Young, energetic, probably Bitcoin and tech-savvy, and in charge of the Lands Forces — the biggest unit of Uganda’s army — Muhoozi is seated in a beautiful and enviable spot. One moment of valour will surely win him thousands of hearts of Ugandans – including mine.
If he manages to also jail Mzee Museveni – even if he builds a mini-Sheraton in Luzira or secretly exiles the old man – snitching on him will not count.
He would have done more already. We will be in the streets singing his name. There is no level of sacrifice to country beyond standing up with fellow compatriots against not just an unpopular and overstayed president, disregarding all blood and material relations.
Surely, the ever-welcoming Buganda – currently most hostile to his haggard father – will even name children after Muhoozi. Again, I hope Bwana Muhoozi is not banking on his dad’s generosity of wheeling him into the presidency. I also hope he is not simply scheming to take over after dad collapses from some misfortune. Both are terrible gambles.
Yes, there are solid rumours of a semi-civilian, semi-military script awaiting dad’s natural death: sponsoring young members of parliament; parliament electing president; diplomatic and philanthropic gigs; and conscripting a bevy of journalists to market his greatness.
All these are problematic as long as they are seen as the handiwork of his father. Why inherit his father’s blighted legacy yet he is in a good position to write a new and more heroic legacy?
If I were to advise Afande Muhoozi, overthrowing his benefactor – who is unfortunately his father – is his best bet at the presidency. It is painful but best.
In these times where elections have run out of use – value, this heroic move against sitting presidents is catapulting many young soldiers across the continent into greatness. Coups are back and are more legitimate and popular than any elections. Let me explain more specifically, more historically.
Africa since independence
You can actually draw a periodised graph reflecting shifts in African politics and the ways in which leaderships changed since our pseudo-independence. Most of these shifts followed superior shifts in neo-colonial politics, oftentimes with little to do with the men who emerge as new leaders in Africa, except a little positioning and sheer luck.
The first decade after independence saw anti-colonial leaders naturally emerge as presidents (1955-1970s). As our so-called former colonisers jostled for ways of continued access to resources in the so-called formerly colonised places, coups were sponsored (1970-80s).
Many promising anti-neo-colonial leaders were actually assassinated or blackmailed out of office. Then came the Cold War, as superpowers wrestled each other, again, over our resources. Proxy-guerrilla wars gave us the next crop of leaders (1970-80s).
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, guerrilla leaders quickly mutated into capitalist-democrats holding elections and chanting multi-partyism.
But their actual hold to power was bed-rocked on enabling former colonisers unlimited access to resources. [technocratized, expert-driven pillage schemes executed through banking and multinational monopolies]. Throughout 1990-2010s, these former rebels – now democrats and incumbents – organised and won one election after another.
Then came the era of human rights movements, which gave birth to street protests (2010-2020) or what came to be called the Arab Spring. Natives picked human rights discourses to find meaning in their leaderships. Presently, human rights discourses have also run out of steam.
If democratic-rebels have not found tight ways of preventing them; some communities simply lack the wherewithal to pull off successful protests. Also, the West has moved on from human rights discourses as they tend to destabilise already established patterns of exploitation.
BLACK AFRICAN-SRPING
With Africans constantly seeking value in their leaderships, we have now returned full square to coups. But this version of coups is more home-grown, localised. In truth, coups actually represent our last hope towards actual independence against the uselessness and colonialist-capitalist schemes buttressed by elections.
In the last two years alone, we have been rolling: Mali, Chad, Guinea, Sudan and more recently Burkina Faso. These coups all staged by men younger than my coup-candidate, Afande Muhoozi, have been motivated by public anger against stolen/useless elections.
Mali’s Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, couped and forced to resign on state television had stolen an election.
In Chad, President Idris Déby had ruled the country for over three decades before a younger soldier – on the calculation of groups friendly to the son – put a bullet through his body. You guessed right, his son, 37-year-old Mahamat Déby was installed as president.
In September last year in Guinea, the leader of the Special Forces Command (SFC – as in Uganda), Col Mamady Doumbouya couped Alpha Condé, after the old man changed the constitution to run for a third term. Col. Doumbouya is president now.
In October the same year, the top generals in Sudan, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, tore up a power-sharing deal negotiated to lead the country into another useless election. Earlier, in March 2021, a coup was tried in Niger. January 2022 has opened with Burkina Faso. It is the Black-African spring.
The point I am making is that coups are back, more legitimate, and led by those closest to power. The reasons for these coups range from stolen elections to a search for independence over the economy.
The New York Times reporting on the coup in Burkina Faso quoted a wretched hand in Ouagadougou saying, “Whoever takes power now, he needs to follow the example of Mali — reject France, and start to take our own decisions.”
In Kampala, the demand for capital to return in the hands of Ugandans would be a useful slogan for our Muhoozi coup.
I can only imagine the pain if Afande Muhoozi decided to sit back, and a junior soldier, way below him, wrapped them up with his dad, and dumped them in Luzira. He will never forgive himself.
yusufkajura@gmail.com
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.
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