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Will talk, won’t talk: Inside the secret push for dialogue between Museveni, Besigye

Monday April 10 2017
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There is a new push for dialogue between Uganda’s President Yoweri Museven (right) and the opposition Forum for Democratic Change Kizza Besigye. PHOTOS | FILE

The last private conversation between President Yoweri Museveni and Kizza Besigye, a telephone call in 1999, was terse and inconclusive.
Besigye was awaiting his release from the Army where he was a colonel, but relations between the two men had already frayed.

President Museveni wanted to know his former close ally and personal doctor’s future plans.

Besigye said he was retiring to private business and farming. When the call ended President Museveni was convinced he had not been told the full story, aides he spoke to later said.
He was right. Less than two years later, in 2001, the two men faced off in an election that, to this day, remains memorable for the violence and malpractices that came to define it.

After three more disputed elections featuring the two men, the contest between President Museveni and Dr Besigye has come to define the political contest in Uganda.
The latest attempt to broker dialogue between the two men, therefore, carries hope, not just for rapprochement between the two principals, but perhaps a wider realignment of the political culture in Uganda.

Senior government officials led by spokesman Ofwono Opondo have publicly denied the existence of any planned talks. Mostly, it is because they have been kept out of the loop.

'Talks about the talks'

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Uganda’s ambassador to the United Nations, Adonia Ayebare, has done a lot of the shuttle diplomacy between the two principals, sources say, while the Women’s Situation Room, a civil society initiative to reduce electoral violence, has been involved, as has the Swedish government.

For several months now, technical teams in the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) and the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) have been quietly exchanging memoranda to work out details, in what a source calls “talks about the talks”.

Tentative agreement has been reached on the broad outlines of the dialogue, according to sources familiar with the process, including agreeing to a neutral venue and a mediator, Sweden’s state secretary for foreign affairs, Annika Söder.

President Museveni’s family lived in Sweden for many years while in exile and that made the Swedes an easy choice, on top of their relatively neutral foreign policy stance in the region.
Agreement has also been reached, in principle, on the main agenda items.

The FDC side is keen to have an audit of the 2016 election, which Besigye claims he won. Official results gave Museveni the win with 60.75 per cent, Besigye 35.37 per cent with former Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi with 1.43 per cent.

The NRM side wants an agenda item on "law and order" as it seeks to end the defiance campaign that Besigye and a section of the FDC party has been pursuing since the election, and which is often characterised by street clashes between the police and protestors.

Despite the progress, suspicions remain high on both sides. History is partly to blame.

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Former Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi. PHOTO | FILE

A few months after the 2011 general elections President Museveni convened a meeting at State House in Entebbe. Mr Mbabazi, then still NRM secretary general was in attendance, as was his deputy, Dorothy Hyuha, First Lady Janet Museveni and generals Salim Saleh, Aronda Nyakairima (chief of defence forces) and Kale Kayihura (Inspector General of police).

The president had been re-elected a few months earlier with 68.39 per cent of the vote while Besigye had 26.01 per cent.

After a violent and bitterly contested election in 2006, in which Besigye had scored 37.59 per cent despite spending half the campaign time in jail, against Museveni’s 59.04 per cent, the return in 2011, which was relatively more peaceful, was the incumbent’s highest since 1996 and, on paper, represented the end of Besigye’s electoral threat.

Yet the 2011 elections had given way to "walk-to-work" protests against the rising cost of living, which security forces, learning from the power of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, had violently crushed.

Efforts to broker talks

Although the street protests had died down in Kampala and other major towns, there had been behind-the-scenes efforts to broker talks between Museveni and Besigye to diffuse the political tensions between them.

One initiative, led by Justice James Ogoola and the Joint Christian Council, had collapsed because of the inclusion of a religious leader that President Museveni considered too radical and public in his criticism of his government.
Another informal initiative, overseen by two media personalities, had opened a communication channel between the two principals via emissaries, President Museveni informed the meeting, and had tentatively agreed on former President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania as a mediator.

President Museveni told the meeting that he now needed their input before proceeding.

Opinion was sharply divided. Sources privy to the meeting said Mr Mbabazi was opposed to reaching out to Besigye because they had defeated him and that his protests were a matter of law enforcement, not politics.

Gen. Kayihura disagreed and said any effort to de-escalate tensions, which were straining his police force and staining his public reputation, were welcome.

The initiative was soon leaked to the media and collapsed amid a lack of consensus in both the NRM and FDC camps.

Challenges

The current attempt at dialogue will face several challenges.

First, both sides are wont to exaggerate their strength as well as the opponent’s weakness.

With a comfortable majority in Parliament and having made electoral gains in former opposition strongholds in the north and eastern parts of the country, NRM officials say the party is at its strongest.
Mr Mbabazi’s departure has been largely painless, they say, and anticipated investments in energy and transport infrastructure, including an oil refinery, an oil pipeline and a standard gauge railway, will lift growth and create jobs.

So sanguine are key NRM officials that they have started canvassing for a planned lifting of constitutional presidential age limits so that Mr Museveni can stand again in 2021 – a guaranteed point of conflict with the opposition.

The opposition, they gleefully add, is divided. Some FDC MPs have openly criticised Besigye’s defiance campaign. A fight for influence between those keen on working within the skewed political and electoral landscape and those who prefer to force the issue through non-violent resistance is likely to escalate when the party holds internal polls later in the year.

“[Museveni] has little, if anything to gain from those talks and a lot to lose,” a senior government official said, speaking off the record because he is not authorised to speak for the President.
FDC officials disagree. “He has the upper hand, yes, but he is not comfortable because he must be worried about what will happen towards or after his departure,” a senior opposition party official said, on condition of anonymity.
Youth unemployment, which is over 70 per cent in most surveys, is a ticking time bomb in a country with a median age of 15.7 and one of the youngest populations in the world. After growth projections were slashed to 4.5 per cent for 2016/17, the economy contracted 0.2 per cent in the first quarter and grew by a very sluggish 0.8 per cent in quarter two and might not meet even those softer targets.
Violent clashes in Kasese in which more than a hundred people were killed and a wave of unresolved assassinations have shaken the peace and stability narrative on which the government is anchored. “At the moment he is in control but he will lose more and more control as his groups start fighting,” an FDC MP says.

READ: Pressure mounts on Uganda over Kasese killings
Sources who’ve spoken to both Museveni and Besigye report that there is surprisingly little resistance between the two men for a face-to-face meeting.

When Besigye was arrested after the 2016 election President Museveni quietly sent an emissary to see if the opposition leader was willing to talk (the emissary surmised that Besigye wasn’t) and President Museveni ordered the police to leave Mr Besigye’s residence last year, which they had surrounded for many months, in order to facilitate the current dialogue.

Besigye, on his part, has told close allies that he has no objection to meeting Museveni “as long as it is not just for newspapers”, one said.
Yet suspicions remain between the two men. People close to President Museveni say he believes Besigye is not interested in talks and prefers a mass uprising against the government. Those close to Besigye suspect that all President Museveni wants is a photo-op.

Optimism
Officials involved in the mediation acknowledge the challenges but are optimistic that the dialogue, once started, will generate its own self-sustaining momentum.
“Once they are in the same room together it will be costly to walk out, especially on flimsy grounds,” a diplomat familiar with the process said, also on condition of anonymity in order not to jeopardise the effort.
The success of the dialogue will depend on the interests of the two principals being aligned.

Interviews with a dozen officials on both sides reveal that while President Museveni and Besigye might not want the talks, they both need them.

For Besigye and the FDC, the talks are a validation of a longstanding argument about the need for political and electoral reforms.

The call for an audit of the 2016 election results, while unlikely to change the constitution of government, could lead to constitutional changes to whittle down executive power in particular the use of security forces and state resources to influence electoral outcomes.
The most obvious benefit for President Museveni is legitimacy. After swearing himself in as “the people’s president,” Besigye will have to drop his claim to the throne and his shadow ‘people’s government’ in order for the dialogue to progress.
The talks also give President Museveni a chance to diffuse the political tensions and change the narrative and perception of the country.

“We are asking international firms to come and invest billions of dollars in oil and gas, and asking tourists to come into the country,” a government minister says. “We can’t do that if there is this constant fear that something is going to erupt. You saw what happened in Kasese, which is near the game parks and the oil fields; no one is going to commit money here if things can just blow up so if the talks can help with that, well and good.”

Officials on both sides of the divide also speak of the need for a negotiated settlement.

Pragmatism?

President Museveni remains a firm believer in a "broad-based" government, which explains his persistent appointment of officials from the leading political parties to his Cabinet.

NRM officials say this is a sign of NRM hegemony in Ugandan politics but a senior opposition leader says it is pragmatism similar to what happened at the end of Apartheid rule in South Africa.
“To the ordinary person there might not be many visible signs but there is pressure on the economy and the security situation and this could be an attempt to diffuse the situation, like the whites in South Africa did,” he said.
“They realised that, with the end of the Cold War the reality had changed and their economy would suffer so the change became inevitable and it was now how to manage it.”

Getting the two sides in one room is easy; getting them to agree on reforms and enforcing them will be much harder. A veteran Ugandan journalist says the talks, if they happen, represent a much bigger opportunity.
“There is a need to move the conversation away from western Uganda to points and issues most people care about,” he said, also off-the-record. “Besigye and Museveni has become a narrow contest and we need to reimagine the politics to include the rest or certainly a larger part of the country.”
The talks, if they take place, would be one small step in repairing relations between Besigye and Museveni – but they would be a giant leap in normalising politics and political competition in Uganda.

This private conversation, unlike the last one in 1999, will have a lot of public interest.

-@kalinaki

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