Uganda pushed former vice president Speciosa Kazibwe to be the new African Union Commission chief – and she lost.
So was the problem that Kazibwe was a bad candidate, or that her sponsor, Uganda, has become a toxic referee?
I think in this case, it was the referee, although the peculiar problems the AU is facing now means many countries are looking for a candidate with a reputation for bureaucratic competence, which is why Botswana’s Foreign minister Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi emerged top.
In the end, though, even she failed to muster enough votes. So Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma stays on, until January when Africa’s Big Men and Women will try again.
Going into the campaign for the AU chieftainship, however, some unusual things had happened. To begin with, Uganda had announced that it was withdrawing from the US-backed AU manhunt for Joseph Kony.
Granted, the AU mission is woefully underfunded and is badly organised, but Uganda’s position was still surprising. First, the anti-Kony campaign in CAR started as a unilateral Ugandan project, then the Americans joined it.
Reports were full of praise for the UPDF, with American officers saying it was the most able combat force they had dealt with in Africa.
The Kony hunt seemed to cement President Yoweri Museveni’s role in the region as co-sheriff with the US, in an enterprise stretching from UPDF’s role as the “first mover” force in the Somalia peacekeeping operation.
It was striking that Uganda was pulling out of the Kony chase, without any sign that the mission was being converted into something new, which would have enabled Museveni to leverage having boots in a fragile sub-region.
Then came Uganda’s threat to pull out of Amisom, the jewel in the crown of its external expeditions, over funding. The international community (read the West) is reducing, though marginally, funding to Amisom, and seems to be holding up disbursements over corruption. Amisom can fight al-Shabaab, but bookkeeping seems not to be its strong suit.
One issue that has not been written about much, is that the West’s military spend in Somalia overall is not reducing. The money that is being taken away from Amisom, is actually being funneled into building the Somalia National Army. In that sense, it is the right thing, because the Amisom mission was, ultimately, meant to weaken al- Shabaab to a point that the Somalia state-building project could happen.
Whether that can even succeed at all, is debatable, but Amisom cannot argue against its logic. After all, Amisom should be alive to the risks of becoming too vested in Somalia’s instability because rogue elements in its militaries are profiting from it.
During the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Museveni said Uganda would reconsider its position on withdrawing from Somalia.
Earlier in the year, Uganda had also been forced to withdraw its forces from South Sudan, where they were then backing embattled President Salva Kiir in his deadly battle with his former VP Riek Machar.
There is a view that Uganda was outfoxed by Ethiopia and Kenya in concert with other international players. Uganda, some sources say, had shifted toward the hardline in Kiir’s camp that opposed any power sharing with Machar.
Separately, Museveni had also become a “distracted” chief mediator on the Burundi crisis, which led to manoeuvres to bring in former Tanzania president Ben Mkapa as the day-to-day overseer of the process, and leaving Museveni in-charge of the “overall thing” as a kind of headmaster of the talks.
It was against this background that Uganda put forward Kazibwe. It was a regional power in retreat, emasculated by the difficult campaign by Museveni against Kizza Besigye in the February election, and especially the post-election crackdown on the Opposition.
Even though analysts have been speaking of the deterioration of “strategic thinking” around Museveni’s court for a while, this state of affairs is truly unusual.
There is a view, popular with foreign businessmen who do deals in Uganda, that all this lack of geopolitical calculation is “evidence of the exit of Amama Mbabazi” who fell out with The Man last year, and ultimately went on to challenge him in a futile presidential contest.
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