Ugandans should brace themselves for a largely authoritarian regime

Suspects being brutally arrested

For nearly four decades, President Yoweri Museveni has maintained power through many things, but key among them is the use of money.

Religious and cultural leaders have been supported with vehicles and other privileges. Businessmen have been given access and protection.

Politicians and public servants have accumulated wealth in a system where corruption has often been tolerated, or at least selectively enforced, and then a little money handed to voters during elections.

The strategy is that to get everyone to remain loyal to the system, everyone should have something to lose. It can also work as an insurance policy. If one accumulates wealth through questionable means, you keep a file on them.

They can be threatened, investigated, or arrested when necessary. But the more traditional Museveni method has been less about arresting everyone and more about buying loyalty. Give people something. Let them benefit from the system.

Make sure they have something to lose if the system changes. For a long time, it worked. The problem is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Uganda needs money.

We need schools, hospitals, roads, electricity, jobs and an economy capable of giving young people a future. At some point, the mathematics has stopped mathing, as we say on the streets. The young generation has become increasingly difficult to rent.

They form a huge part of the population. Many are entering adulthood without jobs, without meaningful opportunities and without much patience for stories about what happened 40 years ago.

This explains, in large part, the rise and continuing popularity of the National Unity Platform among young Ugandans. Increasingly, Ugandans are asking for accountability.

The conversation about corruption is not new, but during the last term of office it reached a different level. Agora’s investigations and exposes helped push corruption into the centre of public debate. Social media made it impossible to ignore.

The traditional media amplified it. Parliament picked it up. As we headed into the general elections, accountability and anti-corruption became a big part of the political conversation.

In the new term, it, therefore, became politically-essential and perhaps convenient for the regime to demonstrate that it, too, could fight corruption. Anita Among was thrown under the bus.

Then came Balaam Barugahara’s anti-corruption caravans. However, now they are losing momentum since they have almost fully been turned into PLU endorsement campaigns, which I argued in an earlier article was inevitable if Balaam was to survive politically.

These realities then beg the question: Can a regime built around rented political support survive without doing it? How does it compete with an opposition that has attracted a large number of young people without continuously giving voters money?

How does it keep politicians, cultural leaders, businessmen, and other influential people loyal without endlessly increasing the price of that loyalty? So now they need another currency, which is coercion.

This is where I think Uganda is heading. If you cannot buy people or persuade them, you intimidate them. Some will say there was never much democracy to begin with. And they have a point. Buying votes, using patronage to influence political leaders, deploying state resources to shape elections is not democracy.

And if you have a government like ours that can never accept losing an election, what exactly are we calling democracy? Perhaps what many of us have been experiencing is simply a democratic space inside an essentially authoritarian political arrangement.

We speak on television, criticise government on X, write newspaper articles. But perhaps it has also kept us comfortable. It allowed us to believe that because we could speak, the system itself was democratic.

Maybe that is part of how we became hoodwinked. Because democracy is not simply the freedom to talk. It is also the possibility that the people you are talking about can actually lose power.

And if they cannot lose power, then eventually the freedom to talk becomes little more than a pressure valve. The danger is that even that pressure valve is now shrinking.

There are those who have increasingly started to argue that we need an authoritarian government. I tend to think most of them speak from a vantage point of safety and privilege. But let us give it an ear.

Some authoritarian governments have actually produced remarkable development. The argument is that an authoritarian government, if led by competent and disciplined people, can sometimes take difficult decisions, control corruption and direct national resources towards development.

The tired example is Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. As seen, it takes competent and disciplined people, especially leaders, so what happens when you get authoritarianism without competence?

These are the same people about whom law lecturers and practitioners have repeatedly raised questions about the quality of some of the laws they pass at Parliament. They announce grand ‘elephant projects’, yet many remain unfinished, delayed, or unable to deliver the value promised.

So, what exactly are we likely getting in exchange for giving up our political freedoms? Possibly nothing. Imagine losing both little freedom and your taxes.

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The writer is a researcher with Agora Center For Research

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