Is Yusuf Serunkuma’s pro-Muhoozi transition stance intellectual fidelity or cowardice?

Yusuf Serunkuma on The Observer podcast

For those unfamiliar with Yusuf Serunkuma’s stance, as I understand it, he argues that Muhoozi Kainerugaba is the most realistic successor to Museveni.

He is the best shot at a stable, or at least least violent, path to and through a transition, and therefore perhaps the safest option.

The other part of the argument is that Muhoozi would be less authoritarian than his father because political society has changed and leaders can no longer get away with the kind of abuses they once could.

I find this part particularly problematic. There is a logic to the argument that as society becomes more politically-aware and legal and institutional safeguards develop, leaders have less room to commit serious abuses.

Perhaps this is true in the aggregate. But that is not the case for Uganda. Abductions, torture and disappearances did not begin with NUP foot soldiers or the recent generation of activists.

They have a much longer history. Yet, if Yusuf’s logic is correct, an increasingly politically conscious society should have pushed the Museveni regime towards greater respect for human rights. The opposite has happened.

Some abuses have not only continued; they are now carried out with a remarkable lack of embarrassment. The old fear of being caught doing something wrong appears to have been replaced by the confidence to do it with one’s chest out.

So, if Muhoozi can do what he does as CDF, what exactly stops him from doing more when he has the full powers of the presidency? On the question of probability, I am also unconvinced that the alternatives are as narrow as Yusuf presents them.

Much of the argument seems to begin with frustration: Muhoozi appears to be the most likely outcome; therefore, we should prepare for him. However, I think that political transitions rarely follow such neat calculations.

We are often reminded of Sudan, Egypt and Libya, where popular uprisings did not produce the outcomes citizens wanted. Fair enough. But Africa has experienced hundreds of changes of government.

There have been negotiated transitions, opposition victories, internal political realignments, transitional arrangements, and what might be called surgical operations within ruling establishments.

Kenya, from Moi; Zimbabwe, from Mugabe, transferred power within the same political establishment. Even if we rule out a mass uprising that successfully changes government and immediately delivers all the aspirations of citizens, there are still many possible forms of transition.

Pressure from citizens can be enough to force those controlling the system to look for a more balanced figure, either from within the establishment or outside it. The future has more possibilities than Muhoozi or chaos.

Politics, thankfully, has never been that obedient to spreadsheets. But even if Yusuf is right about the probability, I think there is a deeper problem. Yusuf has spent years building much of his intellectual legitimacy by criticising Museveni and, at different moments, Muhoozi.

Yet he is now helping normalise the idea that Muhoozi should be Uganda’s next president. Intellectuals do not merely analyse political possibilities. They shape what society begins to regard as possible, reasonable and acceptable.

They have preference-shaping power. Someone who is sceptical of Muhoozi may begin to reconsider simply because they trust Yusuf’s judgement.

Repetition across Yusuf’s many political talk shows, podcasts and other public forums can gradually turn a previously unacceptable possibility into something people begin to regard as inevitable. And then there is the defence that Yusuf is simply following the evidence.

There is a difference between predicting what is likely to happen and arguing that it is what ought to happen. This is why I am not persuaded by the argument that Yusuf is simply being courageous enough to tell us an uncomfortable truth.

Perhaps he is. But intellectual honesty is not the only obligation of a public intellectual. There is also a responsibility to care about what one’s conclusions do in society. You cannot simply say, “The data leads me here,” and stop there.

You must also ask: What does my platform make possible? What does it legitimise? Whose actions does it soften? What kind of political future am I helping people imagine?

Many have been quick to say Yusuf is doing this because he is afraid. He criticised Museveni for years and criticised Muhoozi too, and perhaps now he wants to avoid suffering the consequences.

I do not think that is so; I once asked Yusuf on a podcast where his courage comes from. He told me it came partly from his Muslim faith and his understanding that death is part of life.

I believed him then, and I still do. So perhaps this is not cowardice. Perhaps it is something more complicated: an obsession with being intellectually right at a moment when intellectual correctness may be disastrous for society.

Academics often become so committed to proving that their analysis is correct; that they forget they are also human beings living inside the consequences of that analysis. You can be intellectually-faithful and still be morally wrong.

In a country that has witnessed abductions, torture, and the shrinking of political space, I struggle to understand how the conclusion can be that the man commanding the security establishment is the person we should be preparing to hand the country to.

Maybe Yusuf is right about what is likely, but ‘me as me,’ I am not convinced that it is right to use his considerable intellectual authority to make it normal.

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The writer is a researcher with Agora Center for Research

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