By Dennis Katungi
On January 29th 1986, the just sworn-in president, Yoweri Museveni announced that the events of the last few days that had seen Gen. Tito Okello’s government toppled and the NRA rebels assume power was ‘a fundamental change, not a mere change of guards’. That single statement captured the national spirit and would in the years to come be the yardstick to measure Musevei’s presidency.
The NRM came into government at a time of serious national crisis. Uganda had been split into two, with the NRA guerrillas of Yoweri Museveni controlling western Uganda and Masaka town and the Military Council government of General Tito Okello controlling the rest of the country.
As for Kampala, the city was – between August 1985 and January 1986 – under the control of the Military Council, but some of the suburbs were controlled by Andrew Kayiira’s Uganda Freedom Movemnt [UFM] on one hand and Captain George Nkwanga’s Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda [FEDEMU] group on the other. Never in Uganda’s history had the situation deteriorated so badly that the country was physically divided into different factions. With the real possibility that Uganda was about to break up, the political class [with the exception of the recently deposed UPC party] agreed to the suspension of political party activities for an interim period.
The new head of state, President Yoweri Museveni, and his political cadres argued that what they called sectarian religious and ethnic tendencies of the political parties had led Uganda to the verge of collapse. Legal notice No.1 of March 1986, drafted by the interim parliament, the National Resistance Council [NRC], expressly banned political party activities. Thus during the first ten years of the NRM’s tenure in office, political party activities were officially legally abolished. Uganda was thus governed under a ‘no party system’ which critics claimed was a disguised one-party system.
Several prominent political party leaders and officials were given positions in the new NRM government, among them the Democratic Party president-general Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere, Joseph Mulenga, also of DP, Conservative Party president Jehoash Mayanja-Nkangi, and Jaberi Bidandi-Ssali, the secretary General in 1980 of Uganda Patriotic Movement [UPM], the party in which Museveni contested as a presidential candidate in the 1980 elections. The NRM government now presented itself as being “broad-based” in having incorporated leaders of these parties into its official ranks. The decision to absorb party officials into the NRM ranks was not entirely out of charity. While the NRM gained the military upper hand in 1985 and eventually fought its way to power in 1986, it was apparent to its leaders that they lacked a basic political base rooted in Uganda’s history, tendencies, sentiment and organisation. Traditional political parties become a poaching ground for the NRM.
The NRA was a victorious army but its political wing, the NRM, was yet to establish itself as a viable political entity. By presenting a government filled by politicians from the traditional parties, like DP and CP which were both rooted in the reality of Uganda’s religious, ethnic, educational and societal history, the NRM, in a sense, used the established credentials of these two parties to create its own political base. But perhaps, the masterstroke of NRM was the introduction of Local Councils, initially called Resistance Councils [RCs] at all tiers of local government. The nine-member committees at the village, parish, sub-county, county, municipalities and Districts effectively dismantled the colonial administrative set-up that had persisted through post-independence governments and introduced basic democracy at a local level. But more than that, it created a political super-structure that would not only be the enduring legacy of NRM but would also play a critical role in its retention of power for so long.
Nonetheless, political parties soon began to agitate and allege harassment under the NRM during its first years in power. They based on incidents like the arrest of the Treasurer of the Conservative Party, a one Kawesa arrested in October 1987whose home and offices were searched. The idea of a multi-party political system did not fade away; there were several attempts to keep the party spirit alive. In 1986, Ugandan exiles based in London started a political party called the Uganda People’s Democratic Movement [UPDM] with former prime minister Eric Otema Alimadi as its chairman and Akena Adoko, Milton Obote’s cousin and former director-general of the GSU intelligence agency, as vice chairman. It also established a military wing – the [UPDA] whose top commanders were Brig. Odong Latek and Brig. Angelo Okello. The UPDA later signed a peace accord with the NRM in 1988, ending its two-year armed rebellion. The NRM and its leaders had learnt from their history that ignoring rebels and labelling them as ‘bandits’ was a non-starter. In 1990, a faction calling itself DP mobilisers Group emerged onto the political landscape, led by a veteran DP official Michael Kaggwa. He insisted that the NRM and Museveni were not genuine in their claim about eventually returning Uganda to a multi-party system after pacifying the country. He pointed to reports of human rights abuses and corruption. Attempts by the DP Mobilizers group to hold public rallies at the City Square in Kampala were often met by anti-riot police.
The UPC, with its president Milton Obote in exile in Lusaka, remained the most defiant of the parties along with the DP mobilisers Group. Obote, always a foremost politician, displayed his brilliant writing and analytical skills in a paper he published in April 1990 titled Notes on Concealment of Genocide in Uganda, in which he narrated Ugandan History since independence and claimed Museveni’s government was engaging in genocide and gross human rights violations since 1986. His accusations were, however, largely ignored both internally and internationally as the words of a bitter old man – with Museveni continuing to earn accolades from all over the world for stabilizing the country even as the war was still raging on in northern Uganda.
In 1994, a Constituent Assembly was elected countrywide to debate and promulgate a new national constitution. Political party activities remained banned. However, the NRC elections held in March 1994 had an undercurrent of political sentiment and loyalty. These being the first major elections since the NRM came to power; it was an unstated referendum on Museveni’s rule as well as a rough indicator of how much, if at all, loyalty to parties remained in the Ugandan hearts and minds. Following the promulgation of the new constitution in 1995, a general election was called for 1996 and veteran DP leader Paul Ssemogerere was selected to head a loose coalition of the traditional political parties under an umbrella association called the Inter-Political Forces Cooperation [IPFC]. Sixteen years after the 1980 election, Ssemogerere was still a leading party figure. He showed clout on the campaign trail. However, in the elections, Museveni was declared the winner with 75% of the votes cast, leaving 22.3% for Ssemogerere and 2.3% for Kibirige Mayanja, the new entrant on the political scene. From then onwards, President Museveni and his NRM Party have gained a stronghold over political power in Uganda. Today, the 26th of January 2025, it is 39 years of the NRM and President Museveni as the dominant political force in Uganda. The fundamental change manifested.
Dennis Katungi is the AG Deputy Executive Director – Uganda Media Centre.
@Dennis-Katungi