Museveni Wins Ugandan Election

Well, to the surprise and shock of everybody, Museveni will remain in power for a “third” term.
Uganda’s Museveni Wins Election from the BBC

And of course by third term, I mean his 20th year, since if you go by the third term argument, he really was not in power from 1986 until the mid-1990s. But such is life, I suppose. It is really quite unfortunate, however. So here is my take on the whole situation.

This is not good for Uganda. While in a lot of ways Museveni has been pretty good for the country (especially if you are from the southwest, and most certainly if you are NOT for the north), there are other things at stake here. Democracy, no matter how much our elected officials currently would like us to think otherwise, is not the process of having elections. While that is certainly part of it, the other part, and potentially more significant, is the peaceful transfer of power. Without a culture for the peaceful transfer of power, nothing else really matters, as no matter how well things go while some individual is in power, if the end result is massive violence, all the gains will be lost overnight.

So what is going to happen from this? Well, obviously Museveni is going nowhere in the near future. So Uganda is right back where it has always been, a country that is trying to recover from the violent conflicts of the 1970s and 80s. And a country that has never had a peaceful transfer of power. So the opposition at this point has to assume that the only way to actual contest the leadership is through violence, which pretty much means going to the bush and fighting the government. There is also the potential that for the change to take place there will just be a military coup, though the likelihood of predicting that very much eludes me. The final potential is Museveni having a heart attack or something and dying, which would also lead to mass chaos and violence, as there are no structures in place to replace the current government, which is entirely based on him.

So for the future, what happened today could be the beginnings of disaster. Hopefully I am totally wrong, but I don’t think so. It is hard to predict when everything will fall apart, but I am close to absolutely certain that it will, to my own great sadness. Museveni had the chance to go down in African history as a great statesman, but instead chose to keep his grip on power. So he now seems to be well on his path to joining the ranks of other African leaders that the world once thought showed promise and wisdom, Moi from Kenya and Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

And what great company that is to join the ranks of.