The proposed Consociational Democracy Agreement has stirred memories that Ugandans would be unwise to ignore. We have seen elites gather before to share power, setting aside the harder work of genuine democratization and the uncompromising defence of human rights. Each time the result was a short truce, followed by the unravelling of a fragile arrangement and a new phase of conflict.
The classic example is the Moshi Conference of March 1979. Unelected and unrepresentative exiles, all of them men, met in northern Tanzania to plan a government for after Idi Amin. They created the Uganda National Liberation Front and placed Yusuf Lule at its head. Lule was removed after 68 days. The Moshi spirit died because its signatories lacked the conviction, will, sacrifice and patience to make it work. Another war followed, and it ended with Yoweri Museveni taking power in January 1986. Museveni sat among the delegates at Moshi. He knows better than anyone that a conference cannot achieve what political will refuses.
The NRM came to power on a Ten-Point Programme. It promised democracy, security, national unity, an end to corruption and sectarianism, and the rebuilding of ravaged regions. Forty years later, Museveni is still in power, and we are discussing another power-sharing scheme. Its agenda is the Ten-Point Programme again, worded differently and only longer because more time has passed.
Every such gathering is a vote of no confidence. Moshi was a justified verdict on Amin. The Ten-Point Programme was a verdict on Obote and Okello Lutwa. The Saleh–Otunnu proposal may be well-intentioned, but it is a vote of no confidence in the current government and in the institutions of the Ugandan State.
Uganda does not lack a charter. The 1995 Constitution came from an elected Constituent Assembly after extensive consultation with citizens. It established a Parliament, an independent judiciary, an Electoral Commission, a Human Rights Commission, an Inspectorate of Government and an Auditor General. On paper, each has the power to address the very grievances the Saleh-Otunnu agreement lists. Nor are the principles of democracy a mystery: sovereignty belongs to the people; elections are free, fair and run by an independent body; constitutions bind rulers rather than being rewritten for them, as term limits were in 2005 and age limits in 2017; courts and Parliament stand independent; the rights in Chapter Four and the Universal Declaration are respected; opposition is legitimate; the army and police answer to civilians; every region shares fairly in public resources; and whoever loses an election leaves office. None of this requires a new council. It requires the people in charge to obey the law they already have.
The proposal’s defenders deserve a fair hearing, and their strongest point is a serious one. They say the 1995 institutions have been captured, so urging Ugandans to work through them is like asking a prisoner to appeal to his jailer. Elections are run by a commission appointed by the incumbent. The police serve the ruling party. Parliament approves almost anything put before it. Opposition leaders, Kizza Besigye among them, sit in the dock or in a cell or in exile. If the formal path is blocked, they ask, why not try a negotiated one? Some critics go further and see in this initiative a rare opening: a way for the president to leave office without a dynastic coronation and without bloodshed, one that a voice inside the family might be able to sell.
I agree that the institutions have been captured. That is exactly my point. Whoever holds the key to a prison can open it. The president who bent the institutions can straighten them. He can order the release of political prisoners, rein in the RDCs, DISOs, GISOs, militias, police and army that crowd the political space, give the Electoral Commission real independence, and let Parliament represent citizens rather than the ruler. It needs one decision by one man and the generals who answer to him.
The opportunity for a peaceful transition is real. But a peaceful transition is something you do, not something you discuss. Consider South Africa. By the late 1980s, the apartheid state still had a powerful army, a loyal police force and a captive Parliament. On February 2, 1990, F.W. de Klerk stood before that Parliament and unbanned the ANC and other liberation movements. Days later, Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison. The negotiations that followed were difficult and at times violent, but they worked, because freedom came first and the talking came after. De Klerk and his colleagues understood that democracy would cost them power. They also understood that it would free them, as well as Mandela and the millions who had been denied the vote. Minority rule had become a prison for the jailers too. By giving up power, they saved their country and their own place in its future.
Ugandans know an older version of this story. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas are beaten and thrown into prison at Philippi. At midnight, as they pray and sing, an earthquake shakes the foundations, the doors fly open, and every chain falls loose. The jailer, certain his prisoners have fled and his own life is forfeit, draws his sword to kill himself. Paul stops him: no one has run. Trembling, the jailer asks what he must do to be saved, and that night he and his household find a freedom of their own. The prisoners’ release became the jailer’s liberation. Even then, Paul would not slip away in the dark. He had been beaten without trial, so he insisted that the magistrates come in person and escort him out, publicly admitting that the law had been broken. Freedom must come with justice, not as a favour granted quietly.
Both stories carry the same lesson for Kampala. A dialogue held while opponents are in detention, while security agents decide who may speak, and while succession is arranged in private is not a transition. It is a performance. Free the prisoners, open the political space, restore the independence of the institutions, and then talk. Most of what the Consociational Democracy Agreement hopes to achieve will follow from those acts alone.
It is in the president’s own interest to do this. Dynastic rule imposed on an unwilling, young and connected population may seem to work for a while, but it builds up the pressure that eventually bursts, putting the gains of the past forty years at risk. A leader who frees his country writes his own legacy. A leader who holds on until the end has his legacy written for him.
Adjumani, Mparo, Serere and Agago are not poor because Ugandans have failed to talk about the common good. They are poor because of deliberate neglect, upside-down priorities, greed in the ruling class, contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, and an unfair sharing of the national budget. All of that can change if Museveni loosens his grip on the state and lets Ugandans choose their rulers freely. Another gathering will not. De Klerk opened the prison doors himself. At Philippi, the jailer found his freedom the night the doors swung open. The question is whether ours will open them.
© Muniini K. Mulera