Museveni Bends the Law to Extend His Rule
By: Julian Mok
Photo courtesy by Africa Renewal
Lexington — In late July, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) announced that President Yoweri Museveni had collected the papers he needed to seek nomination as his ruling party’s candidate for the 2021 Ugandan presidential election. 75-year old Museveni has been in power since 1986, winning a total of five elections through a combination of smart campaigning, intimidation, election fraud, rigged polling stations and violent repression of opposition parties.
More importantly, in September 2017, Museveni and Parliamentary members of the NRM moved to amend the only legal obstacle to his 2021 presidential candidacy: The Constitution.
Prior to September 2017, the 1995 Constitution of Uganda set the age limit for presidency at 75 years old at the time of the election. Museveni will be 76 years old by election day in February 2021. In September 2017, NRM members of Parliament introduced a bill to remove the age limit for presidency.
Opposition lawmakers immediately called to filibuster the bill while protesters stood outside the government building to voice their disapproval. According to an Afrobarometer poll taken in September 2017, 75% of the population was opposed to lifting the age limit.
The filibuster stood for a week, but days later Museveni deployed heavy armored vehicles and police to stifle the protests – in Parliament, plain-clothed operatives arrested opposition officials. The fear tactics were enough to see the filibuster dropped. By December 2017, the age cap was removed.
With the candidacy locked in, Museveni and the NRM has found ways to further disadvantage political opponents. They have leveraged the coronavirus to mandate a universal lockdown that prohibits in-person rallies and door-to-door mobilization, the main mode of winning support in Uganda.
Candidates are limited to digital campaigning, but only 18 million citizens in a country of more than 42 million have Internet access, and this is concentrated in urban centers to young Ugandans.
Under these circumstances, it would seem as though all candidates would be equally disadvantaged, but Museveni has found a way to leverage the situation.
He and the NRM, the current ruling party, have committed $100 million to purchase at least 10 million radios and 140,000 television sets that they will hand out to citizens in over 70,000 villages “to keep education going” during the coronavirus shutdown. In addition to relaying school programs, there will be political campaign ads that play over the radio waves, finding a way into voters’ home where other candidates are prohibited.
Museveni and the NRM have historically found great support in rural Uganda, where 76% of the Ugandan population lives. Past opponents have focused their campaigning efforts to urban centers where they already enjoy enviable support. Museveni’s strongest opponent in the 2021 election is Robert ‘Bobi Wine’ Kyagulanyi, a musician turned candidate who has droves of young supporters that enjoy both his music and his platform.
He promises democratic rule, depoliticizing the police force, peace in the region and fighting endemic corruption to spur economic growth. More than his promises, young Ugandans love that he is an outsider with no political baggage and who grew up in the same ghettos where they live. However, his great support from the youth has also been an area that Museveni has attacked.
One way to prevent voters from voting for your political opponents is to prevent them from voting in the first place. In November 2019, the electoral college closed voter registration over a year before the election. This prevented many young first-time voters from registering and participating in election day. Every day, 3,800 Ugandans turn 18 – an estimated 1 million first-time voters will miss out on voting in the 2021 election. This is almost 7% of the expected voter turn-out, which is more than enough to swing an even contest.
The electoral college cited time and logistical constraints as their reason for prematurely ending voter registration, a decision backed by the Constitution.
Not many Ugandans are hopeful that Bobi Wine and the People Power Movement will win presidency. In the 2016 election that was expected to be close, Museveni won 65.75% of the vote, leaving 35.37% to the opposition. With over 20 challengers including Bobi Wine, the competing parties are expected to split the opposition vote and see to it that Museveni wins his sixth election.
His superior communication infrastructure will exclude rural Ugandans from hearing anything but his political campaigns, isolating them further from political debate and locking them into the NRM. Any opposition who dare campaign or speak out against Museveni or the NRM can expect to be intimidated, arrested, tortured or killed. Museveni’s presidential tenure is only surpassed by Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang who has ruled since 1979 and Cameroon’s Paul Biya, in office since 1982.