Janet Museveni with her husband President Museveni and Juma Mwapachu, secretary general of the East African Community. Photo/FILE
Out goes the brother, in comes the wife. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has set the record as the first president in Africa to appoint his wife to the Cabinet.
By appointing Janet as the Minister for Karamoja Affairs, Museveni has gone a step further to make the government a family affair, lending some credence to earlier talk that could he be preparing the wife to take over when he finally bows out.
Though he demoted his brother, Salim Saleh, to the post of senior presidential adviser from the plum post of state minister for finance in charge of microfinance, the government still remains top heavy with family representation.
Even though Saleh’s past prominent role in the Museveni government had elicited cries of outright nepotism, Saleh was excused for being a veteran of the movement in his own right.
The justification being that he fought for the “emancipation” of Ugandans and he rightly deserved a high post in his brother’s government.
Saleh aside, Museveni is now in the league of other world leaders who brazenly use their immense powers to appoint their family members to the government.
But more familiar, especially in Africa, is the incumbents trying to influence their sons or brothers to take over the government when they retire or die.
Many leaders in the continent enjoying unrestricted power have tried to secure their positions by nominating family members to key political, economic and military positions.
Except in Swaziland which stands out as the only remaining official monarchy in Africa, few of these schemes have worked to the letter, but this does not stop incumbents from considering their blood relations as a sure way of protecting their wealth and family.
Before the exit of Jerry Rawlings from the presidency in 2001, there was widespread belief in Ghana that his wife, Nana Konadu Rawlings, was being considered to succeed her husband, given that Rawlings had held power for too long and was anxious of persecution.
Nana had distinguished herself, not only as a prominent women’s rights advocate determined to free the womenfolk from being hewers of wood and drawers of water to being active actors in the political arena, she was also an influential voice within her husband’s government.
However, North Africa holds the record for grooming their next of kin who finally take over power, even though most of the successors were not politically active prior to their elevation.
Morocco, a constitutional monarchy leads the way where the reigning king, Mohammed VI, easily succeeded his father, King Hassan II, in 1999 after sufficient grooming and education.
In Libya, the long-serving leader, Muammar Gaddafi, has been sending mixed signals on whether he is keen to see either of his two sons — Seif al-Islam or Al-Saadi — succeed him when he leaves power.
But in Egypt, Gamal Mubarak, son of President Hosni Mubarak, is widely expected to succeed his father who has been in power since in 1981.
Gamal has accumulated significant power as economic adviser to his father and he would he hard to bypass.
What many Egyptians are sure of is that they expect Mubarak’s family, the ruling National Democratic Party and the military to decide on his successor.
Outside Africa, India — renowned as the world’s biggest democracy — provides the best example of family dominance in politics.
The family of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Party continues to play a central role in Indian politics 62 years after Independence.
Nehru did not show overt signs of having groomed his daughter Indira Gandhi, who held the premiership between 1971 and 1977, then from 1980 to 1984 when she was assassinated.
But Indira Gandhi was keen on pushing her son Sunjay to the county’s leadership, making him leader of the youth wing of the Congress Party, from which he enjoyed immense influence.
But when he was poised to take a stab at the post of prime minister after being elected to parliament in 1980, Sanjay died in a plane crash.
That, however, did not stop his brother Rajiv Gandhi from becoming India’s prime minister before his assassination in 1991.
Currently, even though Manmohan Singh is the prime minister, Rajiv’s widow, Sonia is the de facto leader of the Congress Party.
Indeed, Congress won the election under the leadership of Sonia but she was forced to decline the post of prime minster because she is of Italian descent.
Still, her son, Rahul, is currently being groomed to take over the party’s leadership and make a stab at the premiership in future.
Unlike most African leaders who pick their kin to protect their interests, the Gandhis and the Congress Party have been trusted by the people more than any other family in the history of India’s post-independent politics.
Brothers, David Miliband, and Edward Miliband are both members of the British Cabinet. David is the Foreign Secretary, while his younger brother is the Cabinet Office Minister.
