How Amb. Simon Mulongo misreads my letter to Museveni

In The Observer this week, there is a lyrically crafted piece responding to an appeal I made to President Museveni on January 8, 2025. (Dear reader, I am suggesting you start by reading Amb. Simon Mulongo, before continuing with my response).

I should say, dear reader, my interlocutor, Amb. Simon Mulongo, is a wonderful gentleman. He is a colleague and friend with whom we have debated many, many aspects of Uganda. In all these encounters, I have found him knowledgeable, fastidious and a diligent fellow, who unfortunately, like all of us, has lived under an ‘order of things’ that denies one’s brilliance to shine.

Ironically and sadly, – this is Mulongo’s otherwise cowardly choice – he has immense respect for the man presiding over this ‘order of things,’ and, were the gods to allow it, he would back him for a thousand years.

That said, I read his response with a bemused face. [I enjoyed the rejoinder especially since the administrators of Makerere University, where I am based, decided to issue another denunciation of my affiliation when the letter recently reappeared online]. As you have seen, Mulongo’s pen is testament of a brilliant mind sadly trapped in Karl Marx’s material conditions.

He writes pointedly, elegantly, oftentimes lyrically. But as is true of cowardly brilliant minds, their skills are ever dangerous when put to the sinister causes. Indeed, Bwana Mulongo is subtly, carefully misleading, and a master of obfuscation.

I will reiterate the appeal that attracted this lyrical response from comrade Mulongo. Titled,Dear Yoweri Museveni, Give Uganda a Chance When You Still Can I ask the president – I am still asking – to give Uganda a chance when he still can.

Specifically, working with advanced age (81), and 40- years of doing the same thing, I plead with Bwana Museveni not to stand again in any elections. Basing on the fact that elections are simply procedural – as he is often declared winner no matter the results – I ask him to be contented with his 40 years of trying, be fair to his health, be generous to his friends in big offices, and not wait for a time to die in office.

My thesis is that death in office will bring untold mayhem to the country. Instead, I ask him to oversee a guided transition from himself to someone else, who will still anchor the country while he still lives.

Anyways, as we know now, he heeded neither this call of mine, nor of his friend, Sir Richard Kaijuka who reiterated my message at the memory of their departed contemporary, Eriya Kategaya. He is standing, and by all means, he will be swearing in after January 15. Again, it does not matter whether he won or lost, he will be declared winner.

MULONGO’S MISREADINGS

In his loftily crafted piece – with many abstract nouns making it read like an academic journal article – Mulongo accuses me of being a moralist, which he finds problematic to statecraft.

Instead, he urges that we ought to have faith in the democratic regime that Museveni brought to Uganda in 1986.

He writes that, “Uganda has experienced constitutional continuity unprecedented in the Great Lakes region, multiple electoral cycles, and the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 2005.”

While crediting Museveni for these democratic electoral cycles, Mulongo ignores a key fact that these electoral cycles have only produced the same result for the last 40 years: Yoweri Museveni. But to cover his tracks – and appear balanced – Mulongo points out that “these [democratic] processes are imperfect, often illiberal, and rightly contested, but to dismiss them as mere theatre is to engage in political negation rather than critique.”

What Mulongo is doing here is making the inherent defects, the ever-exploitable aspects of a system to appear like minor, ignorable imperfections that can be remedied after a period.

Dear Simon, what advocates of electoral liberal democracy often overlook is how loose and whorelike this thing is: its most delicious parts – that is, victory at the polls – are not only available to whoever has enough cash, but the strongest of them all.

Democracy (just like neoliberalism) never thrives on the strength of its ideas, but on violence and corruption. Indeed, as Yoweri Museveni would tell country, he knows every political actor has a monetary price.

Folks like Col Kizza Besigye and many others who exhibit non-buyable characters are instead met with violence. In an even more disingenuous turn, Mulongo decides to spin the fates of Sudan and Libya as products of moralists’ exits.

He writes: “Contemporary Africa offers sobering evidence. Sudan’s celebrated transition after 2019 yielded renewed militarism and catastrophic civil war. Libya’s 2011 revolution dissolved the state altogether.

Mali, Guinea, and Niger illustrate how morally compelling exits can trigger elite fragmentation and authoritarian relapse when institutional scaffolding is thin.” First of all, Libya and Sudan were and are not “morally compelling exits.”

These were forced exits where, like Yoweri Museveni, Gaddafi and Bashir held onto power for ages, and had to be forced out through revolution and violence. Mali and Niger are coups.

In fact, one of the biggest fears for me is that Museveni is precisely and exactly seated where Gaddafi and Bashir were to the point that sudden exit spells doom for the entire country.

Notice that Mulongo never addresses the core tenets of my appeal. My letter was rooted in (a) that we are not immortals, and that old age comes with a myriad of health complications, including death.

What will happen if Museveni suddenly disappears? He simply downplays this, calling it a “nonanalytical category.” (b) that Yoweri Museveni has emasculated all other institutions that would give Uganda order if calamity struck him: parliament, judiciary, religious institutions, cultural institutions, elders – all of these have been humiliated and emasculated.

In all seriousness, under Museveni’s regime of things, electoral democracy will not deliver any transitions. Ironically, like Daniel arap Moi in 2002, Museveni has the chance to give this Uganda a transition while he still can. Dear Simon, it is high time we stopped burying our heads in the sand like ostriches. The reality is fast coming at us.

yusufkajura@gmail.com

The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.