By Adventino Banjwa
No well-meaning opposition political figure in Uganda today will fail to argue that as things stand now politically, Uganda is still entangled in cycles of bloodshed that have accompanied change from one regime to another since 1962.
From President Museveni in the 1980s, the promise of national deliverance from the curse of violent regime change is still alive. Should it not be ironic, then, that despite this general consensus on the long-due nature of a peaceful political transition, little debate has been dedicated to the question of political transition itself?
We need to ask ourselves: Why has a peaceful transfer of political power been elusive for Uganda all these years?
With contemporary realities of violence inspired by state tribalism, can peaceful transfer of power from one face to another be pursued as a political end in itself, or must it always be linked to some broader political objective?
In the latter case, how is the broader political objective framed in our contemporary political debates and struggles?
Think of president Museveni’s take on the subject in the honeymoon years of his government. In his work on postcolonial Uganda, historian Phares Mutibwa quotes President Museveni as critiquing what must have appeared to him as a pervasive political reductionism, one that linked the persistent political crisis to the actions of Obote, Amin, the Okellos, and so on.
Museveni argued that such an attitude “blindly equated” these leaders “with the system, that is, the state”, with an equally blinding conclusion that “their removal from power” is the final solution. Surely, a lot has happened since the 1980s.
The seemingly revolutionary discourse of the 1980s subsided significantly, giving way to a dangerous political conservatism: no change. With this, anyone must appear unserious to take seriously any of the statements made in the 1980s – which is not to disqualify the statements themselves.
My point, however, is that Museveni’s comments on power transfer and the postcolonial political crisis above mentioned have many leads into our own predicament today. If it is true that the problem is not the individual per se but the state structure organized in such a way as to make political violence inevitable and clinging onto power a necessary outcome; what Museveni’s earlier rebel activity tells us is that the agency of individual leaders mattered in as much as they failed to come to terms with problematic postcolonial state structure.
In such conditions, the removal of such individuals from power might set pace for decolonizing the state, depending on the nature of political movements that usher in new leaders. With a benefit of time, we now know too well that due to failure to effectively decolonize the state, leaders ushered into power by the political and armed movement of the 1980s could not, until now, deliver on the promised era of peaceful power transfers.
As left-leaning rebels turned into fanatic neoliberal converts in power, earlier decolonial sentiments were discarded with no remorse. Perhaps the key point to take note of is the idea that the ongoing struggle for power, in which the question of a peaceful political transition is high on agenda, must be anchored on the overriding objective of rethinking the political and politics in our postcolonial polity, that is, to decolonize the state.
If the 1980s generation has until now failed both to decolonize the state and to effect an era of peaceful power transfer; our contemporary puzzle entails striking a balance between the ongoing struggle to have a new face in power while at the same time persistently pursuing, in our respective political formations/movements, the question of what it means to decolonize the state today.
Even if we do not have all the answers yet, we must endeavour to keep the question alive.
The author is PhD Fellow, Makerere institute of Social Research, Makerere University.
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