For years now, millions of Ugandans have discussed the big ‘T’ word – transition. What happens after President Museveni? What happens if, one day, he sleeps and doesn’t wake up?
For close to 40 years now, he has sat steadily at the helm and steered the nation. In that time, more than 80 percent of Ugandans living today were born, six different men were elected president in the US, and the once mighty Berlin Wall came down, as did the racist apartheid regime and the laws that anchored it in South Africa.
Even his harshest critics will acknowledge that Mr Museveni changed Uganda, mostly for the better. Yet, like it does with most humans, age has played a patient game with our President. In an interview with NTV’s Patrick Kamara years ago, the President famously said that past 75, a man begins to experience a decline.
He was right. We saw that with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Joe Biden in the US: the public falls, the intelligible speeches, and Lee Njiru, the former press secretary to Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, wrote a moving account of the cognitive and physical decline his boss experienced in his final days in his memoir, The Presidents’ Pressman.
So, it is not surprising that the question of political transition is big in Uganda today. For a country where each transition was determined by Kalashnikovs and military tanks, it is equally not surprising that the discussion gives many people anxiety.
As such, I must confess that I was excited when the president of the Democratic Party (DP), Mr Nobert Mao, announced that he would steer Uganda towards a peaceful political transition for the first time, back in 2021. I still pray that whatever God Mao believes and worships gives him the serenity he needs to pull off such a huge task.
Yet, the most recent statements Mr Mao – also the minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs – made about Uganda’s transition are rather discouraging. See, Uganda has not been short of transitions: 1961, 1962, 1966, 1971, 1979, 1980, 1985 and 1986 all saw political transition.
Some of these years, like 1979, saw three of them in quick succession. Yet, the common thread in each of these is that a group of men sat down and decided that it should fall upon them to determine the fate of Uganda. This was the case more than 10 times. The scorecard? Failure each time!
So, it is heart-rending to hear none other than the minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs suggest that again, in 2025, despite the advantage of hindsight, a group of men from five political parties are sitting in a sort of papal enclave to determine the direction of Uganda and the transition question!
Even more shocking, perhaps, was the revelation that elections, the constitutional safeguard we now have as a lesson from the past and spend trillions on, don’t matter! What sort of transition is that?
Does it not matter that the view of the majority of adult Ugandans should determine what happens after Mr Museveni?
What guarantees do we have that the men will sit, and take into account the best interests of 45 million Ugandans at heart as they discuss?
I strongly believe that while Uganda needs a peaceful transition, it shouldn’t be the end in and of itself. Ugandans will go to the polls in three months, and yet several Ugandans arrested on flimsy – and in some cases ridiculous – charges around the time of the last election are still languishing in jail! What will a transition negotiated by a few men mean for them? In the words of a famous Ugandan, a transition that simply leads to a change of face, without the consensus of Ugandans, will be a mere change of guard; the very thing Ugandans have had in oversupply.