Washington, DC — Dr. Kizza Besigye, a retired colonel who ran against President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda's elections last year, and lost, says the whole exercise was fraudulent. Governments that praise Museveni's Uganda are making a serious error, he says. In voluntary exile now, Besigye, whose former campaign manager launched a democracy advocacy group in Washington, DC last month, is in the United States seeking support for his campaign against the Ugandan president. He spoke with allAfrica.com's Charles Cobb Jr. about what he sees as the failings of Museveni's "no party democarcy."
Uganda is held up as a model in many many ways -- its fight against HIV/Aids, its apparently successful economic management, a steady growth rate, which I think has been a steady six or seven per cent for more than a decade. Yet, you're very critical of Museveni's administration. What's wrong with it?
What's wrong is the trend of his management. I hope that you are aware that I was part and parcel of the interim government that indeed won the respect of the international community in turning things around. But that was in 1986. When we took over from a highly dictatorial and abusive government in terms of people's rights, and we came into government in 1986 with a clear program of revival of our country, revival based on democratic governance, on insuring people's rights on stamping out the corruption which was rampant in especially the public sector and insuring peaceful resolution of conflict and indeed on revamping the economy.
We thought that the only way to successfully achieve that was to involve all political players in Uganda in the governance structures through the formation of a broad-based all-inclusive government that was to be established in 1986. That was the type of government that was able to quickly create conditions for stability on the basis of which economic reforms and other social reforms like you are talking about that under Uganda respect in the international community again could be made. And because, indeed, of implementing that program in the initial period, we achieved the successes in the economy. The economy moved from negative growth to an impressive positive growth. The health sector started recovering and so on and so forth.
You see, as time went on, this same President Museveni, because he did not pursue to the logical conclusion the implementation of that program, especially in the area of democratic governance, he started moving on a path that, if not checked, will undo all the successes that have been credited to his government. And the most regrettable area has been the development of the institutions that are necessary indeed for a democratic dispensation.
He, since 1992, has been persistently engaged in suffocating the activities of all other political organizations except his own organization and, to that extent, of course he was using all kinds of reasons that if you allow people to organize they only organize controversies, reasons which have for a long time have already been proved to be wrong.
Now, this denial of political freedom, of people to associate, organize politically, and to oppose what they don't consider as positive policies that are being pursued by his government, formally has been the pivotal turning point in his administration because what happened was he perceived people who were pressurizing to get space to organize as enemies, and barred them from government. So what was a broad, all-inclusive government ended up now being an exclusive government of a small group of people who were only in our organization of NRM. The other political parties of DP, the UPC, that's the Democratic Party, the Uganda Peoples' Congress and the other partied were all pudged from this administration and not allowed to organize outside it.
Museveni says he won't allow opposition to organize as parties but certainly allowed individuals to organize as opposition - "no party democracy".
No, that's not the case. Individuals are not allowed to organize as opposition because how does opposition organize if it is not through the formation of people who believe in a certain set of ideas coming together and structuring themselves and mobilizing others to support their positions and indeed to generate the resources necessary for their own work. You are not allowed to hold any meeting of political opposition in the country. You are not allowed to sponsor any candidate for any office. You are not allowed to collect funds necessary for carrying out your own work, so how can they reasonably operate as opposition. So opposition in effect is absolutely no doubt that it is banned in Uganda by the laws that have been enacted in that regard.
You yourself ran as an opposition presidential candidate, and ran a threatening race to President Museveni, so there must be some arena in which you can operate.
A: Precisely, you see, first of all people who are interested to know how fraudulent President Museveni's position is, should examine my candidature because I was coming from the same organization as his, the NRM (National resistance Movement) and I was not coming from the opposition as you call it. And our constitution, which he manipulated for that same reason, was saying that people should stand for elected office as individuals not supported by political organizations. But the day I said, I am now going to compete against you sir, he issued a public statement which is on record saying that my action is disruptive because the organs, the Movement, which his organization represents, have not approved my candidature.
So, in other words, he still believes whoever is going to challenge him, even within the Movement, should have been approved by the organs of the Movement, of which he is, of course, the chair. He is the chair of the national conference. He is the chair of the national executive. And so his assertion was that I should have gone through him and asked to compete with him.
Now that is the starting point. Contrary to what, clearly, the constitution says in article 70, that all of us have freedom to compete for any office as individuals, he does not even believe in the law that he has created which suffocates other opposition organizations. Even within his own organization, he does not accept that there should be democratic participation. Even within the same organization. Now that is one.
Secondly, you see these structures, which he was calling upon to endorse my candidature or his - and eventually he called them and they endorsed him as their honorary candidate - are organized right from the villages. So he has an organizational structure from the villages up to the national level. Anybody going to compete with him is going to meet that organizational structure already working for President Museveni.
On the other hand, you who are coming in, you are supposed to start as an individual without any structural support. You have to create some whole election structures from the villages. You know people who conduct the campaign, so the nature of competition is fundamentally flawed. From that angle, all persons who are supposed to compete with President Musevni are supposed to do so as individuals, when he competes as an organization. They are supposed to raise their own funds, when he uses government funds, which fund the whole structure.
Then, of course, the state-controlled media, which is the dominant media in Uganda, is used as a campaign machine for the President and against any members of the opposition. And then you have all the other biased structures like the electoral commission, which is the organizer of the election. The president is the one who appoints all members of the electoral commission and can dismiss them at will without referring to anybody. So they serve at his pleasure and as such, they are directly his servants and he influences them because they want to retain their jobs. He influences them to take decisions that favor him and frustrate any opposition. That is why, during my own election of 2001, up to the time of the election, the electoral commission did not have a voter's register. You know? How can you have an election without a voter's register?
Eventually, we discovered in the petition that I launched in the court after the election, that the register they used, which was only available to them and not anybody else, had nearly 3 million non-existent voters on the register. At the time of our election, the voters who were registered were 10.7 million voters. They have carried out a re-registration, which, of course, arose out of my petition, and they have now come down to seven million. They've just completed the re-registrations. But, Museveni alone, got 7 million, 7 million votes, so you can see that all aspects of organizing an election right from the ground were not level in that some candidates have an organization, others are not permitted to have an organization; some are funded, others are not funded. The institutions that organize an election and make it free and fair, the media, the electoral commission then you have the army which is brought in at will to terrorize the population and which was, indeed, brought in during that election to terrorize the population widely.
We have never had as violent an election as we had in 2001 in the entire Ugandan history. And this is well-documented in terms of the number of people who died directly as a result of the electoral process, the people who were imprisoned and so on and so forth.
There's a broader question here. I have heard, as a reporter, the kind of argument that Museveni uses about the fragility of Africa: that the dangers of ethnic conflict, if you will, injecting itself in the political process, requires, for lack of a better phrase, imperfections in the structure of politics and democracy and that the stability eventually gained is worth that kind tradeoff.
Yes, because you are asking what happened? What happened to President Museveni who was a good leader, progressive and so on, and, you know, if what has transpired over the last 16 years of his rule bore out that argument and it's wrong enough then, and it's long enough time to do so, then we not be raising any fingers.
But let's look at the stability. Throughoutout the entire 16 year period of his rule, up to today as we talk, Uganda has had half a million to one million internally displaced persons within Uganda rising out of internal conflicts, internal violent conflicts. These people are living in camps of crowded people, children dying left and right because of a lack of sanitation, water, health services. They have not gone to school, all these children. The children who were born in these camps are now teenagers. They have not been to school. If his type of governance, therefore, was the avenue to having a stable non-confrontational political environment where ethnicity is not a factor in creating that kind of disharmony, what has happened under his rule for the 16 years?
I've just told you that, in our election, first of all we come from the same area, it's not that even we were from the same movement. He's from NRM. I'm from NRM. Both of us are from the same part of the country., So why did we have far more violence in the campaigns and electoral process generally than we had had when we were under a partisan dispensation, a multi-party political dispensation? What he says is definitely not borne out by the reality and it's not even rational in terms of the theoretical basis of that proposition. So it's just an excuse to entrench himself in power, to avoid organized opposition to his rule, and to have an autocratic government. That is all.
What explains Museveni's popularity with industrialized nations, Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and so forth in an era when they are demanding better governance, greater transparency
That is, in fact, the area of weakness which those institutions have had because they have been demanding economic reforms for providing further support for these governments.
Economic reforms, President Museveni has been giving to them, the economic reforms they demand. Liberalize the economies, privatize public institutions, and create a free monetary environment, all of these policies, Museveni has been delivering on. What those institutions have not been demanding is the institutions that would guarantee good governance and that would have been their failing.
What institutions has President Museveni developed in the last 16 years that insure stable democratic governance? What are they? Absolutely nothing. And that is the failure of the international institutions and it is also the failure of, I think policy, policy towards Africa by the donor countries, of not focusing on the evolution of institutions that can sustain good governance in these countries.
So even for purposes of argument, you assume that President Museveni was a good leader as a person, then what happens if, God forbid, a bus runs over his car in Washington and he is not there anymore, what would happen to Uganda? What institutions are there for a smooth transition to another leadership that would perform similarly? Absolutely nothing. So, these institutions have been focused on economic reforms and not broadly on good and democratic governance.
In other parts of Africa, these institutions have been increasingly emphasizing good governance alongside economic reform. Zimbabwe comes immediately to mind where, the question of governance is driving other countries' policies towards Zimbabwe, as much as economic reform. Wouldn't these concerns apply to Uganda?
In fact, I'm glad you've raised the question of Zimbabwe, because Zimbabwe, far more than any other part of Africa, has exposed the lack of a clear and crystallized position of standards that ought to be met by Africans or the African governments that they support. What are the benchmarks for democratic governance, which must be met by African governments in order to merit the support that they give them?
You'll find that they are not crystallized anywhere because, if they were, then even before Zimbabwe, these other governments where these problems have been -- and it's across the board, when a government says well we have had these elections when in fact there has been nothing -- it would show that it will not be qualified to be called an election and that is also why, even now, other African people are cynical about the concern that was shown on Zimbabwe. They are saying, is this because there are white farmers in Zimbabwe that you are now focusing on Zimbabwe? Why haven't you done this in A, B, C, D?
All of these places where we have trouble -- the Congo, Somalia, where ever there is trouble now -- and all it goes to show is that there is an overemphasis of short term benefits that are derived from those governments delivering on certain requirements of the Bretton Woods institutions or the donor governments without accessing the long-term effect that the broad lack of good governance is going to have on those countries.
Look, Uganda today, there is no debate about it, is one of the most corrupt countries in the whole world. Transparency International, which assesses the levels of corruption and uses certain indices to do so, had clearly ranked amongst, I think, the bottom 13 most corrupt countries in the whole world. Now, this is completely unsurprising because once you have institutions that will guarantee accountability in the government, transparency in the government, corruption will spiral and this is what has been happening.
That corruption is not suggestive at all that there has been an insistence by these institutions on good governance because if there were good governance, there would be checks and balances within the system. Parliament would be checking the executive to see that there was proper separation of powers. You would have a judiciary, which is functioning that can deal with corrupt officials. You would have a policing system that can investigate and prosecute corrupt practices.
As long as you don't concentrate on those institutions, institutional development, you are missing the point completely. What is the condition of the Ugandan police? What is the condition of the Ugandan judiciary? What is the condition of the Ugandan parliament? What is the condition of institutions that relate to electoral management? As long as you don't concentrate on those and you just talk about liberalization of the economy, you can have people digit figures in growth, at the end of the day what was appearing as a success story will just come down crumbling like a pack of cards. And this is what is going to happen.
Our problem has never been fundamentally a problem of economic growth. The problem has been fundamentally that of political mismanagement. And political growth cannot be sustainable against the background of undemocratic governance.
What does somebody like yourself do, at this point? You cannot organize parties, I believe there's legislation now in front of the parliament ...
It's been approved.
It's been approved, okay. So what do you do if you are to try and make that change?
You see, this is the tricky situation in which we are because what the international community ought to appreciate is that what we have in Africa are terror states. What we are suffering now is state terrorism because I cannot go back to Uganda. I have been living outside my country for the last nine months and I cannot go back because of fearing State persecution, which I run away from. So many of the people who supported me at that election have been afraid and run the country or are rotting in jail even without trial or are in total fear of receiving similar treatment like we have received and we have nowhere to turn to because it is the State that is dominating all spheres.
Is there a warrant or something out for you in Uganda?
No there is not formally, but obviously President Museveni has been threatening publicly. The last time is about a week ago when he addressed parliament and he told them that he has information that I am involved in rebel activities, that I am now a terrorist (laughs), and that he's either going to capture or kill us. Standing in parliament using those words, "We shall capture them or kill them."
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Now, so if I don't want to be captured or killed I stay as far away as possible. So the question here is how does the world respond to rogue governments? Governments who have turned against their own populations and what I am saying is the starting point must be the world community through their various multilateral organizations that there are must set standards of good governance beyond which support would be denied if you are not performing to these standards. Because a government like Uganda, in spite of the growth you are talking about of Museveni's inefficient government, we do not generate half of the budgetary requirements for the country which are very conservative. More than half of our budget is externally funded.
So, if the donors, the supporters of that economy put a condition that these are the standards which you have to meet if we support you, like they have been doing in the economic sphere, then he would have very little option but to act accordingly. That is one way in which the international community can help. But of course on our own part, internally, we are going to continue against that hostile environment to organize resistance against what we see as a denial of our rights.
Can you realistically expect that a country like the United States or any donor country will support you? I'm thinking as you speak, Museveni was received at the White House and praised by President Bush. He was received by major political institutions, economic institutions.
Yes, and we think that they are doing so against a background of incomplete information. I think it is entirely within the interests of the United States and similar governments to insist on good governance in these countries. Even when you are talking about controlling terrorism, international terrorism will thrive in environments where there is no transparency and accountability. And I have absolutely no doubt, even myself, that Uganda is a haven for terrorist activities and I have good information to that effect.
What do you mean?
International terror organizations, but even that aside, the level of violence if the United States does not intervene in a positive way as I have been saying, the level of violence will consume the whole region.
As you know indeed, our region has now become completely volatile, precisely because of governments that are not accountable or democratic within their borders. And that will eventually hamper the interests of the United States. So, it is in the best interest, I think, of the United States to insure that they set standards, that they don't just look at Museveni to be sure.
If they could tell me that Museveni has these institutions that will guarantee sustainable development and that will guarantee political stability, then I would have absolutely no problem with them. So, I think the reception they are giving Museveni is against a background of incomplete information or, if not that, incomplete analysis of the danger that Museveni presents today. They must appreciate that the Museveni who took over power in 1986 is not the Museveni they are giving a red carpet to in 2002 I the White House.
What are you doing to change their view? Are you speaking to officials?
Well, what I have done precisely while I am in Washington is to further impress upon all spheres of decision-makers in the United States government, in the Congress, in the Senate, in the State Department -- all areas that I can find access to -- to impress upon them the situation as we see it in Uganda, and ask them to refocus their attention onto the right areas in our countries. And I hope that by providing this information, some of which is definitely factual and I can produce evidence of it, of what has been going on in the various areas, that then they can start reviewing their policy towards Uganda and towards Africa generally.
Are you meeting with President Museveni?
I have, in fact, written to him through the Embassy, informing him that I am here and informing him that I still consider the way forward for our country is for him to engage in a dialogue that would result in undertaking the reforms that would direct our country onto a democratic path and offering him my presence to such a discussion, if he is so interested. He is also having a discussion on VOA on Wednesday [and] I have asked him, in the interest of having an audience that receives all the views, to allow me to participate with him.
