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Uganda Political Parties
With the NRM's accession to power, the very existence
of the
old political parties, particularly the DP and the UPC,
became an
issue. The Ten-Point Program blamed much of Uganda's
previous
difficulties on the excessive reliance of the leaders of
the old
parties upon manipulation of ethnic and religious
loyalties for
their own benefit. The alternative, though not spelled
out, would
be politics without parties. Even though the results were
rigged,
the 1980 general elections had demonstrated that both the
DP and
the UPC retained a mass following despite their repression
by the
Amin dictatorship and that the UPM, the predecessor party
of many
important NRM leaders, did not attract many voters. For
its own
part, the NRM claimed that it was a political movement,
not a
party; but the NRM did not have sufficient political
support to
liquidate the old parties. Instead, in an ambiguous,
informal,
and often shifting compromise, it restricted the public
activities of the old parties but invited several of their
political leaders to participate in its cabinet and even
to
contest RC elections.
The old parties were permitted to maintain their
headquarters
and to issue statements but could not hold rallies or
campaign on
behalf of candidates for RC elections. This decision
stirred
fears among adherents of the old parties that the NRM
intended to
consolidate its hold on power and eventually eliminate
them.
Nevertheless, the NRM's adroit use of another of its
principles,
broad-based government, kept an uneasy peace with the
parties,
particularly the DP, through the appointment of party
leaders to
important government positions. The DP was awarded so many
important portfolios in the first cabinet in 1986 that it
almost
seemed to be the senior coalition partner. In addition,
the NRM
turned a blind eye toward the successful election of many
DP
party members in RC elections during the first two years
of the
interim period. According to the DP's own estimates, it
had won
84 percent of the seats in RC-Vs, the district resistance
councils, in twenty-two of the then thirty-three
districts,
compared with only 7 percent for the NRM and 7 percent for
the
UPC.
At the DP's insistence, the NRM met sporadically
between 1986
and March 1988 for private discussions over the
appropriate party
system for Uganda. These meetings ended when the NRM
unilaterally
insisted that party activities must be suspended for an
unspecified period of time, after which a referendum would
be
held to decide whether the constitution would adopt a
system
permitting multiparty competitive politics. Northerners in
the
rebel Uganda People's Democratic Army (UPDA) expressed
similar
anxieties. In the peace agreement they signed with the NRM
in
June 1988, they insisted on a national referendum on the
party
system and on the form of government to replace interim
rule.
However, the relationship of the referendum to the process
of
drafting a new constitution, or even if one would be held,
remained unclear at the end of 1990.
When the NRM extended its prohibition on parties to
prevent
them from campaigning and from nominating candidates for
new
members of the NRC in the elections of February 1989, the
issue
became considerably more threatening to the officials of
the old
parties. The UPC promptly responded by denouncing the
elections
as a charade intended to consolidate the NRM's grip on
power and
by insisting that no UPC members would participate.
Nonetheless,
several prominent UPC politicians did contest NRC seats,
but
without making any public reference to their party
identity. Even
more DP politicians ran for the NRC while also following
the
government rules. After the elections, the DP headquarters
issued
a statement deploring the ban on parties and warning the
NRM not
to impose its own choice of government on the people. The
DP
appeared to have lost its pre-eminent position in the
lower RC
elections in 1989, and it did not do particularly well in
the
parliamentary contests either, though its members probably
won
more elections than UPC politicians. However, data to
substantiate this point were not available. Leaders of the
NRM
defended the elections as successful because they were
free from
overt sectarian influences. But many observers believed
that the
NRM's chances for continuing in power through elections
might
depend on not having to compete on an equal footing with
the
other parties. If that prediction were widely believed by
Ugandans, the Constitutional Assembly, likely to be the
next
arena to consider this issue, could find it difficult to
resolve.
Data as of December 1990
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