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Museveni won’t go, so we’ll just have to let him stay, provided...

Tuesday November 21 2017
M7

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni. PHOTO FILE | NATION

By FREDRICK GOLOOBA-MUTEBI

It is a comedy of acceptance and rejection. I mean the ongoing consultations in Uganda regarding how old a presidential candidate ought to be.

For the past few weeks, the country has been treated to scenes where large crowds have turned up at consultations convened by opposition politicians and in striking unanimity, rejected the proposal to make it legal for 18-year-olds and over-75-year-olds to contest.

The issue has really not been whether the idea of amending the Constitution is in itself good or bad. Rather, those rejecting the proposal have done so because they do not like the idea of President Yoweri Museveni running for office again at the age of 77, after leading the country for 35 years.

They are, in short, feeling Museveni fatigue. Truth be told, there are signs of this fatigue even within his party, the National Resistance Movement.

That became clear when some ministers and other officials went to their rural home areas to “consult” local leaders on removing the age limit, and were told in no uncertain terms to not even think about it.

Much of this, however, was before MPs were handed large sums of money ostensibly to spend on the consultations, and before the NRM deployed some of its leading luminaries to go around the country, region by region, and do their own consultations.

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Such is the vigour with which opposition politicians began their anti-amendment campaign and such was the enthusiastic support they got, that when the NRM began touting their regional teams, one could have laughed them out of town.

Of late, however, there is a confusing flurry of media reports pointing to the NRM’s consultations returning overwhelming endorsements. In some cases, this is happening in the same areas where before, opposition politicians met with resounding rejections. There is an interesting catch, however.

The NRM’s indoor consultations are exclusively with selected local big men and women, convened in choice venues, almost certainly over refreshments to wet their throats.

Meanwhile, the opposition has been convening everybody, including local riff-raff, among them unemployed youth who have no time for a president (the only one they have known in their lives) who may have brought back stability, but who can’t give them jobs, let alone hope that their circumstances will improve.

There are, of course, many reasons why the local political, social and economic elite are endorsing the proposal. They include the specious argument that the status quo is discriminatory and therefore unfair.

There is also the fear, almost never stated but hardly difficult for a perceptive observer to detect, that without the charismatic Museveni as the NRM’s candidate, defeating a growing opposition would be that much more difficult.

The issue then becomes: Why risk defeat if he still wants to hang around, which he evidently does? There are other considerations as well, and these have come out clearly of late.

Some of the local bigwigs just want something in return for supporting the constitutional amendment. There are places where they want their areas to be upgraded from whatever they are now, to district status. And so they say, “We shall support mzee (old man) but he should also consider this thing of ours.”

A district is no small thing. It comes with, among other things, jobs and associated perks and elevated status for those that get them. And the people who are likely to get these things in the event that an area is declared a district, are the same people being consulted.

Although by law district status ought to be conferred on an area after it has been found to fulfil a number of criteria, increasingly when politics comes in, those can be disregarded. The good men and women interacting with the party’s emissaries know this well.

In other places, the delegates have been asking for “industrial parks” to be set up in their areas in exchange for their consent. Why they would imagine that industrial parks can be set up just anywhere and everywhere is unclear, but then that is what they want if they are to open the way for the possibility that weighty matters of state could be put in the hands of teenagers and old men and women with diminished mental and physical capacity.

The same goes for some people who, after years of arguing for a federal system of government, now want it re-examined, with the possibility of giving Museveni what he wants and they in turn getting what they want. In recent times, this kind of reasoning has been appearing on social media, the central argument of those who are pushing it being that this is the moment to “force Museveni to listen.”

Perhaps most striking was a request by a local leader somewhere in northern Uganda that, in return for area supporting the proposal, a former army chief of staff, the late brigadier David Oyite Ojok, a prominent son of the area, be “recognise” for his role in the war that toppled Idi Amin’s government. And the comedy rolls on.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]m

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