In 2003, a cloud of uncertainty hung over the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) ahead of the 2006 presidential election. The 1995 Constitution barred President Museveni from standing again since he had already served two terms.
Yet the party leadership wanted him to continue carrying the mantle. At the National Leadership Institute in Kyankwanzi, the NRM hatched a plan to amend the Constitution and initiated a process that would see their chairperson contest again in the 2006 elections. To secure the process, MPs from the ruling NRM party and allies each received Shs5m, presented as facilitation for consultations with their constituents on the constitutional amendments. A number of senior Cabinet ministers who opposed scrapping term limits were removed from government.
The victims included then Ethics minister Maria Matembe, the late Eria Kategaya, who was first Deputy Prime Minister, and Local Government minister Bidandi Ssali. Their dismissal sent a message: the amendment was not up for debate. According to constitutional lawyer and former Constituent Assembly delegate Dan Wandera Ogalo, the framers of the 1995 Constitution were guided by Uganda’s violent past.
Since Independence, there had never been a peaceful transfer of power from one President to another. ‘We had never had a peaceful transfer of power, and whenever you don’t have a peaceful transfer of power, it means violence. People die, people are maimed, property is destroyed, and people become paupers. This weighed very heavily on us to say we must have a provision which ensures that there is a peaceful transfer of power,’ he recalls.
The Assembly, therefore introduced two safeguards: presidential term limits and age limits. Ogalo notes that even the popular consultations pointed in the same direction.
‘The people of Uganda themselves, in their views, had said they wanted a two-term limit for the President,’ he said. Still, by 2003, he began hearing rumours that Mr Museveni’s strong performance and energy justified amending the Constitution to let him continue. ‘The argument was: if the President is still working very well, why should you do away with him when we still need him?’ he remembers. Current Chief Justice Alfonse Owiny-Dollo was also part of the Constituent Assembly that debated the Justice Benjamin Odoki report. He recalls the justification for term limits.
‘People put the argument that if you serve more than two terms, then you would have lost the capacity, the reason why we found it necessary to include the two presidential term limits in the 1995 Constitution,’ he says.
He adds that the framers argued that leaders should serve and go, leaving behind strong institutions rather than depending on the strength of individuals. ‘However good a person is, we are only human. We should have a system, not a person. It’s good to have strong and devoted leaders, and people who will love their country, but what will sustain any country are systems,’ he says.
The Chief Justice’s regrets Justice Dollo has often expressed regret that the Assembly failed to entrench the two safeguards. ‘How could we, especially the lawyers, be so foolish? How could we be lured into not strengthening provisions for term limits? We left it as any other provision in the constitution. And that’s why it was easy for Parliament to remove term and age limits,’ he says. He insists that such provisions should have required a referendum to amend.
‘That one, I take responsibility and anybody else who was in the Constituent Assembly. We should have entrenched that provision so that if you want to amend, you go back to the people. We failed the people of Uganda as a consequence.’
For Mr Ogalo, the removal of the two-term and age limits had no justification beyond benefiting President Museveni. ‘Clearly, the scrapping of the two-term limit was to benefit President Museveni. Equally, the removal of the age limit was to benefit President Museveni. That is a very dangerous way of approaching constitutional amendments. You amend the constitution for the people, not to benefit one person,’ he says.
Former Chief Justice Benjamin Odoki, who chaired the constitutional review commission, wrote in his book The Search for a National Consensus that one of the central goals of the 1995 Constitution was to guarantee free, regular, and fair elections.
He recalls that consultations showed overwhelming support for a directly elected president limited to two five-year terms.
‘The President, for the first time, is now directly elected by the entire population. His election can be challenged in the Supreme Court. The term of office is five years, limited to two terms of office only, under Article 105,’ Justice Odoki wrote.
For constitutional lawyer Peter Walubiri, the removal of term and age limits destroyed any chance of constitutional democracy in Uganda. ‘It was the final blow; henceforth, only death by whatever means will remove Mr Museveni from State House and thereby start the process of the NRA-NRM disintegration,’ he says.
The final blow Prof Fredrick Ssempebwa, who was part of Odoki’s Commission, agrees. He recalls that the majority of Ugandans demanded term limits because they had never seen a peaceful transfer of power. ‘They wanted to have a peaceful change. They didn’t use that language of term limits, but they said there must be a system where leaders change right from the top,’ he says. Prof Ssempebwa notes that even Museveni supported the idea during consultations. ‘When we consulted, President Museveni repeated what he said at the very beginning, that the problem of Africa was leaders who overstay in power,’ he recalls. Now, with President Museveni in power for nearly 40 years, Prof Ssempebwa says the dangers are visible.
‘There are fears about his health, his grasp of power, and his control of things, so it’s a problem for the country. There is also this power of incumbency, and he is unlikely to be voted out,’ he says.
When Mr Museveni took power in 1986 after a five-year guerrilla war, he declared that Africa’s problem was leaders who overstay. But after the scrapping of term limits in 2005, he accepted his party’s endorsement for another run. On November 17, 2005, the NRM named him flagbearer. His candidacy sparked criticism, especially since he had promised in 2001 that it would be his last run. The arrest of Opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye in November 2005, on charges of treason, concealment of treason, and rape, triggered riots across the country. International donors, including Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK withheld aid, citing democratic concerns.
In the 2006 elections, Mr Museveni’s vote share dropped to 59 percent, while Dr Besigye garnered 37 percent. Election observers from the European Union declared that the polls were not free and fair. Dr Besigye challenged the results in the Supreme Court, which found evidence of intimidation, violence, and voter disenfranchisement. Still, in a 4-3 decision, the court upheld Mr Museveni’s victory.
Currently, Mr Museveni is the third-longest consecutively serving non-royal leader in the world after Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea and Paul Biya of Cameroon. When asked why he stayed on despite his earlier statements, he replied that it was the people who kept voting him back.