On Monday, police fired tear gas canisters and live ammunition to disperse hundreds of people who had turned up in Kawempe in Kampala for campaign rallies of Mr Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, the presidential candidate of the Opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) party.
The pandemonium raged on as he campaigned in Mukono on Tuesday, Buikwe on Wednesday and Kayunga on Thursday. There was nothing new about it. Scenes of Opposition politicians and their supporters scurrying for cover amid tear gas smoke are expected every time the Electoral Commission (EC) calls an election. What was new here was the decision by police to deploy dogs and unleash them on NUP supporters as a crowd control measure.
Indictment
The events of the first three days of the week came a few months after the release of the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index (BTI) 2024. The BTI index, which evaluates how developing countries and countries in transition go about changes aimed at moving them towards greater democracy and free market economies, accused security agencies of infringing on the right to assemble. ‘The right to associate and assemble is a fundamental part of Uganda’s bill of rights. However, it is also one of the most frequently violated rights by State actors, particularly the police and military,’ the Index notes. It added that political space has shrunk so much that the parties cannot operate freely.
Double standards
The Index also alludes to the fact that there seems to be one set of rules and laws for supporters of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM), and another set for those of the Opposition, even when Article 21 of the Constitution clearly stipulates that ‘all persons are equal before and under the law’ and ‘deserve equal protection of the law’. Given that the Index was released several months before the campaigns kicked off, one would have thought the indictment of the Force would have prompted its officers to do better.
At the start, they did so well that civil society actors, among them Mr Livingstone Sewanyana, the Executive Director of the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, lavished praise on them. ‘I was appreciating the police officers for restraining themselves and at the same time urging them to restrain themselves because I was mindful that things could change so fast and get out of hand,’ Mr Sewanyana says. Well, they changed very fast on Monday.
No surprise
Several watchers of the Ugandan political space believe it had always been a case of when the tear gas would come out, and not whether it would come out at all.
‘I was not surprised that violence broke out at some point. At the time we praised the police, the presidential campaigns had just begun. They were upcountry. The excuse that the police usually come up with when it comes to Kampala and the neighbourhood is that they were preventing a disruption of business, which they would not tolerate,’ Mr Sewanyana says.
Mr Dan Wandera Ogalo, a constitutional lawyer, who participated in the writing of the 1995 Constitution and represented Bukooli North in the 6th Parliament, says he too was not surprised by the return of tear gas, which he thinks is linked to the NRM’s long stay in power. ‘After 40 years, your support wanes, and as it wanes, it frightens your campaign strategists and the security forces, who essentially have failed to understand their role. If they see this big crowd following Bobi Wine here, or they see Nandala (Mafabi) whom they may have thought was nothing, but they see him drawing lots of crowds, it frightens them, and their answer is what they know best – violence,’ Mr Ogalo says.
Mr Nathan Nandala Mafabi is the presidential candidate of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC). Others believe one of the outcomes of the NRM’s long rule has been that the institutions of State such as police and the Internal Security Organisation, have been so fused with the ruling party that it makes it impossible for their officers not to act like functionaries of NRM.
So is the violence by design?
Mr Kituuma Rusoke, the spokesperson of the Uganda Police Force, doubts that anyone benefits from violence. ‘I doubt even NRM would support incidents of that nature. Ordinarily, nobody would wish to see people falling in ditches,’ Mr Rusoke says, but Mr Ogalo disagrees. ‘That is a way of intimidation. It is a way of subverting the election. It ensures that the topic of the Opposition having many followers is contained. When you later steal the election, you can always say that, ‘but really, where was their support?” Mr Ogalo argues.
Collusion?
Claims that police work to sabotage the ruling NRM have been going on for a while now, and they were recently repeated by Mr Emmanuel Dombo, the director of communication at the NRM Secretariat. He is inclined to believe that police brutalise the Opposition not only to make NRM get a bad name, but also to enable Opposition to get sympathy. ‘Some of us actually are suspicious that perhaps the Opposition is actually working with police. Common sense would just show that. What is the objective of harassing the Opposition?’ Mr Dombo asked in a previous interview.
But Mr Rusoke does not agree. He instead thinks that it is the Opposition that provokes police. ‘We have to focus on the trigger issues – the underlying causes of the violence. You have to admit that there are politicians who love to see chaos by inciting the masses, and the masses are easy to manipulate. Once they are in that charged state, they will unleash their anger on the coercive instruments of the State. In the end, you find a counter reaction,’ he says. Prof Paul Wangoola, a former member of the National Consultative Council (NCC), which was Uganda’s Parliament following the ouster of the Idi Amin regime, has previously blamed acts of violence on the ruling party.
However, Mr Odwe, while speaking in an August 2024 interview, attributed violence, lapses and bad judgment calls on the part of police officers to deficits in training and failure to nurture and develop police officers. ‘People are recruited from different communities and backgrounds. They have different cultures and education. Others can be bad, but it is the police to transform them. The transformation begins in the training schools, but that is not where it ends. It ends in the field,’ he argued.
He added, ‘Transforming a character into a good law enforcement officer is a process that takes time, but it should be a progression towards value. If somebody was like 50 percent good, he should, over time, progress to 75 percent, 80 percent or even beyond. They should not be at 50 percent and then regress to 40 or 25.’ Mr Rusoke insisted back then that there were no deficits in training, but does that training apply to soldiers deployed in the army?
Some of Mr Museveni’s critics describe this as militarisation of the police. Those deployments of people who have no training in aspects of say crowd control, they argue, are causes of the kind of mayhem that has been seen for most of last week. But Mr Rusoke, does not think so. ‘Anybody who has experience with crowd control as an officer will tell you that it is usually a very charged moment. It is not an ordinary situation. So, those transgressions are common but our encouragement is that commanders must always come to the ground and discuss the post operation incidents,’ Mr Rusoke says.
Mr Ogalo laughs off Mr Rusoke, saying most of the people who ended up in the Force after Mr Museveni declared his intention to sanitise the Force are responsible for most of the acts of violence because of their mistaken belief that their duty is to the NRM and not the country. ‘Those people [security personnel] failed to understand their role. They see their role as sustaining the regime,’ he argues.
Pleasing NRM
Given the President’s remarks in Kitagata more than 14 years ago, there is a thinking that some police officers are too eager to disperse Opposition crowds in order to catch the eye of Mr Museveni. Mr Dombo thinks that some of them do it inadvertently. ‘The security at times may sympathise with the incumbents. If somebody is abusing the President as he is looking for a vote and the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, police may misconstrue that to be an attack on the Fountain of Honour and the person might be dealt with differently,’ Mr Dombo argues. Mr Dombo recommends rolling out civic education to include even the men in uniform.
Bigger challenges
Mr Ogalo does not believe that civic education is the way to go. He argues that a country which is going into the seventh election cycle under the watch of the NRM and the fifth under a multiparty political dispensation should ordinarily have been improving in the conduct of elections and the practice of democracy, but that has not been the case. Others think that what was witnessed in Kawempe, Mukono, Buikwe and Kayunga, in the week coupled with what happened in various parts of the country in the 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021 elections point to an even bigger problem – that the country has caught a culture of violence.
Mr Ogalo insists that it goes beyond a culture of violence. He argues that there could be something fundamentally wrong with the systems and national fabric.
‘Remember that it was because of bad elections that Mr Museveni took us through a civil war. Since 1980, we can’t resolve the question of intimidating Opposition ruling parties. This goes far deeper than simply tear-gassing Bobi Wine. There is something fundamental,’ Mr Ogalo says. That might call for some soul searching on the part of all stakeholders, but mostly those in the drivers’ seats.
Provoking police.
We have to focus on the trigger issues – the underlying causes of the violence. You have to admit that there are politicians who love to see chaos by inciting the masses, and the masses are easy to manipulate. Once they are in that charged state, they will unleash their anger on the coercive instruments of the State. In the end, you find a counter reaction – Mr Kituuma Rusoke, spokesperson of the police
Intimidation: That is a way of intimidation. It is a way of subverting the election. It ensures that the topic of the Opposition having many followers is contained. When you later steal the election, you can always say that, ‘but really, where was their support?” Mr Dan Wandera Ogalo, a constitutional lawyer
Misconstrued: The security at times may sympathise with the incumbents. If somebody is abusing the President as he is looking for a vote and the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, police may misconstrue that to be an attack on the Fountain of Honour and the person might be dealt with differently,” Mr Emmanuel Dombo, the director of communication at the NRM Secretariat.