I experienced, in a small way and from a comparatively safe distance, the violence of Museveni’s security state in 2012. I was living in Old Kampala, dividing my days between research at Makerere University, the National Library, the Uganda Wildlife Authority, and the Ugandan Parliament. In the shadow of what was then known as the Gaddafi National Mosque rival politico-religious factions engaged raucously in the street. Concerned less by any threat to the state, and more to establish its primacy in enforcing order, the security state showed up.
In the hostel where I was then the sole resident, I was sitting and reading in a spartan courtyard surrounded by dormitories and private rooms. I first heard tear gas being used, and the hostel manager careened from the front of the building into a refuge in the back. Tear gas canisters meant for demonstrators out on the road ricocheted around the courtyard, and within seconds my eyes felt afire. I hadn’t dealt with tear gas before, but I plunged my face under a faucet in the yard. The military police switched to live rounds, and my eyes took a back seat as I sprinted to my room and dove beneath the bed. It was all over in a few minutes, and the Daily Monitor issued a lugubrious report the following day on the violence by authorities and the handful of deaths that resulted.
Such has become politics in Museveni’s Uganda, a particular irony since the president was feted in the late-1980s as the figure to bring a decisive end to the chaos engendered by Idi Amin’s leadership and the violence that followed his deposition by Tanzanian armed forces after he pushed the otherwise-peaceful Julius Nyerere too far.
It is tempting to say that in other times Museveni’s violence might have drawn the ire of the U.S. government, curbing his ability to lash his opponent and his citizens with such impunity. But Museveni is on his sixth--perhaps soon seventh--U.S. president, and as Helen Epstein illustrates in her book Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, the Ugandan president is skilled at wrapping American presidents around his little finger. Museveni’s “genius,” according to Epstein, was to “capitalize on Western ambivalence about Africa’s capacity for democracy and self-determination,” using “generous foreign aid to turn Uganda into a military dictatorship dressed up to look like a democracy” (22).
During the Cold War many African states manipulated U.S. and European governments by casting themselves as allies in the fight against Communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with a wave of democratization across the continent, in part due to long-running pro-democracy campaigners finally making headway, and in part due to the U.S. withdrawing its support from many authoritarian figures who were newly seen as an embarrassment rather than an anti-communist bulwark.
Museveni was among the first would-be authoritarians to realize that the “War on Terror” provided a golden opportunity for him to play a similar role. Ugandan soldiers fighting far afield against enemies of the U.S. have bought him extraordinary indulgence, and Museveni’s credentials as an elder statesman, political revolutionary, and ambitions for closer regional integration ensured that he maintains the respect of his political peers in East Africa and beyond.
Museveni manipulated the Bush administration with ease, given the zeal with which it sought to export raw American power. Obama and his officials discussed the so-called War on Terror less crudely, but prosecuted it with a similarly ruthless and frequently lawless vigor. The Trump administration didn’t even pretend to care about the preservation of global democracies in its conduct of foreign policy. And already Museveni is turning his eye toward the new dispensation.
Not for Museveni the fence-sitting of many of the other world’s authoritarians after Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. Just a few days after the election, Museveni took to Twitter to congratulate Biden, emphasize the bonds that Christianity and the African American community forged with Uganda, and make a pitch to renew the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. Biden is likely to be less interventionist in his foreign policy. But that could work in Museveni’s favor, should he be re-elected. Doing the dirty work of the U.S. in regional conflicts, and sending Ugandan soldiers where Americans wish to go but fear to tread, could earn him gratitude and a blind eye toward authoritarianism at home. During the Obama administration Biden was a voice of caution--partly about foreign intervention, but also about parting ways with America’s long-time “friends,” however viciously unsavoury those friends might be. Today in the world, the U.S. has fewer long-term security partners with boots on the ground on behalf of U.S. supposed security interests than Museveni and the Uganda People’s Defence Force.
Kenya’s Daily Nation has been reporting that voting materials have arrived late in some areas known to lean toward the opposition. The newspaper also outlined a host of technical glitches and personnel failures at polling stations around the country. This does not bode well for voters concerned about jobs, corruption, infrastructure, and healthcare, being able to change the country’s political course. If no candidate receives 50% of the vote, the top candidates continue to a second round. Museveni has never come close to having to compete in a second round.
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka observed the sad irony that threats to democracy in the U.S. are diverting media and governments’ attention, such as it ever was, from the ongoing crisis of Ugandan democracy.
