The Museveni Succession

On how one of Africa’s storied leaders squandered his legacy and will likely plunge his nation into constitutional chaos when he leaves office.

I: Anatomy of political decay in Uganda

The presidency of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni (1986-present) offers important lessons on the nature of power (and leadership) in most African countries. Throughout the region, social and economic realities have historically imposed severe structural limits to rulers’ power, authority, and ability to transform their societies (see here and here). State-building, nation-building, and cultivation of popular legitimacy are all expensive endeavors in low-income multiethnic postcolonial societies. Yet it is hard to expand economies — in order to afford state/nation building and cultivation of legitimacy — without some traction on these three dimensions.

This, in part, explains the last 60 years of failed attempts by African leaders to escape the bad equilibrium of weak statehood, fractious identity politics, weakly institutionalized electoralism, and poor economic performance. Instead of being able to transform their societies’ socio-economic conditions, many succumbed to the pressures of diurnal politics of survival — regardless of the duration of their tenure.

Museveni’s long tenure (37 years and counting) illustrates this reality. Instead of using his power to transform Uganda as he had promised in 1986, politics transformed him into loving power as an end in itself. As a result, he will leave office largely as a failed state-builder, a failed nation-builder, and a failed developmentalist president. The Ugandan state is still scarce in much of the country, while his governance style still relies on ethnicity as the dominant mode of organizing mass politics. He also failed to transform the economy. In 1986 Uganda’s per capita income was 71% of Kenya’s. As of 2022 Uganda’s per capita income had shrunk to just 46% of Kenya’s, having essentially stagnated since 2009. The political instability that will follow his departure from office will likely erode current levels of state capacity, social cohesion, and economic development. That, too, will be part of his legacy.

Like other rulers in the region, Museveni chose to cope with his inability to maximize the state’s hegemony and to define and enforce the operative rules in society by adopting a model of authoritarianism characterized by “institutionalized arbitrary governance.” His style of governance focused “more on weakening competition than on maximizing control.” The ensuing generalized decay of civilian institutions has left the military, itself factionalized under the logics of arbitrary governance, as the main game in town (with an ever increasing role in the economy through the National Enterprises Corporation).

To be fair, Museveni was dealt a difficult hand. He inherited a landlocked, fractious multiethnic society with a battered economy and a history of elite political instability and civil conflict. History and social facts on the ground meant that it was always going to be difficult for Kampala, regardless of who was in charge, to transform Ugandan society. Since subnational ethnic fractionalization could not be erased overnight, Museveni had to use a share of the economy’s limited output to prevent elites from defecting from his coalition with their co-ethnics in tow. To his credit, he certainly did better than either Milton Obote or Idi Amin.

Museveni’s approval rating and voters’ reported proximity to the ruling party (National Resistance Movement) through multiple rounds of Afrobarometer Surveys. Museveni failed to translate his popularity into a genuine mobilization of the public towards political and economic development.

Yet it is difficult to dismiss the fact that Museveni could have tried harder and achieved better outcomes, especially since for much of his tenure he has been genuinely popular on account of having brought political stability to much of the country. Potential social desirability bias notwithstanding, 67% of Ugandans approved of his performance in the latest Afrobarometer Survey (2022). Notably, the president’s rating is higher than that reported allegiance to his weakly institutionalized ruling party. In light of these approval numbers, Museveni could have been less risk averse vis-à-vis fellow elites and institutionalized a hegemonic ruling party. He could also have built a strong administrative-bureaucratic state (at the national and subnational levels with the Local Council system) capable of maintaining order, facilitating economic growth, and providing essential public goods and services. Doing both would have enabled credible commitment between him and fellow elites, attenuated the salience of identity politics, and boosted regime stability.

Museveni’s aversion to institutionalization stunted political development in Uganda. The National Resistance Movement (NRM) is a Potemkin party, a pale shadow of more illustrious hegemonic parties in the region like Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). The Ugandan parliament, judiciary, and other public institutions continue to decay under his watch. Perhaps the best illustration of political decay in Uganda is the absurdity that is the bloated cabinet (83 Ministers and Ministers of State) and hordes of presidential advisers (98 as of 2021). In other words, Museveni relies on unstable personalist purchasing of elite loyalty as a substitute for institutionalized mass politics and rationalized administrative-bureaucratic management of state affairs.

The system is unstable because it is a chaotic “musical chairs” queueing system marked by constant reshuffling.

Museveni giving out the equivalent of US$100,000 in cash in a bag at a public function. Source: Popula

The tragedy, of course, is that Museveni and Uganda could have avoided this state of affairs. When he took power he was rightfully viewed as a revolutionary leader who could transform Uganda by stabilizing its politics and focusing the state’s attention to the important tasks of state-building, repairing the social fabric, institutionalizing politics, and improving Ugandan’s material conditions. These views of Museveni were not unreasonable. Objectively speaking, he was/is better than the modal African leader. However, at some point Museveni ceased to see power as a means to and end — i.e. transforming Uganda. Thereafter merely holding power became an end in itself. This reorientation has since left him unable to escape what Branko Milanovic calls the dictator’s trap:

[T]here is nothing that can be offered to dictators to make them step down. They have to continue to rule until they either die peacefully in their beds and after death became either vilified or celebrated (or at times, both), or until they are overthrown, or meet an assassin’s bullet. Once on the top, there is no exit. They have become prisoners like many others whom they have thrown in jail.

As a prisoner of his long tenure, Museveni is trapped not only by his own love for power, but also by the dependence of those around him. Political, military, and business elites (and quite frankly, a large share of stability-conscious Ugandans) have strong incentives to keep him in power for as long as it takes. Many simply cannot countenance change. This means that Uganda is on track for a messy transition if Museveni dies in office. Neither the NRM nor the military have institutional mechanisms for enforcing an orderly transition.

II: The making of a life presidency

It is interesting to explore whether Museveni was always going to be a lifetime president, or whether his “type” changed after he tasted power. Admittedly, this is a speculative exercise as it is impossible to go back in time and run experiments on this question, or to pinpoint exactly when Museveni’s preferences over power changed during his long presidency.

That said, available evidence suggests that power changed Museveni and that the direction of change was a function of the manner in which the “Bush War” (1981-1986) war was prosecuted and settled.

Museveni in 1984 at the height of the “Bush War.” Source: The East African

The young Museveni was a radical revolutionary who became politically conscious early in life (Museveni and his biographers agree that he became politically conscious while in secondary school at Ntare). While at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) he joined a radical students’ union that at one time found President Julius Nyerere insufficiently revolutionary. At UDSM he overlapped with illustrious scholars like Walter Rodney, Clive Y. Thomas, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence O. Ranger, Giovanni Arighi, and others. Knowledge of these scholars’ works very likely influenced his views on how best to achieve socio-economic transformation of postcolonial societies.

Even in his advanced age Museveni continues to see himself as a Pan-Africanist revolutionary invested in the structural transformation of Uganda and Africa. His own record, of course, makes his pronouncements in this vein ring hollow.

Beyond reinforcing his leftist ideological orientation, Museveni’s time at UDSM exposed him to ideas about guerilla warfare as a mechanism for achieving freedom and transforming peasant societies. It is then that he first visited areas liberated by FRELIMO in northern Mozambique, from where he learned about resistance councils that he would go on to found during Uganda’s “Bush War.” Prefiguring his future life as a rebel leader, Museveni’s undergraduate thesis was on Fanon’s theory of violence and its application to the case of Mozambique. The thesis provided glimpses of his political beliefs:

One cannot create a new order unless one shakes the old one… To say that one can introduced fundamental changes without a violent shake-up is to say that one can turn ore into iron without melting it.

Events in the early 1970s set in motion Museveni’s transformation from an idealistic revolutionary to a pragmatic power-hungry politician. On his return to Uganda he briefly worked in the Obote administration. By then he had joined the ranks of leftists in the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). Following the coup in 1971 he fled Uganda and founded the Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), a rebel group that sought to dislodge Amin from power. Despite efforts to set up bases in the north, early FRONASA was mostly a western Uganda affair. After a botched invasion in 1972 Museveni found himself exiled in Tanzania and Mozambique for the following six years. On the eve of the 1979 Tanzanian invasion that toppled Amin FRONASA formally banded with other groups in exile to form the Uganda National Liberation Front/Army (UNLF/A). The disputed 1980 election split UNLF’s units. Thus FRONASA begat the People’s Resistance Army which later National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) after merging with Yusuf Lule’s Uganda Freedom Fighters (UFF).

The politics of the “Bush War” laid the foundations for Museveni’s long tenure — and cemented his “type” as a power-hungry pragmatist. The relatively short duration of the war (5 years) short-circuited the theoretical idea of a “protracted people’s guerilla war” as the mechanism for sociopolitical transformation of a multiethnic peasant society. Obote’s swift losses, Tito Okello’s 1985 coup, and UNLA’s subsequent disintegration forced an end to the war with the NRA having conquered barely half the country. Instead of scaling his wartime attempt at mass mobilization countrywide, Museveni promptly switched to being a political dealmaker focused on putting together a stable elite governing coalition. It would take years for the NRA to extend meaningful central control to the other side of the Nile — especially among Tesos, Langis, and Acholis.

Overall, the NRA’s lack of political hegemony when it seized power in early 1986 meant that Museveni had to pragmatically negotiate with and accommodate other political forces within Uganda — a cycle that continues to this day.

Part of the problem was that, despite his revolutionary beginnings, when the rubber met the road Museveni was never been good at institutionalizing mass political mobilization. The wartime NRM functioned not as a political wing of the NRA, but as its extension (the relationship between the NRM and the Ugandan military continues to mirror this arrangement). This reality limited the movement’s ability to transform the countryside. The NRM local Resistance Councils’ predominantly function was to help the NRA fight UNLA (especially in the Luwero Triangle) and not political education or economic transformation. For example, in order to deal with the problem of westerners’ overrepresentation in the NRM, Museveni (ostensibly then a radical leftist) chose to merge with UFF — an organization led by a rightwing Muganda (Lule) — rather than cultivate a social base for the movement in Buganda. The lack of internal organizational clarity of purpose (and not necessarily ideological flexibility) elevated the politics of survival over policy:

the NRM is today [1988] caught in a contradiction: on the one hand, it wants to be a home for the reconciliation of all tendencies in Ugandan society, but on the other hand, it also wants to change that society. But you cannot do both. Not all political tendencies are reconcilable; if you try to move in all directions at the same time, the only result will be paralysis.

Museveni’s politically-expedient post-war rush to intra-elite dealmaking and accommodation — borne of an inability to directly mobilize Ugandans of all ethnic stripes — also foreclosed on a structural transformation of the Ugandan economy. Intra-elite deals demobilized their respective co-ethnics, thereby making it possible to depoliticize significant chunks of public policymaking. This made it possible in Uganda, like in much of the region, to cede policy autonomy to outside actors in the name of resuscitating the economy. The absence of a politically mobilized countryside with institutional influence created room for Uganda’s economic reforms to largely focus on monetary policy (exchange rates), stabilizing the urban economy, and cash crop producers. Peasant agricultural production was simply ignored.

Once he found himself on the dealmaking-for-political-survival train, Museveni found it difficult to jump off. There was always an excuse to be pragmatic about staying in power, rather than invest in serious state building, nation-building, political institutionalization, and economic transformation. He needed to stabilize the economy after the war. He needed elites onside as he quelled rebellions from the other side of the Nile. He needed more time to transition from the “Movement Era” to a multiparty democracy. He needed political space to fight armed groups spawned by the post-Mobutu wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was the best-placed to manage Uganda’s role in “Global War on Terror” in a volatile neighborhood. He needed to midwife Uganda’s exploitation of its oil reserves. He couldn’t step down because there were no viable alternatives (a fact that was reinforced by his allies’ inability to coordinate around an alternative). He needed to abolish presidential term limits. In the end, staying in power became the goal.

Simply stated, structural limits to the establishment of a broadly functional hegemonic state in Uganda and the diurnal politics of survival that these limits necessitated partially explain how Museveni, a former revolutionary, became the problem that he railed against in 1986:

The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power.

III: Only bad options on the able

Given the realities of Ugandan politics and the oversized influence of its military (which essentially remains fused with NRM), the best way out of the dictator’s trap would be for Museveni to appoint a successor that is not from the west, and live long enough to midwife the transition and continue to act as the personal guarantor of important dependent interest groups. He would do so by retaining control over both the NRM and the military, or by ceding the same to his brother, Salim Saleh (Caleb Akandwanaho), who has proven to be more adept at leveraging power to build a business empire. This outcome is at best remote since Museveni is addicted to power and has over the years eschewed grooming any successor.

The second best outcome would be substantial NRM elite defections without fragmentation in the military. Under such circumstances, the defectors would form a coalition with the opposition and be able to defeat Museveni without attracting a military intervention. The biggest hurdle to this outcome is the fact that the military and the NRM are inseparable. Furthermore, Museveni has a tight grip on the military and has intentionally made it fragmented as a coup-proofing strategy, making it unlikely that the entire military would pledge loyalty to defectors, even if they were to be popularly elected.

The third best option — which increasingly looks likely to become a reality — would be to pass the baton to Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Museveni’s son (evidence suggests that Saleh is not interested in directly wielding power). However, this option comes with its own risks. To put it mildly, Muhoozi is a maverick and may not honor his father’s past commitments and style of governance as he tries to build his own governing coalition. Plus the idea of a continued western domination of Uganda’s political economy may invite systemic political instability, including a military coup by disaffected units. Furthermore, it is unclear if Muhoozi would even be able to garner enough support from pivotal western constituencies (including within his extended family).

An opposition victory that dislodges both Museveni and the NRM is unlikely. As noted above, for nearly four decades Museveni’s style of politics has focused on weakening and fragmenting the opposition. In addition, the politicization of the military and police narrows the option set of viable opposition candidates to “credible insiders” (i.e., recent defectors that can be trusted to protect the military’s interests). This reality rules out leading opposition politicians with little economic and/or social links to the military establishment.

As he continues to dither about his retirement, time is not on Museveni’s side. Given his advanced age and Muhoozi’s open campaigning, it is very likely that the general election in early 2026 will force a resolution one way or the other.