Yoweri Museveni the theoretician, strategist

Jul 23, 2015

Ugandans are once more in campaign mood and a lot is being said about President Yoweri Museveni.



By Amb. Kintu Nyago

Ugandans are once more in campaign mood and a lot is being said about President Yoweri Museveni.


However, what is not coming out clearly is his role and gift of being a revolutionist, theoretician and a strategist during the days of the struggle to liberate Uganda from the past rogue regimes.

When the Uganda Army attacked Tanzania in October 1978, the Amin junta had decayed to the core. This can be demonstrated by the fact that this attack was initiated by Lt. Col. Juma Butabika, of Mbarara’s Simba Battalion, without authorisation of his commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Idi Amin.

This war incubated Uganda’s current political changes.  Hence when the president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, decisively counter-attacked, it is the organised Apollo Obote’s politico-military Uganda Peoples Congress-Kikosi Malum and Museveni’s FRONASA that benefitted from this strategic move.

However, the UPC’s benefits were short term for Obote, unlike Kwame Nkrumah or Museveni, never productively reflected in exile, at Msasani, Dar-es-Salaam, about his past failings. Consequently, the Obote II regime resembled that of 19th France under the Bourbons. Both, to paraphrase Maurice Talleyrand  “…learnt nothing and forgot nothing”!  Hence Uganda’s tragedy in the early 1980s.

Conversely, Museveni had used his exile productively. He strengthened his strategic alliance with Nyerere and Mozambique’s Samora Machel, reflected on the political and military strategies to capture power in Uganda and formed and shaped the means to achieve this, hence FRONASA. Museveni is a patient strategist who started from relative weakness, on Amin’s attacking Kagera. However, this offered Ugandan patriots a God-sent opportunity to re-enter Uganda with the Tanzanian Peoples Defence Forces. Nyerere needed their political support and Obote and Museveni, were his closest Ugandan allies.

Museveni used this war, through the Western Axis, to massively recruit into FRONASA which, on entering Uganda in late 1978, had less than 100 cadres. However, by the time Kampala fell, a few months later, on April 11, 1979, FRONASA had approximately  10,000 soldiers. Many, deliberately, were intellectuals.

The politics leading to the 1980 elections offered Museveni the opportunity to prepare for the decisive next phase — the armed struggle. And it offered him the scope to participate nationally through the Uganda National Liberation Front and later the Uganda Peoples Movement. Four groups participated in the early 1980s armed struggle. Dani Nabudere’s Uganda National Liberation Front-Anti Dictatorship, Moses Ali’s Uganda National Rescue Front, Andrew Kayira’s Uganda Freedom Movement and Museveni’s Popular Resistance Army. The latter later transformed into the NRM/A, after merging with Yusufu Lule and supporters

Now Museveni proved a master theoretician and strategist. Of these four armed formations, two, tThe UNLF-AD and the NRM opted to use the method of guerrilla warfare.  The UNLF-AD, commanded by Chefe Ali,  drew rigid inspiration from the Maoist strategy of a Protracted Peoples War and and  hence located themselves remotely in the   Rwenzori mountains, safely far from power. The pragmatic Museveni was more flexible and eclectic borrowing widely from Mao but also from Regis Debray and Ernest “Che” Guevara’s useful Foco theory of revolution. Focalism’s central articulation is that a small disciplined guerrilla force can provide a successful  focus for popular discontent against an oppressive sitting regime. Hence the location of the NRM struggle in the Luwero Triangle, next door to power! The success of this bold decision validated Museveni’s political, military, theoretical and strategic credentials. 

Other factors that favoured the NRM success were, within a fractured polity, Obote’s disastrously failed to  form a government of national unity.  Parochially, he disproportionately rewarded his Bushenyi cronies with cabinet positions. This boomeranged and intra-UPC pressure forced him to appoint only UPC’s from other regions into cabinet hence leaving the opposition in the cold.

Also the Obote II regime’s primitive counter-insurgency approach drove the peasants into supporting the rebels while the NRM, to its credit, treated them humanely, and politically involved them through the creative democratising Resistance Councils. This was a key NRM innovation.

Politically, the Luwero Triangle also hosted the NRM because it was opposition territory  which after Obote’s 1966 constitutional abrogation, had experienced the regime’s wrath, mainly through the late 1960s state of emergency regulations especially in Buganda. These affected all and sundry.

The writer is an Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Uganda to the United Nations, New York

 

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});