Few subjects have aroused suspicion, bitterness, and disgust over the last 20 years in Uganda’s politics as the question of ‘moles’. Moles, loosely defined, are senior members of Opposition parties whom the National Resistance Movement (NRM) state recruits and maintains in their parties to inform the State on Opposition plans and activities.
In the intelligence services, deploying moles in rival services is a standard operating procedure and even essential in how intelligence is gathered. In a multiparty democracy, it’s not necessary to have moles, at least in the clock-and-dagger sense of intelligence services. The State as the superstructure of the nation-state is expected to be neutral, serving all citizens and all sides in the political contestation. The police, intelligence services, Judiciary, and Electoral Commission, are examples of institutions of the State.
They exist to guarantee the safety and continuity of Uganda as an entity and are expected to serve whichever government is in power, as well as Opposition political parties. In the NRM state, as well as authoritarian states of the Soviet kind, all political power and the allocation of resources and contracts are fused with the ruling party. In the NRM state, all real power has been centred at State House or its related offshoots. That’s to say, the President’s Office and that office alone, is the major centre of power.
Even the national assembly that, on paper, is a second branch of State and has the primary role of allocating budgets, is in reality an extension of the President’s Office and subject to its directives. Over the past 39 or so years, the NRM has gone through the motions of democracy, but its actions show that it finds democracy in the Western liberal sense a great inconvenience and limit on its power. Lest we forget, President Museveni’s formative political years were forged in the sphere of Maoist China and the Marxist liberation groups in Mozambique and Tanzania.
This Uganda, that is, effectively, a one-party state, is the environment in which Opposition parties, the media, civil society, and the general population must live in.
Regardless of how they feel about the government of the day or the political system, human beings must live. They must feed their families, pay bills, and seek business opportunities. In a situation where all opportunity is tied to the President’s Office, those outside the NRM state or opposed to it find their way around it by making tactical choices.
During the 2011 election campaign, Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) presidential candidate Kizza Besigye took to urging his supporters to take whatever money, T-shirts, or other handouts from the NRM they could but still vote for FDC. These resources were, after all, he would remind crowds at his rallies, Ugandans’ and so getting them was not a favour but a right. In this, Dr Besigye was acknowledging the situation: In a totalitarian or authoritarian system, where the ruling party or politburo is one and the same as the state, critics and opponents of the system are forced to exist under its hand.
So, if, for example, the State decides to hold up a dispatch of copies of Daily Monitor on their way to Gulu or Mbarara, this newspaper that has long been an irritant to the NRM state will seek information from sympathisers inside the President’s Office on how to retrieve the copies. Several times in the last 20 years, Daily Monitor and its sister brand, Monitor FM/KFM, have been shut down by the government for simply doing their job of reporting the news and holding the government to account.
Complex manoeuvres and behind-the-scenes discussions and engagements have had to be made, often including, discreetly, with some actors in the NRM state, in order for the shutdown to be lifted.
Direction the country is taking
This has never prevented Daily Monitor from persisting with the critical and questioning tone it started with in 1992. What is often forgotten by many is that inside the NRM state are thousands of senior or influential players who are as unhappy about the direction the country is taking as are the Opposition parties and independent media.
These NRM and President’s Office insiders have been a reliable and important source of information and tip-offs in some of the biggest and most influential front-page news stories Daily Monitor has published over the past three decades. Thus, the fact of moles cuts both ways. The NRM state will have its moles and informers in media newsrooms, but these same newsrooms also have their sources and moles inside the NRM system.
That’s why I, for one, I am hesitant to dismiss all Opposition politicians who either have been labelled moles or who have eventually crossed over to the ruling NRM.
All this question of moles would have been unnecessary had Uganda, since 1986, been a liberal democracy. Any true Ugandan at heart who has read or heard about the unapologetic corruption and waste of public resources by the NRM government and its leaders is bound to feel revolted or alarmed.
This holds much truer for older Ugandans who experienced the 1960s and 1970s where, their imperfections and excesses notwithstanding, had a basic respect for the formal Ugandan state.
So, who is a mole?
Opposition politicians recruited by NRM, often reluctantly and under duress, or people inside the NRM state who tip off the Opposition and media on the excesses of State House? In my view, the Opposition moles became so because they were preyed upon by the NRM state. Their financial stresses, ill health, private sexual indiscretions, and other vulnerabilities were manipulated and that’s how people known to be principled in their beliefs cross over to NRM.
Deep inside, I think after they realise their hopeless situation, they become even more bitter with the NRM state than they were at the height of their days in the Democratic Party (DP), FDC, Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC), or National Unity Platform (NUP). The Biblical story in the Book of Genesis of Joseph and Moses in Egypt is instructive. Even after rising to high office as a result of his gift for interpreting dreams, Joseph knew at heart that he was a Hebrew, formerly a slave, and his innermost allegiance remained with his enslaved Hebrew people.
The incident in the Book of Exodus where Moses killed an Egyptian whom he came upon mistreating a Hebrew slave makes my point about Ugandan moles.
The general public had been traumatised by photos of Bobi Wine’s bodyguard and NUP activist Eddie Mutwe with bold and sweat on his face, or the many arrests and instances of rough justice meted out to Besigye.
Inside the NRM state, President’s Office, CMI, UPDF, ISO, and State House are human beings with feelings, pride, revulsion at injustice, and ethnic affiliations.
How do these blatant injustices make them feel? The former FDC, DP, and NUP members who are now NRM members are human beings too. They have memories and maintain friendships with former Opposition colleagues in their days of activism.
If I were to say who should be more worried about moles, the NRM state or the political Opposition, the NRM state has much more reason to worry.
The real moles are those in the NRM state, be it CMI, State House, the NRM Secretariat, or ISO, who leak information to the Opposition or the media.
They do this out of conviction and a sense of justice, since obviously the media and Opposition don’t have the resources with which to entice them.
There are many Josephs and Moses’ in the NRM state.