Yoweri Museveni has made great strides in dismantling the vestiges of colonial rule in Uganda, but Mahmood Mamdani questions the long-term stability of outlawing political opposition
WHEN Yoweri Katuga Museveni came to power in 1986 at the head of the National Resistance Army (NRA), he pledged ”Fundamental Change” to the people of Uganda. Ten years later, when he ran for presidency under a new Constitution, his slogan was ”No Change”.
Had Museveni changed, or had the political system in Uganda changed so fundamentally under 10 years of the Museveni presidency that he could pledge no more than to conserve it?
In its first year of power, the National Resistance Movement-led (NRM) government appointed a national commission of inquiry into the local government system. I was appointed chair of the commission.
A key question that concerned the commission was whether to institutionalise and legalise the popular village assemblies and elected peasant committees, called resistance councils and committees, originally introduced by the NRM in guerrilla-held areas, or to continue with chieftanship introduced under British colonial rule and sanctioned by every successive government.
Not only did the commission decide, after two years gathering evidence on the role of chiefs in rural areas, on a modified version of the former, it also considered the RC system as the kernel of the agrarian revolution brought to rural Uganda by the NRM.
For a peasant in 1986, the chief signified the embodiment of authority. At the start of the year, the chief assessed his petty holding and decided how much tax the peasant would pay.
If the peasant thought he had been unfairly assessed, he appealed to the chief. Once he had settled the appeal, the chief came to collect the tax.
If it was not forthcoming, the chief put the peasant in jail. Once the jail term had been served, the chief decided what fine the peasant would pay over and above the original tax. And so the wheel of oppression turned.
There was little that was traditional, and everything colonial, about the powers the chief enjoyed. Not only did he exercise administrative authority, he also had legislative power (he could pass by-laws requiring peasants to donate labour or cash for ”development”), executive power (he could implement the by-law) and judicial power (he could punish failure to obey his by-laws).
When the system was a parliamentary democracy, the peasant could vote for a MP of his choice, but never for a chief of his choice. In a country where urban areas were administered by an electoral civic order and rural areas through appointed chiefs, the impact of a multi-party democracy turned out to be superficial and explosive.
What else could an election in a predominantly rural country, where electoral choice was limited to the minority of citizens in urban areas and to chiefs in the rural areas, be but superficial?
Simultaneously, would not the same election – in which the winning party came to represent citizens in urban society and to be master of the peasant subjects it ruled through chiefs it had appointed – be equally explosive?
Chiefs understood this fact well. None could underplay the importance of delivering ”their” peasants to their party. Not only did the chief claim to represent ”his” people, he claimed it as a traditional ethnic right.
Electoral issues in rural areas took on an ethnic flavour as political parties adopted the ethnic tag of the chief’s authority.
An electoral democracy where peasants were left as a rightless mass under a hierarchy of chiefs inevitably led to a double corruption. The city came to be linked to the country through patronage, and these ties also adopted an ethnic flavour.
The conveyor belt for the institutionalised patronage was the political party system. The switch that linked the two forms of corruption was the election: it set in motion the machinery of patronage and triggered ethnic tensions.
Museveni’s political views were formed through two sets of contrasting experiences. One was a politically turbulent Uganda run by the hierarchy of chiefs; the other was a stable Tanzania run by a single party apparatus.
Alongside Ghana and Guinea, Tanzania came to symbolise the most radical attempt to deal with the political legacy of colonial rule by dismantling the institution of chiefs. In all three countries, a militant anti-colonialism linked militant urban- based nationalists to peasant struggles against chiefship and its corruption of ”tradition”. The inheritor of that experience was the single party.
At one level, the single party was a way to contain the social and political fragmentation reinforced by ethnically organised native authorities. At another level though, the militants of the single party came to distrust democracy, by which they understood an electoral reform that left chiefship intact in the rural areas and so confined civil society to urban areas.
A democratic link between the urban and the rural was, in their eyes, synonymous with an ethnically based system of privilege that linked chiefs’ power in rural areas with urban-based civil organisations. Even if a solution was imposed from above, they understood that the single party was a better alternative.
While it dismantled chiefship in rural areas, replacing chiefs with cadres, the single party tended to depoliticise civil society in urban areas. The more it succeeded, the more it became bureaucratised.
As the centre of gravity shifted from party to state, the method of work came to rely more on administrative coercion than political persuasion. In the words of Franz Fanon, militants of yesterday turned into informers of today.
The attempt to reform localised despotism turned into centralised despotism: instead of a ”customary” halo over the power of the chief, we got cadres of the single party unleashing compulsion in the language of ”revolution” and ”development”.
The reaction to the legacy of the single party came in two waves. The two reactions to the single party came to see democracy in opposite terms: one heralded democracy as representative, the other as participatory. While the former identified democracy with political parties and countrywide elections, the latter claimed that democracy could only be meaningful through grassroots participation at the village level
The representative trend came to be known as the pro-democracy movement. From Francophone countries in West Africa (Benin, Niger, Ivory Coast, Mali) to Anglophone countries in the east (Kenya, Sudan and Zambia), the pro-democracy movement tended to be urban-centred.
It was guided by the perspective that democracy equals multi-party competition and majority rule through electoral representation. Wherever multi-party reform took root, the results were disappointing.
In the absence of a democratisation of power in rural areas, urban-based political parties were forced to deal with ethnically organised chiefs’ hierarchies in the countryside. In the process, parties tended to turn into many ethnic coalitions. While usually less coercive than the single party variant, its bitter fruit was ethnic conflict.
It is the great virtue of Museveni, and the NRM, that they did not dismiss the legacy of militant nationalism, but critically incorporated that experience into a reworked programme.
The continuity lay in the conviction that without dismantling ethnically organised chiefs’ power, it would not be possible to check tendencies to political fragmentation strengthened by colonial indirect rule. The difference lay in the recognition that this dismantling could not be from above and by force; it would have to be from below and through popular support.
As one would expect, the participatory trend developed through reforms in not one, but several countries.
But it is in Uganda that the lesson was underlined with the full force of comprehensive reform: the introduction of resistance committees.
The resistance committee system separated the powers fused in the chief. Legislative power no longer belonged to a council of all village adults, and executive power lay with a committee elected by the village council.
The chief became a simple administrative officer: paid, hired and fired like any other member of the civil service – except that he was accountable to popular organs.
”The first function of the resistance committee,” said the 1987 commission of inquiry report, ”is that of a watchdog: it is to resist any tendency on the part of state officials towards abuse of authority or denial of the rights of the people.”
I characterise these two broad reform movements as multi-party and representative on the one hand, and non-party and participatory on the other. If one thought of democracy as representative, the other championed it as participatory. If one saw the countryside as the real problem, the other saw the city as symptomatic of corrupting tendencies.
While the focus of multi-party reform was on democratising the centre through elections, non-party reform was on simultaneously emancipating and knitting together the local and the rural through grassroots assemblies.
Such a comparison, however, misses an important point. That is the originality of Museveni’s political contribution. For while the movement for multi-party reform is literally content to translate democracy as a turnkey project from Western manuals, it is to Museveni’s credit to have come to grips with a key political legacy of Africa’s colonial experience – the recognition that the real and enduring political legacy of colonial rule in Africa goes beyond the racial effrontery of alien rule to local despotisms that are institutionalised and legitimised as so many ”customary” forms of power.
To appreciate Museveni’s contribution is not to argue that it is free of any dilemma. There are at least two.
The NRM’s great success has been the rural and local; its great dilemma continues to be the urban and the central. While village assemblies have brought a measure of self- administration – and peace – to rural areas, they have little to offer urban constituencies demanding the right to organise political parties and to participate in multi-party elections.
For this reason, the NRM is often tempted to pit rural against urban areas, arguing that the participatory aspect of democracy is its popular aspect, whereas its representation side is really meant for selfish elites – who can be safely ignored as they are a minority.
Or, in a different version of the same argument: a multi-party democracy may be okay for Europe, which is urban and class- divided; but not for Africa, which is rural and where class divisions are incipient and people tend to live in village communities.
Urban areas may be small, particularly in Uganda, which, at less than 10%, has one of the lowest proportions of urban dwellers in Africa. But Africa is urbanising at a rate second to none globally. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, the capital Kinshasa alone accounts for nearly 15% of the total population.
To take into account the most dynamic features of the African reality is to recognise that African countries are not just villages or towns but both; not just rural peasant communities or class-divided urban areas, but both. It is a context requiring us to think of democracy in both its participatory and its representative aspect. How to marry the two is the first challenge we face.
The second challenge stems from a more universal lesson, one underlined by political crises in different contexts. How many ”revolutionary” governments do we know of that began with mass support and ended as repressive isolated regimes? Governments that used popular support to avoid the question of power, of a constitutional change in government?
Is there not a shared lesson in the old Soviet bloc Communist Party and the single party in post-independence Africa: both held elections and both did not allow rival political organisations?
Is it not true that any political system that does not guarantee the right of opposition – the right to organise as an opposition – can never be stable and self- sustaining?
Professor Mahmood Mamdani is the head of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town