshuffles of national governments that give different institutional, ethno-regional and societal actors opportunities to extract rents from public assets (9–15). By playing off various interests against each other, Museveni prevents any single group from accumulating enough power to pose an appreciable threat to his rule.
As demonstrated in Nelson Kasfir’s chapter, distributional clientelism did not emerge from primordial patrimonial practices rooted in African traditions. NRM clientelism is instead a product of rational choices made by ruling elites whose main priority is to remain in power. Rulers provide clients with access to resources in exchange for loyalty. This nexus does not so much hollow out state institutions as reshape them into personal instruments wielded to reward Museveni’s allies and punish his enemies. Furthermore, Kasfir modifies typical discussions on patron–client relations by making a cogent case for mutual entrapment. Once clients partake in illicit enrichment, they rely on their patrons for protection from prosecution. Such protection can be withdrawn if a client proves disloyal. Yet, Museveni’s inner circle cannot remain in power without clients’ support. Consequently, they repeatedly plunder state resources to reward loyal clients (32–34). Should patronage dry up, support would dissipate and the regime could be exposed to existential risks.
The regime’s scramble for political support has empowered some clients more than others. Tabitha Mulyampiti’s chapter on female representation in NRM-dominated parliaments describes how social movements for gender equality were co-opted in ways that reinforced regime hegemony. Ugandan women have typically faced grave political and economic obstacles to advancement. Upon entering the legislature through reserved quota arrangements, women were so grateful to obtain generous remuneration that they became highly reluctant to challenge presidential policies (115–117). In addition, Janet Museveni, the president’s wife, actively manipulates government-sanctioned feminism in ways they serve her, and her family’s, material and political interests.
The Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) proved more difficult to control. Former or serving military men, such as Kizza Besigye and David Sejusa, have mounted formidable political challenges to Museveni’s rule. Yet, Museveni has thus far managed to stave off such threats and contain pretensions at praetorian independence. He has done so through a combination of propaganda, corruption and coup-proofing. Uganda’s 1981–1986 Bush War involved numerous rebel organisations. It was prosecuted to a successful conclusion through combined insurgent efforts and internal fissures within Milton Obote’s government. However, as shown by Jonathan Fisher and Stephanie Cawood, Museveni used state resources to carefully curate a narrative that put his National Resistance Army (NRA) at the centre of the struggle (62). More recently, government media and commemoration ceremonies have centred Museveni’s personal role in this conflict, presenting him as Uganda’s sole saviour.
Yet, military loyalty is ultimately clinched through material rewards. As elaborated in Sebastiano Rwengabo’s contribution, military corruption does not connote institutional failure. Rather, such extraction secures regime longevity. Museveni provides senior commanders with regular payoffs to ensure those controlling the state’s arsenal never turn their guns on those they are supposed to protect (149–150). As a successor to the NRA, a rebel force over which Museveni maintained tight personal control, the UPDF has not been able to achieve institutional autonomy. Indeed, it can be viewed as an extension of the president’s kin group. Salim Saleh, Museveni’s much younger half-brother, was army chief from 1987 to 1989 and still wields enormous influence in defence matters. Museveni’s son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, headed the Special Forces Command and is currently UPDF chief (157). Moreover, there are few checks and balances capable of reining in military prerogatives. Since the NRM itself is little more than the NRA/UPDF’s political wing, effective civilian oversight over military budgets and conduct never developed. Gerald Bareebe’s chapter complements Rwengabo’s arguments by emphasising the overrepresentation of senior UPDF officers from southwestern Uganda, Museveni’s home region (185–187). In 2008, 75% of top army positions were held by men from this area. This makes the army’s upper echelons a de facto closed caste, thus mimicking the exclusionary practices of different northern military elites during the Obote and Amin eras.
While Museveni might appear unassailable, his very policies have created dangerous political fissures. Khisa’s chapter stresses that the generational tensions that characterise contemporary Uganda are playing out within the ruling family itself. Odrek Rwabwogo, the president’s son-in-law, has formed an alliance with Salim Saleh, which is apparently pitted against Muhoozi’s presidential ambitions. Muhoozi is supported in these ambitions by his mother Janet (227). Museveni himself shows no inclination to leave office and may well cling to power until encroaching decrepitude, or eventual death, compels a long-delayed transfer of power. Beneath these byzantine machinations are a bevy of inter-regional tensions exacerbated by decades of NRM fostered divisions, which have left influential sub-national elites embittered and eager to seize greater shares of power. Such ominous conclusions make for grim reading, but this volume raises important questions that Uganda’s power elites will eventually have to address if the country is to remain socially stabile after Museveni.
In Slow Poison, Mahmood Mamdani utilises a longer kaleidoscopic lens to explain Uganda’s current predicament. Part memoir and part scholarship, Mamdani interjects his personal experiences across political developments from Idi Amin to Museveni. On occasion, his shifting perspectives disrupt the work’s narrative flow. Yet, this does not detract from its originality and insightful conceptual framework. By ‘slow poison’, Mamdani means a continual ‘fragmentation of the subject population, an ongoing and seemly endless process, reinforced by official violence and institutionalized corruption’ (3). By appropriating insidious imperial administrative practices premised on political tribalism, Uganda’s post-colonial leaders undermined national cohesion to perpetuate their rule. Divided populations are easier to control, and societies turned against themselves are less able to hold rapacious elites to account.
Manufactured tribalism has been a constant theme throughout Mamdani’s work. However, Slow Poison contributes to a growing body of literature that fundamentally reassesses the socio-political and economic impacts of Amin’s rule. Rather than deconstructing grotesque cultural caricatures, fabricated by western commentators eager to demonise an independent-minded African leader, Mamdani focuses on Amin’s efforts at nation building. At root, Amin felt Uganda was an African country that had to put its black citizens first. As such, the assets of its relatively privileged Asian residents were targeted for expropriation and used to construct a black capitalist class. This drew extensive condemnation from western states, with Britain in particular packaging the Asian expulsion in ways that made it look like a benevolent humanitarian state and depicted Amin as a mindless savage hellbent on economic self-destruction. Britain had used Asians as an intermediary group during the colonial era to mask exploitative practices architected by metropolitan administrators and corporations. Asians thus paid the price for British misrule.
Amin’s Uganda was by no means immune to the slow poison of political tribalism. Nonetheless, Mamdani stresses that inherent tensions between Nubi troops and South Sudanese refugee soldiers, rather than Amin’s deliberate machinations, undermined military coherence (100–101, 106, 112, 120). Further efforts at fostering national cohesion through negative integration led Amin to condemn his erstwhile British and Israeli patrons by embracing political Islam and engaging in irridentist aggression against neighbouring Tanzania, a country that was openly supporting Obote’s rival government in exile. These cross-border tensions eventually led to war and Amin’s ouster in 1979. According to Mamdani, the regime’s collapse was a product of its anti-western ethno-populism, not its irrational brutality.
Museveni, by contrast, embraced neoliberal economic policies and reverted to political tribalism. His steady implementation of the Washington Consensus allowed him to brutally consolidate power with minimal interference from western government. Upon entering Kampala in 1986, the NRM/NRA spent the next ten years completing its conquest of Uganda. State violence was largely directed away from Bantu-speaking southern areas and towards Luo-speaking communities that had supported Obote’s rule. Mamdani argues that after about 1995, Museveni deliberately kept the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency going to prolong western aid and maintain a pretext to collectively punish and control a disgruntled Acholi population (225–230). Further military assistance came from America after Museveni readily embraced Washington’s war on terror. Ugandan troops acted as surrogates for US strategic interest across eastern Africa in exchange for generous security assistance and opportunities to loot natural resources. Foreign weapons and training enabled the accumulation of plunder, which, in turn, replenished the patronage pools Museveni needed to reward kinsmen and clients. Hence, external support facilitated regime resilience.
Mamdani pairs his views on securitised governance with a discussion of societal fragmentation. Museveni both subverted and co-opted sub-national identities to perpetuate his rule. When encountering hostile socio-political currents rooted in structures of traditional authority, such as resurgent Bugandan monarchism, Museveni dissipates these challenges by cultivating lower-level local nationalisms. Sub-chiefs and kinglets within larger chiefdoms or kingdoms receive state patronage and political protection to support their bids for self-determination (270–271, 283–285). The NRM also used territorial redistricting to break up kingdoms aspiring to widen their administrative autonomy. For Mamdani, such neo-colonial practices degraded national cohesion and put Uganda’s future territorial integrity at risk.
Slow Poison is a thought-provoking work, which will no doubt elicit much discussion. However, Mamdani makes rather too sharp a distinction between the Amin and Museveni regimes. Since the mid-1960s, Uganda has, in effect, been ruled by gunmen, either directly, in the form of overt military oligarchies, or, as during Obote’s two stints in power, indirectly, when civilian leaders became over-reliant on their armed enforcers. Uganda has not yet managed to break out of this militarised trajectory. Power is still seized and sustained by men with guns and gunmen, whether populist or neo-colonial, seldom cultivate civic nationalism.
Nevertheless, Gerald Bareebe’s monograph makes a compelling case for civil authoritarianism, which he characterises as ‘the centralization of political authority in the hands of a dominant leader or a narrow ruling elite, alongside the selective incorporation of societal actors’ (13). In contrast to Mamdani, this work does not see such incorporation as primarily driven by Museveni’s political calculus. Bareebe instead views co-optation as a necessary compromise with residual social structures. Comprising organisations such as churches, legacy political parties and traditional kingdoms, these structures possess sufficient levels of social power to constrain autocratic aspirations. To contain mass resistance, the NRM must co-opt societal leaders into state institutions and patronage networks. This creates composite modes of governance beneath the political kingdom’s commanding heights. Museveni comes across in Bareebe’s text as generally cautious and unwilling to constantly clamp down on societal forces he does not fully control for fear of generating unmanageable opposition.
The resilience of autonomous social structures after a continuum of mass violence and political instability from 1966 to 1986 is indeed impressive. However, Bareebe avoids excessive optimism by repeatedly emphasising the elite nature of these social pacts. Party barons, businesspeople, church prelates and royals reap disproportionate material rewards from political deals with the government, while benefits for their respective constituencies are far more limited (chaps. 4–6). In addition, when the NRM encountered subaltern social movements it considered beyond the pale, such as Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement, it met these challenges with crushing violence (46–51). Even highly revered sub-national institutions, like the Bugandan monarchy, were subjected to harsh repression when they attempted to garner greater powers (76–78). Essentially, Museveni’s NRM decides the terms of engagement with social elites. To presume otherwise, risks obscuring the constraints under which non-state actors operate when interacting with the ruling party.
Bareebe’s attempts to contrast Uganda’s experience with other African cases raise certain difficulties. To be sure, Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) imposed a far more centralised despotism after coming to power in 1994 (162–165). Rwanda’s genocide was carried out with unprecedented ferocity, and the RPF fought for total victory, although complete pacification was not achieved until suppressing a northern Hutu insurgency in 2000. These violent ructions obliterated countervailing social structures and allowed the RPF to fill the ensuing vacuum unhindered by embedded constraints. However, Bareebe does not consider Rwanda’s historically rooted administrative cycles, wherein relatively brief periods of socio-political collapse were followed by deeper state consolidation and protracted despotism. A pre-colonial absolute monarchy was toppled by German and Belgian colonial agents only for Rwandan kings to co-opt their foreign overlords into projects geared toward expanding royal authority. The Tutsi monarchy’s collapse from 1959 to 1961 resulted in highly centralised Hutu republics capable of surveilling and mobilising peasant communities for political objectives. Kagame’s RPF operated within this established path dependency, further strengthening the Rwandan state’s capacities for social control. Kagame himself comes from an aristocratic background and acts very much like a Tutsi king. Historical precedents carried over across 1994’s critical juncture. The genocide thus initiated more continuity than change. This shortcoming aside, Bareebe’s work makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on authoritarian resilience in contemporary Africa.
Taken together, these three works allow for some general conclusions on Ugandan politics in the late Museveni era. Crucially, Museveni’s sense of personal ownership over the NRM undermined efforts at building an autonomous party state. His proclivity to delegate responsibilities to close kin and utter refusal to transfer power within the party to equally capable struggle stalwarts raise very serious questions as to whether the NRM can survive after he leaves the scene. As little more than an instrument of Museveni’s inner circle, the party lacks robust bureaucratic structures able to immediately transfer their loyalties to a new supreme leader. Instead, the NRM has facilitated the construction of a militarised family state in which the president and his kin deploy coercive institutions to retain power and accumulate wealth. Museveni’s advancing age will compel him to gradually loosen his grip. As he does so, factional interests led by his family members will jostle for advantage and a presidential succession beneficial to them. Oligarchic feuds will grow fiercer and further imperil possibilities for peaceful political change.
