‘I hear political Opposition supporters saying they are going to have a change of government in the upcoming presidential elections. I want to tell you the bitter truth that I don’t expect any change in government,’ Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja told a meeting of medical staff and local leaders from Kayunga District last week on Thursday.
The proclamation by the country’s eighth most important citizen and Leader of Government business can easily be spurned. After all, the appointing authority said in his State of the Nation Address on June 10, 2021, that his current Cabinet is full of ‘fishermen.’ On the other hand, the PM’s assertion could be interpreted to mean that the January 2026 presidential election, in which President Museveni is up for his seventh elective term against seven contenders, is a foregone conclusion.
Upon shooting to power 39 years ago, President Museveni first ruled for 10 years without elections. He offered himself for the first polls under the new Constitution in 1996 and won with 72 percent of the valid votes cast. He went on to win elections in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021. The former coordinator of intelligence agencies, Gen David Sejusa, even dropped a bomb shell in December 2013 that he and other army officers engineered the 2006 presidential election results in favour of the incumbent against Dr Kizza Besigye, who is currently in jail on treason charges since last November.
All elections since 2001 have been marked by the omnipresent role of the country’s military apparatus. However, even as general crime, which warrants the iron-clad protection for VIPs in government, festers across the country, there is no corresponding response by security forces compared to the response during and after election campaigns.
There are about a dozen security agencies carved out of police and the army, the notable ones being the Defence Intelligence and Security, formerly Chieftancy of Military Intelligence (CMI), Joint Anti- Terrorism Taskforce (JATT), Internal Security Organisation (ISO), Special Forces Command (SFC), Directorate of Crime Intelligence, among others.
Amid the kidnapping and disappearance of Opposition supporters, police, who are charged with everyday law and order, often feign ignorance, while the command structure of the rogue security personnel remains opaque. Lawyer/activist Andrew Karamagi argued that the primary functions of the security agencies seem to be regime protection. ‘The ruling party is modelled along State security agencies. So there is no separation between national security and the longevity of the regime. Now, ideally, we should have an intelligence community that is even suspicious of the President.’
In this land
Promotion of democracy ranked number one on the NRM’s original 10-point programme, the rebel group’s policy blueprint, followed by promotion of security for all people and their property to eliminate state-instigated violence, and consolidation of national unity and elimination of all forms of sectarianism. As President Museveni campaigns for a seventh elective term under the theme
‘Consolidating the gains’, State-sanctioned violence against the population is commonplace. From the Kayunga riots, Walk-to-Work protests, to the November 2020 blood bath during which security personnel killed 54 people.
The right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, if for political reasons or to express discontentment with government, provided for in Chapter Four of the Constitution, is gagged by the Public Order Management Act, or selectively applied such as in the case of police escorting supporters of the loose Patriotic League of Uganda to protest outside the Germany embassy in July.
Barely after the NRA/M captured power, the country was sucked in by a welter of rebellions that sprouted in the north and north-eastern parts of the country.
Insurgencies commanded by military figures in the past governments broke out, from Peter Otai’s led-rebellion and other lesser rebel groups in Teso, Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement and later Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army that roared until 2005, to the West Nile Bank Front. In the process of stopping the rebellions, egregious human rights violations were committed by NRA, including the Mukura massacre when hundreds of people were burnt alive in train wagons.
During the drafting of the 1995 Constitution between 1988 and1995, many Ugandans were concerned about their peace and the stability of the country.
Ugandans were still nursing wounds inflicted by the security agencies since 1899 when the first armed force, the Uganda Armed Constabulary, was established by the British colonial administration.
Constitutional Law lecturer Kabumba Busingye argues that the manner in which the British colonial government established authority over present-day Uganda explains a lot that has gone wrong since then, not just in Uganda but across many parts of Africa.
‘So you had very few citizens who were really British citizens, for lack of a better word, the European residents of Uganda, but by and large you had subjects. So you have our ancestors who were in Uganda but were for all intents and purposes and by documents called natives and that word was not something that had any dignity to it. That’s again as [Prof] Mamdani argued, defined the rulers and the ruled. So even the Kabaka and other traditional leaders were not called leaders; they were called native rulers. So in effect, we were diminished,’ Dr Kabumba averred.
Colonial house extension
He adds: ‘Museveni is interesting. I think his success, because he has been successful to the extent of, if you measure success by holding onto power, there’s an element of success there. Of course, if you measure it by other metrics, national building, it’s a little bit mixed. But as a political project, he has been successful. I think he has come closest of the leaders, post-independence leaders, in mirroring the nature of the colonial state. Because the colonial state was a violent machine that closed itself with legality.
‘If you just read the colonial documents, it would be difficult for you to know that you’re in a dictatorship. So you had governors, you had the paraphernalia of, you know, even the very colonial project was framed in Christianity, commerce, and civilisation, look at the dehumanising British colonial Africa.’
After promulgation of the Constitution on October 8, 1995, Ugandans saw it as a golden opportunity to put safeguards to control the security agencies from ever turning against the citizenry.
Public views about security agencies to the Uganda Constitutional Commission were so harsh that the team led by Justice Benjamin Odoki recommended some of their demands be dropped or toned down. Constituent Assembly delegates agreed with the Uganda Constitutional Commission recommendations that shaped Chapter XII on defence and national security. In the chapter, the Uganda People’s Defence Forces, Uganda Police Force, Uganda Prisons Service, Intelligence Services and the National Security Council were established. The Constitution put key requirements for all those security agencies that they should be under civilian authority, nationalistic, patriotic and disciplined.
Members of each security agency were to be recruited from each district of Uganda. ‘It shall be the duty of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces and any other armed force established in Uganda, the Uganda Police Force and any other police Force, the Uganda Prisons Service, all intelligence services and the National Security Council to observe and respect human rights and freedoms in the performance of their functions,’ Article 221 in Chapter XII of the Constitution reads.
Thirty years later, Chapter XII has remained intact on paper, but a lot has changed in practice.
Mixed bag of fortunes
Former Makindye East MP Mike Mabike argues that one of the unresolved questions in the post-independence era was the role of the army and security agencies, and the 1995 Constitution intended to solve it.
‘In 1966, when the military came out of the barracks and got involved in what was ordinarily a civilian quarrel between President [Edward] Mutesa and [Prime Minister] Milton Obote, they never left. The framers of the Constitution put the army and security agencies under civilian control. But that hasn’t been enforced because the leader of the National Resistance Army, now UPDF, is now the President, and he has personal interests,’ Mabikke says.
While peace and security is the NRM’s unique selling point, the army and intelligence outfits are commanded at the whims of the Commander-in- Chief, (CDF) which has also led critics to believe that even in the likely event of the incumbent losing elections, peaceful change of power is impossible. Twenty seven years ago, the UPDF was sent to the DR Congo to treat a festering wound in the heart of Africa, a year after the kleptocratic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko had been ousted. The decision to deploy Ugandan troops was taken by the Army High Command, which was chaired by the CDF on September 11.
The President argued that the deployment would secure Uganda’s security interests by denying the Sudanese government an opportunity to destabilise Uganda through eastern Congo; deny habitation to Uganda’s dissidents such as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in the Congo and protect Uganda’s territorial integrity from invasion by Kabila forces. Eight years later, the UPDF deployed to Somalia without approval of Parliament, which pattern was repeated during deployment to South Sudan, where the Executive defended that they hurried to ‘stop a genocide’, and later in 2017 in Equatorial Guinea.
Today, the Kampala regime is a key ally of Washington and its European allies in the restive Great Lakes region, and is involved in mercenary peace missions in South Sudan and Somalia, and continues to play its diplomatic cards favourably to remain in the good books. Mr Mabikke says when it came to establishing law acts to regulate the military as the Constitution had directed, interested parties used the UPDF Act to entrench the personalisation of the military.
‘For a military officer to work well, he or she must be in the good books of the CDF. Therefore, you can’t have professionalism in the forces.’
Mr Mabikke says the impunity of security agencies has taken root as it was before the adoption of the 1995 Constitution. Mr Robert Kirenga, the executive director of the National Coalition of Human Rights Defenders Uganda, says the country is experiencing a contradiction of security agencies that the framers of the Constitution had envisaged.
‘Do we have what you would call a national army? Do we have an army that is non-partisan? Are law enforcement agencies, including the army, doing the things as provided in the Constitution? That is something you have to pose to the citizens and they tell you.’