UPDF in a Post-Museveni Uganda: Hints of Hope and Upheaval.

ELIAS BIRYABAREMA



Kampala--From its founding in 1981, through the guerrilla battles to the seizure of power in ’86, transformation into a national army and then on to the current multiparty politics, the UPDF (formerly, NRA) has been run as a de facto personal army of President Yoweri Museveni.

Mr Museveni’s influence within the UPDF is so pervasive and overweening—or so he has made people believe—that most Ugandans have long understood it as nearly impossible for this institution to stand without him. And so there is a considerable measure of wonder and apprehension about the sort and extent of change, if any, that will sweep through the UPDF in a post-Museveni Uganda.

While it is true that the army has long shed some of its historical ties to Mr. Museveni and assumed a national character and visage, it still maintains lots of cultish loyalty and reverence for its founder and a great deal of the army command structures and functioning appear to spin around his personal authority that its unclear how that institution’s integrity will continue when its supposed centre of gravity (Mr Museveni) erodes.

In Ex Army Commander, Major Gen Mugisha Muntu’s prognosis, the UPDF can survive Mr Museveni’s political demise and grow even stronger but that that will depend on the evolving character of the force and factors influencing its internal growth and transformation.

There’s a growing cadreship of elite officers (highly educated, trained and modernist in outlook), Muntu observed, that is increasingly gravitating toward independent thinking and action and that if the future of UPDF is shaped by these officers then worries of an institutional breakdown after Museveni would be wanton. “Yes, they’re all these educated and inspiring officers in our military that are upcoming,” he said. “I think they represent the hope and continuity of our army.”

Encouragingly, too, the elongated stability of Uganda’s politics and the growing strength of some of the country’s democratic institutions and the spread of civil liberties—parliament, opposition parties, the media, civil society—is also cited by analysts to be quietly shaping the mindsets and general character of these officers. Increasingly a growing section within the military leadership, according to a source in the intelligence community, is inevitably realising that the army has little choice but to defend these young institutions and this epiphany will ultimately determine how the military behaves upon the exit of the founding Commander-in-Chief.


Be that as it may, plenty of hints here and there do not seem to point to a reassuring future. Another source within Mr. Museveni’s intelligence circle lamented the president’s persistent use of the army in his personal political manoeuvres, noting that the practise has now become so entrenched that it will take a long time to reverse.

In all the elections Uganda has had for instance under Mr Museveni—1996, 2001, 2006—the army has inserted itself (or has been inserted) right at the centre, with several senior raking officers actively conducting covert campaigns for President Museveni. The current coordinator of Intelligence Services, Mr David Tinyefuza and Maj. Gen Elly Tumwine overtly campaigned for President Museveni in 2001 and issued dreadful threats against his key opponent Col. Dr Kiiza Besigye. The same was reprised in 2006 elections.

For the UPDF to fully professionalize and gain sufficient national goodwill and support, so crucial for its continuity, it will have to unlearn a great deal of the anti-democracy lessons imparted by Mr Museveni and his strongman style of politics. That won’t be easy considering that most of the generals, supposed to re-orient and sanitise the UPDF are the same officers who have been harassing and brutalising political opposition members on behalf of president Museveni.

Their predicament is further complicated by the fact that their participation in Museveni’s machinations is itself done in self-interest since through maintaining Museveni’s dictatorship they perpetuate their own impunity.

There are decidedly less explored undercurrents that will nevertheless prove crucial in the future of UPDF. It has been politically incorrect for the media in Uganda to debate the longstanding accusations of tribal marginalisation in the military. Lately though, these incendiary accusations have been amplified anew by disaffected elements within the NRM. And official denials have appeared to inflame it further by inviting closer scrutiny of the tribal composition of the army. Mr Museveni’s perennial justification for the Bahima’s predominance in the army has been that they initially formed the nucleus of the NRA but after 22 years of little or no change, many are now dismissing this argument as a smokescreen for his sectarianism.

The pandemic of grand corruption in the army, one of Mr Museveni’s most hideous legacies will for long retard the growth of UPDF and there’s expected little change when he leaves power. The embezzlement of vast sums of money in payments of phantom troops, procurement of arms and even diversion of salaries for real soldiers have resulted in the perpetuation of critical capacity limitations. The consequences of this corruption have been colossally tragic as in the army’s failure to end the war in northern Uganda.


Few expect this state of affairs to change in a post-Museveni Uganda. But the cost of failure to end army corruption will probably be greater than what the nation has paid so far.

It could continue weakening the military up to a point where it’s vulnerable to upheaval and in a post-Museveni Uganda that point could come closer far faster than many can imagine.