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By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
History repeats itself? Well, characters or personalities also replicate themselves. In this article, I focus on two: one, which dominated France from to and one, which has dominated Uganda since 1986. Both were not really indigenes of the countries they dominated.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte was born into an Italian family, with his father being a poor nobleman in Corsica His supporters were called Bonapartists. The rise of Napoleon involved the overthrow of the French monarchy and the creation of the French Consulate, and later, the First French Empire. Napoleon’s rule saw the abolishment of many laws and policies that had existed in France for centuries, such as feudalism, privileges based on birth, and social inequality.
The factors that led to Napoleon’s rise included the French Revolution and the overthrow of the French monarchy. After the French monarchy was overthrown, Napoleon and his allies overthrew the French Directory government and created the French Consulate, installing Napoleon as its leader through a rigged election.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was a French military leader and statesman who led the French armies in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He is considered one of the greatest military leaders in history
Napoleon gained power due to his respected reputation as a military officer during the French Revolution. In 1799, Napoleon and his allies overthrew the French Directory government and established the French Consulate. Napoleon was elected, in a rigged election, the First Consulate.
Napoleon’s new government was composed of three parliamentary assemblies: the Council of State (Conseil d’état), which drafted bills; the Tribunate, which could not vote on the bills but debated them; and the Legislative Assembly (Corps législatif), which could not discuss the bills, but whose members voted on them.
After four years of debate and planning, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte enacts a new legal framework for France, known as the “Napoleonic Code.” The civil code gave post-revolutionary France its first coherent set of laws concerning property, colonial affairs, the family and individual rights.
The Civil Code of 1804, or the Napoleon Civil Code, is divided into three books or sections: laws on persons, laws of property, and laws on the acquisition of property. The first book addresses basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom of occupation, and freedom of religion.
In May 1802, Bonaparte amended the Constitution to grant himself the title First Consul for Life, with near dictatorial powers – a king in all but name. But he wasn’t satisfied. By late 1803, the path was clear. He wanted a crown, to be recognised on the same footing as the monarchs of Europe. Eventually he made himself Emperor of France, which was easy because he influenced the legislative body to declare him one.
He forced the nations he had conquered to accept the new laws he had created for France, undermining the centuries-old foundations of European civilization. The monarchs of Europe arrayed their armies against Bonaparte. But time and time again, Austrian, Russian, and Prussian troops were defeated by the citizen-soldiers of the French Republic.
There are a lot of good books on the Napoleonic Wars, but hands down the definitive work has to be The Campaigns of Napoleon: The Mind and Method of History’s Greatest Soldier by David Chandler. It isn’t cheap, but there’s a reason for that. No other book is nearly as comprehensive and complete.
Tibuhaburwa Museveni
Although in his Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy, Tibuhaburwa Museveni said he was born somewhere in the Savanna of Ankole, there are credible accounts of his life’s trajectory, which show that he was born in Goma in Mulenge Eastern Congo (DRC) and found himself in Ankole when his father and mother migrated with him as a juvenile to Uganda after a short stay in Rwanda. The migratory family is said to have arrived at the Kraal of Amos Kaguta, who was a brother to the father of Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s father.
Therefore, Tibuhaburwa Museveni grew up as a refugee child and had all his early educate at Kyamate Primary School before he proceeded to the Dar-se-Salaam University College, which was a constituent college of the University of East Africa, along with Makerere University College and Nairobi University College.
Tibuhaburwa Museveni uses his so-called NRM Caucus in Parliament to influence it to agree to his choices regarding constitutional changes and legislation. What they agree on is what gets passed in parliament. It is groupthink in which the only thinker is the President. The Opposition in Parliament is only used to legitimise the legislative processes as desired by the President.
The NRM Caucus in Parliament is united behind the wishes of the President. If it is change to certain articles in the Constitution to enhance his power, although the Uganda Constitution 1995 is all about empowering the Post of President, the NRM Caucus will work towards that, even if it means weakening the effect of the Constitution, the legislature and the judiciary. If it is laws to limit the effective ness and the political space of the Opposition in the country, the NRM Caucus will do the needful for the President.
No one who studies the history of France can fail to be greatly struck by the similarity between the Bonapartist ideology that engulfed the empire and what is happening in Uganda today. Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, I boasted that he owed his power to the French citizens alone. When his glory was at its peak, he demanded that there should be conferred on him the title of premier repre’sentant du peuple (popular representative).
Museveni was never a liberal. Political competition is dangerous, in his view, because opportunists will sow division for personal gain. After fighting his way to power in 1986, he established a system of “no-party democracy”, in which candidates stood for office without party affiliation. His own National Resistance Movement (NRM) was to be the all-encompassing arena of politics, containing the fractures which had once torn the country apart. Calls for multiparty democracy were missing the point, he told other African leaders in 1990. Democracy was like water, which can exist as liquid, vapour or ice: (ROAPE, 2021). Even after a multiparty system was restored in 2005 – partly as a quid pro quo for the lifting of presidential term limits – the NRM remained the substrate of local politics. The leading opposition force, the Forum for Democratic Change, had itself splintered off from the ruling party. Politicians such as Kizza Besigye, the FDC’s tireless leader, were hounded by the police. They were treated less as rivals than as enemies of the state (ROAPE, 2021).
“The historical mission of the NRM,” Museveni said last year, “is to make the Ugandan jump on the historical bus of machine power and gunpowder power… and, as a consequence, cause the metamorphosis of our society into a middle class, skilled working [class] society and away from the society of peasants, low skill artisans and a miniscule and powerless feudal class.” (ROAPE, 2021)
“Museveni has the largest patronage machine of any government I know in Africa,” Mwenda told me. “When there is an uprising here, or demonstrations, the deployment of the police and army is a short-term tactical measure to secure stability, but the medium- to long-term strategy is always to penetrate the groups that are protesting politically and begin demobilizing them using bribery. Co-optation.
You should see how the system here works! In a very short time, within a month, they will give [their ringleaders] money, put them in party structures. They will find communities where the hotspots are, form co-operatives, put money on the account. They will get hair salon owners, bus drivers, taxi touts, vendors and hawkers, and begin organizing them and counter-mobilizing politically.” (ROAPE, 2021)
Karl Marx called his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, after the date in the French revolutionary calendar when the first Napoleon had staged his coup. It is an intricate study of class antagonisms in a society in flux. And reading it in Kampala, it feels strangely recognisable, despite the gulf that separates modern Uganda from nineteenth-century France. In this work, Marx traces how the conflict of different social interests manifest themselves in the complex web of political struggles, and in particular the contradictory relationships between the outer form of a struggle and its real social content. The proletariat of Paris was at this time too inexperienced to win power, but the experiences of 1848-51 would prove invaluable for the successful workers’ revolution of 1871.
Consider Marx’s discussion of how money greases the wheels of dictatorship (Liam Taylor, cited by ROAPE, 2021):
“Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with prospects such as these that [Napoleon III] hoped to lure the masses. Donations and loans — the financial science of the lumpen proletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs Bonaparte knew how to set in action”.
Tibuhaburwa Museveni has used this Napoleonic Strategy to great effect: Virtual all people of al categories have fallen prey: politicians, religious leaders, musicians, academicians, professors, you name it. Loans have been arranged under non-performing schemes such as Bonna Baggagawale, Myooga and Parish Development Model. Politicians have been can be given money gifts in millions, or billions to endorse the wishes of the President. The belief of the President and his cohort is that their type of democracy is expensive. In the early days of NRM/A rule they would even say that a country costs bodies (ensi Egula Milambo). This is what I use to hear from NRM/A functionaries, such as fallen Noble Mayombo, and Kajabagu Karusooke, whom I used to debate national issues with in the 1990s.
David Mafabi, Museveni’s political adviser, said that the President could play the role of Napoleon. The Napoleon he had in mind was the famous one: the military genius, the modernizer, silencing his enemies with a whiff of grapeshot. It is a (historically inaccurate) vision of the great man bestriding history, wrestling with immense forces, even his violence justified by some larger purpose. This is Museveni the Ssabalwanyi, the greatest of fighters” (Liam Taylor cited by ROAPE, 2021).
Napoleon used to say he was the true representative of France and the embodiment of democracy. Museveni says no one can teach him about democracy, that he is the vanguard of democracy; that his National Resistance Movement (NRM)is the embodiment and vanguard of democracy. Napoleon also said he is the true representative of France. Museveni projects himself as the true representative of Uganda by having the largest number of so-called representatives of the people under his armpit and instructing the any way he wants to achieve his aims and purposes in Uganda and the Great Lakes region. He has some times bypassed Parliament in pursuit of his aims and purposes or used his NRM Caucus in Parliament to get his way.
In conclusion, Napoleon Bonaparte and Tibuhaburwa Museveni are two sides of the same coin of dictatorship located at different poles of the Globe -Napoleon Bonaparte in the North and Tibuhaburwa Museveni in The South. There is no doubt that the one in the North is the teacher of the South. Both use the law to unmake laws to ensure their philosophy of politics and governance prevails.
They both seemingly project themselves as the choice of the people. Both are adroit rulers who think, believe and are convinced they are the true representatives of their countries and embodiments of democracy. Both use politicomilitary means to govern, and will not hesitate to encroach on the legislative processes and judicial processes to get their way. Constitutionalism will work so long as it does not stand as roadblock to their aims and purposes of power. And for them money is not only a political tool to organise and disorganise the masses but also to keep the political elite and the intelligentsia divided and under check so that they end up being on top of everything: war and peace, education, industrial pace, political development, influence in the region, et cetera.
The future of Uganda can only be guessed, not predicted with certainty. However, president Museveni believes he has a strong army and that he is strong, and therefore, the future of Uganda and Ugandans is secure. Napoleon Bonaparte had the same thoughts French his French security when his army was the strongest in Europe, but failed to read the future well because he was not God who predicts the future precisely.
For God and My Country
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