Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni spent last week dealing with a new and very East African problem — the severe post-election trouble that every president in the region since 2007 has had to confront.

Ever since the disputed December 2007 general election in Kenya, which led to the country’s worst bout of political violence, no East African president, from President Paul Kagame in Rwanda to Jakaya Kikwete in Tanzania, has enjoyed a trouble-free 12-month honeymoon after victory.

As he angrily fought back accusations of personal bribe-taking; a noisy and rebellious parliament; and ministers who had to leave office under a cloud of corruption scandals, Museveni easily capped his worst eight months since he took power in 1986.

His troubles may be many, but they are not by means unique.

After the violence that followed elections in Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki had to share power with his obstinate opposition rival, Raila Odinga, in a coalition government strung together through often very bitter negotiations.

But Kenya remained restless, and the government became mired in troubles that led to the resignation of three ministers.

The country seems to have been mollified when, after more than 20 fruitless years, the bulk of the political class rallied around a fairly progressive Constitution that was passed in a referendum in August 2010.

In Burundi, alarm bells are being sounded by human-rights groups about increasing repression by the Pierre Nkurunziza government.

Though he won elections handily last year in June, it was a half-empty victory because the main opposition groups boycotted the poll.

The born-again Nkurunziza has been slow to evolve into a democrat, and seems to be drawn to the unquestioning ways of the church.

In Rwanda, where the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front is, without a doubt, the EAC’s most disciplined ruling party, President Paul Kagame too had political trouble to take care of.

Barely had he finished his swearing in after winning the August 2010 election, than the formation of a new political party, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC), was announced.

Law and order

While the Rwanda government has had no shortage of opposition groups, especially those based abroad, to deal with, the RNC was different because former RPF insiders and close aides of Kagame formed it.

Rwanda’s former chief of staff and ambassador to Washington, Theogene Rudasingwa; Gerald Gahima, Rwanda’s former prosecutor general and vice president of the Supreme Court; Col Patrick Karegeya, former director of Rwanda’s external security services; and Gen Kayumba Nyamwasa, were the key founders.

Some RNC members have said they will work to overthrow the Kagame government through force of arms.

They were dealt with through Kigali’s unflinching law and order approach to these matters.

In January this year, a Rwandan military court handed jail terms of between 20 and 24 years to the four in absentia for “threatening state security.”

In Tanzania, the travel-happy Kikwete found he could no longer globetrot as much as he used to after his re-election in November 2011.

The opposition Chadema claimed Kikwete and the ruling CCM had stolen victory.

In this, East Africa’s most polite and deferential country, Kikwete was blindsided at the inauguration of the new parliament when a combative opposition, which had increased its previously miserable numbers in the House in the November elections, embarrassed him with a walkout.

In January, Tanzania went on to witness some of its most violent protests on the mainland after an opposition rally in Arusha, the EAC headquarters town, turned violent and police shot and killed two people.

And, just as Museveni is enduring a feisty and youthful new parliament, Kikwete had to deal with a combat-happy fresh-faced CCM backbench that was going for the neck of every allegedly corrupt minister.

But that is where the similarities between Kikwete and Museveni end.

While Kikwete stemmed the rebellion by co-opting it through giving the CCM militants the heads of a few politicians and officials accused of corruption, Museveni has stood by his accused allies.

Two weeks ago, the anti-corruption court stunned the country when it threw the immediate former vice president Gilbert Bukenya in the river.

Bukenya, who lost his job when Museveni formed his new Cabinet in June, had been accused by a parliamentary investigation of acting improperly and causing loss of public monies in authorising the purchase of luxury cars for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) in Kampala in 2007.

When he turned up for what he probably thought would be another routine hearing at the anti-corruption court, it committed him to the High Court and cancelled his bail.

Bukenya spent a week in Luzira Prison by Lake Victoria before he was granted bail a few days ago.

Museveni seems to have been caught between a rock and hard place on Bukenya.

The same parliamentary report that slated Bukenya for his role in the CHOGM, was also damning about Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa, and former housing minister (presently Government Chief Whip) John Nasasira.

Kutesa and Nasasira are long-time allies of Museveni; the latter is the father-in-law of First Son Lt-Col Muhoozi Kaneirugaba. They also hail from the same corner of the country as Museveni.

It smacked of ethnic bias, that the system had caught Bukenya, but Kutesa and Nasasira were free in the wind.

Matters became complicated further, when the rowdy special sitting of parliament to discuss the secret deals the government has struck with foreign companies, claimed that Kutesa was one of the ministers who had got a kickback from an oil firm.

Other names in documents that were presented to the House, and that now seem to have been forged, were Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi, a Museveni loyalist and ramrod, and Internal Affairs Minister Hilary Onek (formerly energy minister).

It would seem, as if to buy Museveni a breather and allow him to regroup, Kutesa, Nasasira, and Junior Labour Minister Mwesigwa Rukutana “stepped” aside from Cabinet, to allow for investigation of Ush14 billion ($5 million) tender for fixing Speke Resort Munyonyo, that served as one of the lead venues for the 2007 CHOGM.

The only East African country where the president is not legally bound to serve fixed terms is Uganda. In 2005 President Yoweri Museveni controversially leaned on Parliament to scrap term limits

The parliamentary report alleged that there was some fiddling there too. All the ministers deny wrongdoing.

large part of the reason for the present catfight inside the ruling NRM can be seen as the beginnings of the race to succeed the increasingly lackadaisical Museveni, whose reputation has been battered by regime corruption and government incompetence.
However, East African analysts are also beginning to speak of a “contagion” effect.

For example, the public hearings for the Chief Justice, the judges, and Kenyan Electoral Commission have been studied closely — and with some fascination — in Tanzania and Uganda, where Kenyan TV channels are watched.

In Tanzania, for example, the parliament session on oil, where government ministers and members of the president’s family were tongue-lashed, captured the imagination of quite a few people in Tanzania.

Social freedoms

The low tolerance for corruption and orderliness of Rwanda is noted with admiration in the rest of East Africa. Likewise, people in Rwanda too speak longingly about some of the media and social freedoms of cities like Nairobi and Kampala that, despite their chaos, are more appealing to younger people.

State-media relations in Rwanda are notoriously quarrelsome, in part because many officials and leaders distrust the media, which was one of the main instruments of the 1994 genocide in which nearly one million people were killed.

East African presidents could increasingly find that election victories, even when won honestly (a rare thing in the region) are not enough to confer the level of legitimacy that will allow a president to rule without being immediately challenged upon his victory, or to take a month off, go to the Bahamas, and shake off the exhaustion of the campaign before returning to focus on his new term.

In addition to local legitimacy, EAC leaders must now also worry about “regional legitimacy,” in which East Africans will only be content if they are also enjoying the good things that other Community citizens are.

Just as the region is, with fits and starts, slowly becoming a common economic market so, it seems, is it also beginning to evolve into a common political market.

On current form, though, it seems this common political market, is a very different monster than what leaders like Museveni are thinking of when they push for an East African Political Federation.

It is likely to be quite subversive and not good for strongmen.