Engaging the question of the party’s unexpectedly low performance would assume that the election was democratic. Yet still, the criticisms are not unfounded – for one of the charges against the party is that it was less bellicose in challenging the ruling government.
How then should we understand ANT’s performance in the 2021 election? To offer a fair assessment of ANT’s performance in the 2021 election is to understand the campaign strategy that the party deployed.
Two grand ideas defined the ANT’s campaign strategy; on the one hand, the party took on a strategy that sought to contain the human cost of a liberation struggle against a violent state. To the party’s credit, it did not lose any life as a result of the campaign, but it lost the election. Did the party then achieve anything, politically?
To address the question of the political gains of the ANT from the 2021 election demands an understanding of the second grand idea of the campaign strategy – in fact, what I understand to be the philosophy of the ANT.
Whereas, like other political parties and actors participating in Uganda’s 2021 election, the ANT’s promise to the electorate was of hope – a hope that moves beyond the change of government, the ANT’s promise of hope also thought about how to manage the transition. The ANT’s presidential candidate, Major General Mugisha Muntu often emphasises that whether by revolution or reformation, change is inevitable in Uganda, “but what kind of change should we experience?”
Gen Muntu’s question begs our political struggle to offer attention to the question of transition. One of the challenges that the National Resistance Movement (NRM) has thrown at us is a question of how we are prepared to move on as a country after it has left power.
For the years the NRM has been in power, it has sustained many problems – the core political dilemmas being as old as the colonial state. Postcolonial historians like Mahmood Mamdani have continued to, for example, redirect us to the colonial roots of tribalism and the whole idea of the nation-state.
Tribal talk defined the 2021 election in a very alarming and enduring manner. For fear of the unknown in case power changed, western Uganda voted for Museveni in an unprecedented fashion – the malpractices notwithstanding.
The feeling of insecurity in the hands of another government inspired a section of society’s support to, and rekindling of a fading regime. The question on the nature of transition thus determined people’s electoral choices.
Yet still, an assessment of the popular sentiment in the 2021 election reveals that people were ready to sacrifice the transition process for the hope of that moment. Ideology could be sacrificed for popularity. The result was the incredible transference of Uganda’s opposition support from the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) to the National Unity Platform (NUP).
The desperate desire for change within the Ugandan masses has created a crisis in the philosophy of the majority of the electorate to the extent that you don’t need a reform manifesto to convince us, but a rythmic mantra. Whereas many people believed in the ANT’s campaign, for example, the wave of political angst hindered the translation of the party’s sympathisers into supporters. What then remains the political significance of the ANT in the opposition?
The ANT insists on limiting the human cost of a liberation struggle and it’s a strategy that is productive for the opposition though in a seemingly paradoxical sense. The ANT’s strategy seeks possibilities of untying the ropes around our necks without strangling ourselves in the process.
While in some instances desperation has produced results, the road to the self-destruction of revolutionary efforts often begins with despair. While despair may move masses into terrifying any state, for example, it tends to silence questions on the form of transition needed.
The troubles in Sudan tend to vindicate the ANT’s strategy. The ANT is thus applaudingly operating from the deep end of the noble non-violent movements. However, how is the ANT prepared to inspire a hope that can both redeem the masses from the valleys of desperation and then mobilise them up the hill of critical thinking about the nature of transition that Uganda needs?
The author is a PhD Fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR)
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