Concretely, this means that media workers tend to shy away from contradictory debates that tackle national and party politics as they see such debates as counterproductive and because their audiences are supposedly not interested in those. As a former producer from Radio Buddu in Masaka explained:
[Contrary to the ones in Kampala], the ekimeeza in Masaka was not going to be political at all.
Q: Why not?
A: Because the problems of Masaka Region were not political. They were more social and economical problems. There was a lot of poverty, a lot of ignorance. And so we would use that radio to give people the chance to talk about their personal problems. How do they improve . . .
Q: But maybe they wanted to talk about the government and—
A: [He interrupts] Yes, and . . . Tactically, I just avoided that. One, because the political environment in Masaka was very, very volatile.
Q: What do you mean?
A: Was very uncompromising. People were uncompromising. My father, before I really took that job in Masaka, at that time my father was in Masaka, he told me, “My son, you are coming to Masaka, but avoid politics. There is a lot of political intrigue.” Intrigue, it means . . . hmm . . . fighting inside. So you avoid that. [. . .] I wanted Buddu to be a unifying factor, so we tried to avoid politics in the first year, as much as possible.74
According to this perspective, the realm of “politics” is or should be limited to the capital city. Politics is defined narrowly, not as the management and discussion of collective issues, or as the power structure, but as national leaders’ decisions and behavior, and viewed in a negative light.75 Moreover, national politics is not considered relevant to understanding what happens in a particular locality, and local-scale “politicking” is not considered worth covering (or it is seen as too dangerous both in terms of repression and in terms of inciting people to violence). When I asked the same producer to elaborate on the distinction he was making between development and political shows, he replied:
Political programs would involve political personalities, political topics, and nonpolitical would involve income-generating projects, the social projects, like maybe why in this village don’t we have a bore hole, why do we have children in the streets, so it’s a social problem; it’s our problem.
Q: The children on the street, water, it could become political, if the RDC is here, the councillors. . . . How do you control that?
A: Of course, we would be so clear that it is not a political topic; don’t bring politics to the topic today, we are talking about the children in the streets.76
Thus, as a result, problems affecting rural populations were presented as objective and consensual issues, to which technical solutions should be prescribed. They were not linked to general mechanisms of domination or national decision making. They were not supposed to be debated along party lines or with the same political antagonisms observable at the national level. Poverty in particular was detached from the actions of the national (or even local) elites.77 This widespread dichotomy between development and politics resulted in restricting the repertoires of critique, to force discussion to be deployed according to a certain pattern that engaged the responsibility of political leaders along a special repertoire.
This reluctance to organize “political” debates up-country (as expressed by media producers) resonated with the NRM “no-party” ideology, but also, in the case of Central Uganda, with a popular and older conception in which party politics was associated with chaos and moral decadence. According to Mikael Karlström, who conducted research in the 1990s, “Twenty years of misrule and civil war had made ‘politics,’ in the popular imagination, nearly equivalent to witchcraft in the classic sense of providing the symbolic vehicle through which a community envisions the standardized collective nightmare of its own dissolution.”78 As noted earlier by other authors, the depoliticization of social issues is a strong characteristic of Museveni’s Uganda.79 However, and importantly, this depoliticization does not rely only on mere constraint. Instead, it also involves deeper debates and ideas about morality and professional excellence, which makes this depoliticization particularly entrenched.
The programming of political talk on the private airwaves was therefore far from straightforward. But this was not necessarily—or at least not only—because it was seen as risky, in a context characterized by political pressure and repression. It required particular political, economic, and professional configurations, and first and foremost the conviction that politics would indeed be profitable. Entertainment and music were cheaper and attracted bigger audiences. They were the symbols of the rupture with radio models associated with a dusty past. Political talk radio had thus to be packaged in a particular way, making politics funny, entertaining, and relaxing, accompanied by laughter, sexy jingles, popular panelists, and witty oratory. It had to fit with journalists’ professional and political ambitions to make a difference within the political debate and to position themselves as celebrities and as authoritative commentators. And they had to convince hesitant radio station owners to allow them slots on the air. In rural areas or in smaller towns, radio was largely influenced by the political economy of transnational development and its narrow although very consensual and entrenched definition of politics as “politicking,” and thus noxious to “peace” and “development.” In these contexts, talk radio had to adopt specific forms of engaging with collective issues in order to fit with local economic and professional ambitions. As we will see in the next two chapters, the opening of these venues for political expression also thrived because they fitted particular political agendas, especially the transformation of party politics and of royalism in Buganda.
THREE
The Ebimeeza and the Partisanization of Ugandan Politics
IN UGANDA, THE PARTISANIZATION OF POLITICAL LIFE, UNDERSTOOD as the “process of ascendency of political parties in political competition,” has fostered debates that have a much longer history than the NRM takeover.1 The way political competition should be organized has been a central issue of controversy among politicians, and the citizenry alike, since the late 1950s.2 As mentioned earlier, the historicals of Club Obbligato were very hostile to the influence of political parties on the debates, reflecting an intellectual reluctance grounded in their upper-class belonging. However, parties were very visible in the ebimeeza. In the shows, these contradictory dynamics had implications regarding the way the rules of the deliberations were to be defined. The way political “balance” or “pluralism” was understood, the very concrete ways in which people were seated, how they were addressed, and how they introduced themselves at the microphone (according to party tickets or not) were all constant topics of discussion among ebimeeza orators and organizers.
The ebimeeza were the product of the immediate political context of the year 2000, and of the particular pattern of electoral competition in force in Uganda at the time. Their emergence and success were directly linked to the micropolitics of political parties and their social grounding. The ebimeeza cannot be understood in isolation from this, and, in return, they provide a rich empirical opportunity to study the embedment of parties within society, against the background of a literature that has often considered African parties as empty shells, and that has largely focused on party elites.3 The organization of national and local political competition as a race between political parties is neither obvious nor straightforward. It is the result of varied local and international dynamics. Both the partisanization of political life and the institutionalization of parties as organizations rely on initiatives from above and on evolutions from below. An existing landscape of political organizations and sociabilities nourishes these processes.
The