One day in 2006, not long after President Yoweri Museveni had controversially secured his third elected term, Norbert Mao came into a room at Kampala’s Speke Hotel, where journalists had been waiting for him. In those days he was a dashing fellow in a dark suit and green tie, and he wasted no time in throwing his leather bag on a table and then resting his right foot on a chair. “All along we’ve been telling you that this man is a thug,” he said, gesticulating earnestly. “Now it has become so obvious that there’s no longer any doubt.”
The man of whom he spoke was the president, of course, and at the time very few opposition leaders would have described Museveni that way, the word “thug” sounding more comically effective than, say, the deep-throated venom in the voice of Kizza Besigye when he called Museveni a dictator. Mao has always had a way with words, using them to attack others if not to defend himself, using them to impart lessons for the future.
But where is Mao himself heading in the aftermath of his deal with Uganda’s ruling party? What does he see that the rest of us can’t? In short, what’s he betting on? Many of his Acholi kinsfolk are still scratching their heads for answers after his much-publicized “homecoming” fete in the city of Gulu, where the likes of Salim Saleh, the president’s brother, and Thomas Tayebwa, the deputy speaker of the national assembly, gathered one Saturday in July to help Mao make sense of where he stands as a prominent political son of the Acholi.
Gulu had not hosted such a high-powered political crowd in recent times, and it must have been exciting for the local people to witness such pomp. Many wished Mao well. Yet there are others across Uganda who followed the event from afar and were intrigued by the symbolism of what they saw. Was the function an installation of an Acholi political leader for the benefit of the National Resistance Movement? Or was it the installation of an Acholi political leader for the resurrection of Mao himself?
The event at Gulu’s Kaunda Grounds marked one year after Mao, the president of the Democratic Party since 2010, signed a “cooperation” deal with the NRM. He has since been serving as the minister of justice and constitutional affairs in a government he has criticized for most of his political career, and among people he has lampooned viciously over the years.
Accounting for everything we know, Mao at fifty-six is a frantic democrat. He is, by law, the leader of the DP but also, by contract, a member of the NRM. He is the very freak Mao himself would laugh at, mock, and perhaps even dismiss. But the contradictory circumstances of Mao’s current politics are anything but surreal. They are, at least for him, a personal reality, revealing him as a calculating man who’s tragically come face to face with the limits of his potential.
Rumors of Mao’s undisclosed ‘friendship’ with the NRM intensified after 2015, in the aftermath of his failed bid to get nominated as a parliamentary candidate. He seemed a man adrift, a low point in the career of the most gifted Ugandan politician of his generation. He somehow held onto the presidency of the DP despite a strong challenge from a faction led by Kampala Mayor Erias Lukwago, who decamped to the Forum for Democratic Change in 2020 when he could no longer abide Mao’s leadership. Mao laughed at Lukwago, saying he was raving.
Towards the 2021 election, there was a massive exodus of lawmakers from Mao’s DP to Bobi Wine’s newly formed National Unity Platform. Mao, of course, polled less than 1 percent of the ballots cast in the presidential election of 2021. The bigger disaster for him was losing badly to Museveni in Gulu.
But then something happened: his friend Jacob Oulanyah fell sick not long after he had been elected to the speakership of the national assembly. Suddenly Mao was in demand, talked about as Oulanyah’s possible replacement as the Acholi figurehead the government could work with. It seems he seized the opportunity.
On February 3, 2022, at 5.06 a.m., Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba tweeted: My big brother Norbert Mao is the most brilliant opposition leader in Uganda today. He has Presidential skills. And this was Mao’s response:
Thank you my young brother. I’m glad you’re a member of the 5 am club. These days you’re in the business of opening closed borders. I assure you DP has never closed its borders. We believe in building bridges, not walls. And amidst strong winds we build windmills.
Only Mao understands the raw forces that finally drove him into the consenting arms of the NRM, but the death in March 2022 of Oulanyah is believed to have been a catalyst. The NRM lost a pillar in northern Uganda, a region that Museveni had worked so hard to wrest from the grip of the opposition since the end of the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency. Speaking at Oulanyah’s funeral, Mao remembered a call from his late friend in which he, Oulanyah, asked Mao why he hadn’t realized his presidential ambition. The two had been close leaders at Makerere University, with Mao as president and Oulanyah as speaker of the students’ guild. If Oulanyah could become speaker of the national assembly, he was asking, what was Mao waiting for? According to Mao’s testimony, he told Oulanyah that he had encountered a heavy
“traffic jam” in his quest for the presidency.
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Very few people can claim to know Mao, but those who have encountered him closely say his metaphorical speech masks deep personal sorrow. Because of his tendency to sermonize, one wonders what he would sound like if he were a street preacher, or if were a courtroom magistrate, or if, for that matter, he had never gone to school. He sounds even more intelligent as a Luo speaker, for example, delivering truths that can startle as much as they enlighten. The accent is clean even when he speaks Luganda, entertaining those who think no Acholi can master the kabaka’s language. And he has apparently charmed Museveni, who once described Mao, not exactly disapprovingly, as “a joker.”
Mao was born in 1967 to an Acholi father who was sometimes absent and a Munyankore mother he never knew. He has said little about his childhood in Acholiland and, later, in Jinja-Njeru, where his father had made his home. Interviewed for Capital FM’s Desert Island Discs after he was appointed a minister, Mao began by recalling the chilling story of hearing, as a 12-year-old boy, his father describe how once he considered throwing his first-born son down the waterfalls at Karuma. His father, an itinerant soldier who later became a cereal chemist, returned home to find the baby alone and its estranged mother gone, and so he put the infant in his Volkswagen and drove to the village in Gulu where Mao’s grandmother nursed him before his aunt took over. “My father and I were suckled by the same woman,” Mao told the interviewer. “When I grew up, I used to tease him. I’d say, ‘In reality, you’re my brother.’”
He was a good student despite the bullying he suffered as a “Nyankore” boy. His classmates commented on the color of his skin, which they found not dark enough. He used to spend time at a library near him, and apprenticed himself to handymen ranging from a cobbler to a bicycle repairman. He learnt how to make knives, one of which he used one day to stab a bully in the stomach. His was a deprived childhood. In the era of Idi Amin, Mao told Desert Island Discs, even washing soap was rationed by “hawk-eyed mamas” who barely let the kids sniff it.
He attended Wairaka College, which he found not to his liking. He was a rebellious boy, joining gangs and once even destroying the headmaster’s note to his father in order to escape punishment. One day, when Mao and his disobedient siblings were punished by being denied food, Mao threatened his father by saying he would call the police for child abuse. At the end of his second year at Wairaka, he told his father he would rather drop out than report back to that school. His father somehow managed to get him, through a back door, into the estimable Namilyango College, where he was a top student and beat the odds to become head prefect. In a 2015 interview with the Independent magazine, Mao recalled the advice of a high-school boxing teacher who told him, “However much things are bad in the ring, keep fighting to go to the next round.”
He studied law at Makerere University. In the political event that made him famous, he defeated the equally talented Noble Mayombo in 1990 to become the next president of the students’ guild. That race remains memorable for many because Mao was up against the world in a high-stakes contest against Mayombo, a baby-faced army officer with a brilliant mind, a budget, and firm ties to state power.
Mao’s life has been marked since that victory, as the voice of a generation that always wondered what a President Mao of Uganda would sound like. Through his highs and lows, the fate of Mao has sometimes seemed to be inextricably woven with the fabric of the country at large. Despite his name recognition, despite his oracular powers, despite his cosmopolitan appeal, why did he perform so poorly when he presented himself multiple times as a presidential candidate? Whatever his politics, a desperate, sinking, broke, despairing Mao could never translate into a win for Uganda. Thus, in the imaginations of many, he remains a poster boy for a new Uganda in which it can be possible to win an election purely on merit.
After his failed attempt to become a delegate to the assembly that drafted the 1995 constitution, Mao served two terms as the lawmaker from Gulu Municipality. As an advocate of negotiations and amnesty for Lord’s Resistance Army fighters, he was crucial in ultimately successful efforts to end the war in northern Uganda. He then had a stint as the Gulu chairman, branding himself there as Chairman Mao, during a period of relative peace and stability in a land previously wracked by terrible violence.
And yet the end of war in northern Uganda defanged, so to speak, opposition politicians from the region. Suddenly, while there was not much to blame the government for, the authorities also could not be praised for ending a war they should have stopped much earlier. Occasionally Mao made threats about breaking off from the rest of Uganda to form a possible Nile Republic, citing unfair distribution of resources and poor service delivery in Acholiland. The idea sounded radical, but it was not suggested with any seriousness and Mao was mostly ignored.
Thus, while Mao has been the most articulate broadcaster of his people’s hopes, he is, even now, yet to become the principal Acholi figurehead. Many of those who respect him recall his immense potential as a young man more than they think about where he stands today or where he will go. With the NRM feeling so comfortable in Gulu that Saleh could make a home there, Mao was eclipsed in influence by everyone from Archbishop John Baptist Odama to Oulanyah, who in his last years was the bridge to the central government for the entire northern region.
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Today, as a government minister and potential insider who may yet play a crucial role in the political transition from Museveni, Mao is perhaps more influential than he has ever been. He finally has an opportunity to pursue the priorities he has articulated for years as an opposition figure. Key items on his agenda include a review of the constitution, national dialogue, unity and reconciliation, and reparations for victims of the war in northern Uganda.
Speaking to Gulu’s Mega FM on June 8, when he was already a minister, Mao explained that change and socio-economic transformation will come about by influencing government policy. Again he spoke in parables, asking, “What happens when the water you are fetching downstream is always dirty? Does it help trying to clean the dirt from down? Can’t someone go up to try and find out why the water is continuously dirty?”
But some critics charge Mao with being a self-seeker, a newfound project of the Museveni regime. They say he’s a washed-out politician looking only to gratify himself. The poet Kimong Eveline, expressing her disappointment with Mao’s decision to work with the NRM, said he portrayed “a bad image of” the Acholi people who once had embraced him as a straightforward man. “His handlers are no longer people from here,” she said.
Emmanuel Mwaka Lutukumoi, a former deputy resident district commissioner who once was a member of the DP, in a sharp open letter urged Mao to “avoid using lots of idioms” and directly explain the meaning of his deal with the NRM. The villagers who feted Mao in Gulu may have laughed at his words, Lutukumoi suggested, but they still need to understand why Saleh was present. “Ugandans and Acholi want their Mao back, a Mao who is never afraid to talk the truth to power,” he said.
While the Gulu fete was undoubtedly put on to reassure the Acholi of his good intentions, Mao will have to try again, and perhaps by deeds more than words. His friendship with Kainerugaba, who has declared his plans to take over from his father as president of Uganda, is very interesting to Ugandans trying to visualize an end to the Museveni presidency. How peaceful will it be? Can an equipoise be reached between the contradictory forces shaping up for the political battle ahead?
Some Acholi may look at Mao and see parallels between him and Lacito Okech, a chief, colonial collaborator and historian who in his time was despised by some of his people as a paper-tiger leader. Like Mao, Okech — the father of Dr. Martin Aliker, the business titan — was not a fool, and the pragmatism of men like him helped contribute to the pervasive sense of Acholi dignity on the eve of Uganda’s independence in 1962.
If Mao never becomes president of Uganda, it will not be because, as a middle-aged man, he made an unlikely trip to Rwanda to celebrate Kainerugaba’s birthday, or because he hobnobbed with Saleh when he shouldn’t have. For he had been in the wilderness for such a long time that had he been lost forever, never to be heard from, he would have been mourned not as the great Acholi hope but as one of a range of gifted politicians broken by the Musevenian epoch.
The fact that Mao stubbornly hangs onto the DP presidency means that he fully understands what he’s dealing with. If he retains the stubborn streak of the boy he once was, then there may be one more fight in him no matter how far he goes.
At the event in Gulu Mao put on an uncharacteristic bow tie in what looked like a nod to Oulanyah, now at rest not so far away in Omoro. One photo from the scene showed Saleh, who is a giant, kowtowing to the shorter man as he shook hands with Mao. Uganda’s justice minister, it must be said, looked very happy indeed.