ended, they said, “We didn’t know the time” . . . (laughs) [. . .] I have heard serious DP [people . . . ] saying, “No, we are not ready to be eaten.” . . . Then I said, “When shall you be eaten?” (laughs) When is the time to be eaten correctly? [ . . . ] And you see my worry, Mr. Chairman, because DP for political [reasons], DP has tentacles in the central [region] and if you want to emerge, you can’t get around DP, you have to take this into account if you want to move on. I know that my important colleague Lukyamuzi has a constituency (laughs) [This was an ironic remark as Lukyamuzi, who was part of the opposition coalition and who was present at the debate, had lost his seat in the 2006 elections], but despite that you still need DP! [. . .] You talk about being united, but you have people who run away from their parties. [. . .] What I want to say is that the cooperation is really excellent, but will these people manage to be together without fearing? I thank you.3
A year later, in September 2009, the government banned the ebimeeza. Since then, these radio shows have not been allowed back. This book is based on the idea that the ebimeeza and their ban reveal the complex ways in which legitimate speech and political personhood are imagined in the politically restrictive context that exists in contemporary Uganda. I argue that the ban tells us more about the Ugandan political culture and about Museveni’s regime than just that it is aging and becoming less and less liberal.
There were clear short-term political reasons for the ebimeeza—also called “People’s Parliaments”—to be prohibited. These included especially the growing tensions between the central republican state and the neo-traditional authorities of the Kingdom of Buganda: forbidding live outdoor talk shows was a way to curb radical royalist speech. However, I argue that this ban needs to be resituated within a longer time frame, as well as a wider context. To understand fully its significance, and the fact that it was approved by some of the very people who were directly affected by it (including opponents to Museveni’s growing authoritarianism), the ban needs to be resituated within the controversies the ebimeeza triggered once they first appeared in 2000, and within much older concerns about who was entitled to speak and how.
Having access to the local arguments about the existence of the ebimeeza, about the rules they should follow, the ways they should be organized—in short, about the way people should or should not “talk about politics”—gives us a heuristic insight into profound debates on the forms and the basis of citizenship. But such knowledge also leads us to a better understanding of the concrete exercise of power and the mechanisms of domination in a context often labeled as “semiauthoritarian.” Analysis of the ebimeeza shows why some things may be said in contemporary Uganda, and others may not.
The story of the ebimeeza and the controversies around them allow us to understand in detail the parameters of criticism and of the complex ways in which limits are imposed on the ways in which people may imagine themselves as members of a polity. What kind of political order was imagined and practiced in the ebimeeza? What kinds of speech did people value and why? What does the existence of the ebimeeza and their disappearance reveal about the Ugandan political society? In short, the ambition of this book could be summarized as understanding the imaginaries of political personhood at play in contemporary Uganda while not separating those imaginaries from the concrete and complex mechanisms of political domination in force under Museveni’s regime, beyond large and reductive dichotomies. By doing so, this book ties together the study of the polemical imagination of citizenship and the study of what is often called “authoritarianism,” or, in the case of Uganda, “semiauthoritarianism.”
Complicating the Picture of “Hybrid Regimes”
After the crushed hopes of the “third wave of democratization,” the concept of “hybrid regimes” was supposed to allow a closer understanding of political situations that include features presented as essential to democracy but also characteristics described as authoritarian.4 Interestingly, Museveni’s Uganda is often quoted as the paragon of the “hybrid regime” and characterized as “semiauthoritarian,” a regime that “remain[ed] basically authoritarian, but incorporated some democratic innovations.”5 According to this literature, semiauthoritarian regimes are characterized by the existence of competitive elections; the oscillation between a certain regard for human rights and civil liberties on the one hand, and their violation on the other; nepotism practices, corruption, and the abuse of power, but also the possibility to challenge such behavior through parliamentary politics, the judiciary, and the media.
The new typology that stemmed from this idea of “hybridity” (with categories such as “illiberal democracies,” “liberal semidemocracies,” “quasidemocracies,” “pseudodemocracies,” “semidemocracies” or “semiauthoritarianisms,” “competitive authoritarianisms” or “electoral authoritarianisms”) was indeed more precise.6 However, its heuristic value is not satisfactory when it comes to understanding the actual extent and parameters of the state’s power as well as the repertoires within which people living under a particular regime act and think in their daily lives.7
Within a particular regime, the ways in which control is carried out varies enormously according to the different localized and complex ways in which the state is socially embodied. The hybrid typology is often based on very broad indexes amalgamating complex realities into measurable variables that do not take into account the sociology and history of the state, its agents, or those of the populations involved. Typically, political actors are identified using large formal categories (the judiciary, the media, the military). The social histories of these groups or institutions, the ways they were formed through the amalgamation, the integration, and the exclusion of particular social actors, as well as their inner conflicts and debates, are largely erased. The daily negotiated dimension of power and repression, which are deeply intertwined in the social fabric, is overlooked. It is often forgotten that even in a context labeled as “authoritarian,” where the state can appear as homogeneously submitted to a powerful executive, it is in fact a competitive space. The state is crossed by social, political, and ideological differences and antagonisms, and it is entrenched within society as well as within the struggles that structure it.8
Typically, in the “hybrid” literature, changes identified as “democratic” are seen as strategic and reluctant concessions to external donors to legitimize the autocrat’s rule. Obviously, this dimension of instrumentalizing donors’ “good governance” agendas by top leaders should not be overlooked. But there is more to this than mere strategy. A sociological approach takes into account the complex working and sociology of the state in all its heterogeneity, including in its extroverted dimension, and provides a more comprehensive picture. What can be said, for instance, of the corporative interests of sections of the state? Of the interests of particular segments of the political and bureaucratic elite in pushing reforms or agendas that might be favorable to their own social advancement?9 The literature on these issues has demonstrated the heuristic value of analyzing political change as the result of a confrontation or accommodation of sociohistorical segments of society and their struggle for power, recognition, and access to the state, beyond the surface of “democratization.”10
This book relies on the principle that the exercise of power is intertwined with social relations and should thus be studied from the analysis of society (i.e., from the study of the socially entrenched daily interactions between groups and individuals). This approach should not stop us from studying processes of institutionalization and autonomization of the state. However, this book recalls that the negotiations at play in terms of how to speak about politics (for instance) involve actors who are ingrained with multiple social belongings, and who largely transcend the simplified dichotomy of a “liberal” civil society resisting an oppressive state.
Another concern raised by the idea of “hybrid regimes” is that it gives the impression that some dynamics and political actors within a political regime are fundamentally “democratic,” whereas others are fundamentally “authoritarian.” It thus often encourages a deductive and univocal reading of social and political
