POST-MUSEVENISM
Uganda's opposition has concentrated in in-fighting for social space in protracted bickering which is counterproductive. This territoriality and the inconsequential flag-bearer fight distracts us from organizing for the bigger trophy of liberating Uganda. Under pluralist dispensation, parties ally for strategic reasons before or after elections, mostly to leverage their resources, consolidate their grip where they are present, and to focus on winning new territories. These alliances are usually strategic, principled and mutually beneficial, not antagonistic.
I theorize that our inability to envision a post-Museveni regime is at the center of this squabble.
Mr. Museveni's regime is definitely hegemonic. After 33 uninterrupted years in power, Mr. Museveni has galvanized himself within the state. Museveni is the state of Uganda. Opposition groups have under-developed capacity to imagine how to dismantle this hegemony. Scholars and theorists of politics have offered some insights into the hegemonic nature of authoritarian regimes and factors for their durability.
Tina Rosenberg, for instance, discusses the challenge of tackling and managing a post despotic regime and why most opposition fears to think beyond these regimes. Rosenberg observes that the post despotic regime offers its own challenges that need proper handling to avoid the rise of residual elements of the pas tyranny from regaining power and influence. First, post-despotic actors must grapple with the question of overcoming the legacy of the deposed dictatorship. Whether to investigate a tyranny's legacy and whether such endeavors take the shape of criminal investigations is one. There is also the option of trying those past leaders, liquidating their ill-begotten assets at home and abroad, or pursuing traditional methods such as purging the old regime with their entire power base, collapsing their economic bases or pursuing a secret intelligence agenda to bring the atrocious elements from the past to justice. According to Rosenberg, each one of these actions and the thought of it, whether by opposition groups or elements within the dictatorship needs caution.
The caution is necessary since post-dictatorship democracy tends to be weak if the dictatorship did not collapse in its entirety. That is if the pillars of the tyrannical regime or state were not smashed. Some dictators are clever enough to negotiate for a gradual transition, such that they retain some or all of their privileges like in the case of Mugabe. However, most dictators are so self-absorbed that they will wait until their organization is completely collapsed with them, like in the case of Gadhafi, Saddam, and Bashir.
Levitsky and Way of the University of Toronto, have studied trends and factors of durability among dictators in Eastern Europe. They surmised that authoritarian regimes often enhance elite cohesion upon which authoritarianism is entrenched. The elite are mobilized by providing institutionalized access to the spoils of power. In Uganda, Museveni has used corruption, sectarianism, and patronage to mobilize the elite. Levitsky and Way, however, cautions that while dictators spend time and resources to mobilize elite, they do not actually rely on elite cohesion which tends to be unprincipled and dissociates rather unpredictably. Dictators thus depend largely on identities, norms and organizational structures forged during sustained violence and ideologically driven conflicts to cling on to power.
Andras Bozoki (2013) illuminates the incongruousness in depending on democracy to challenge authoritarian regimes. Bozoki argues that economic growth is not conducive to authoritarianism and therefore tyrants subvert any meaningful economic empowerment of the people by skewing the distribution of social and economic resources; second, dictators do not guarantee the growth of democracy since authoritarian systems run behind electioneering veil. Thus, dictators use the concept of democracy as a smokescreen for building a ruthless regime antithetical to the spirit of real democracy.
But, dictators do not exist in one country like a vacuum. Dictators have friends and where they have none, they create some. Political scientists, Kevin Koehler and Alexander Schmots writing in the Washington Observer opines that dictators associate and develop linkages with one another. The durability of a dictator thus depends on the density of these linkages to facilitate transnational diffusion and cooperation.
In sum, the Ugandan opposition has to rethink the meaning of pluralism as a place beyond Museveni's dictatorship. Pluralism encourages diversity and does not forge the unification of ideas for the sake of unity. Our old political parties seem to exude the internalization of Mr. Museveni's repressive approaches to subvert the proliferation of plurality. These individuals are too pre-occupied with thinking within the existence of repression. When generation elections are called, the opposition will have generated sufficient apathy against their own interests, eroded the credibility of each other and shaken the faith in a post-Museveni reality. To overcome the infantile pettiness, the opposition is guided to embrace and respect plurality, focus attention away from each other by target regime's support pillars at local and central government. Thinking of a post-Museveni era, a possibility of probability may unite us.
