Inside Museveni’s 34 years

As a result of stability and sustained growth, Uganda has been able to provide an increasing basket of public goods and services to her citizens – roads, schools, hospitals, dams, water-treatment plants alongside healthcare, education, clean water and electricity.

While many Ugandans (and other African elites generally) expect these public goods and services to be of high quality and widely spread, public revenues in our country are too low to satisfy these expectations. Ugandans are dissatisfied with the state, not because the country is not improving its ability to serve them, but because their expectations grow much faster than state capacity. Increased revenue has also given Museveni more resources to buy off opponents, reward his loyalists and equip the army and police to crack down on those who dissent.

What then have been Museneni’s major failures? The source of his economic failure is in the nature of alliance he built during the reconstruction phase. The president allied with Western powers. This allowed him to access Western financial assistance but on condition that Uganda allows western direction of the policy-making, policy orientation and policy implementation process. Consequently public policy was heavily tilted in favour of multi national capital. As a result local capital was either displaced or its growth stifled through policies such as privatization, liberalization and deregulation. Thus today the commanding heights of economy  – telecommunications, banking, manufacturing, etc. – are under the control of foreign capital.

On the political front, Museveni’s other major failure has been inability to organize a transition of power from him to the next generation or next president. This is especially important in a country that has never seen a peaceful transfer of power from one government to another or from one president to another. For as long as there is no such a peaceful transition, it remains to be seen whether the stability he has created can outlast him. In fact this long rule has stifled the evolution of institutions that can act independent of how he personally exercises power. This leaves us a vulnerable state.

Hence, the longer Museveni has stayed in power, the more monarchical his rule has become. Today authority continues to be transmitted from the president (through personal relations) to his close associates such as family, relatives and personal friends and from them to other associates related by personal ties of their own. This is because the longer he governs the more perverse his personal influence on the state gets and therefore the more dependent on him our national institutions become. This has created a real risk that without him the state could again disintegrate. As Museveni and NRM celebrate 34 years, this is the issue to ponder.

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