Violet Awotwi: Ms. Byanyima, can you please tell our readers a little bit about yourself? What was your background prior to becoming a Member of Parliament for Mbarara Municipality in Western Uganda? What were your motivations for joining politics?
Winnie Byanyima: I joined politics long before I stood for
parliamentary elections in Uganda. My family has a long history in Ugandan
politics and I have been an activist for most of my life. I left Uganda during
the dictatorship of Idi Amin, as I could not accept what was going on in the
country. I became a refugee and got involved in student political organizations
while I was in exile. I always had a passion for justice. That was what led me
to exile and to human and women’s rights activism and it is what directs my work
till today. When I graduated from the university with an Engineering degree, I
considered pursuing a PhD in fluid mechanics. But by that time, a civil war had
already begun in my country, so, I decided to return home to join the struggle
against dictatorship. I got a job with an airline company, while I worked
clandestinely to support the growing resistance. Of course, my family and
friends wanted me to be safe and were worried for me. But my family knew that I
was unstoppable and supported me where they could.
VA: What were some of the challenges of life in exile?
WB: The biggest challenge was not having enough money. Though I had a scholarship, I had to share it with my sister so that we could both undertake our university studies. Also, I was afraid that the Idi Amin dictatorship would take a long time to remove. The thought that my parents could die before I would be able to return home haunted me a lot. Otherwise, it was a normal and exciting life. I met many interesting people from Africa who were also struggling and fighting for independence and justice in their countries. As young African student activists, we organized against the apartheid regime, fought for the independence of Namibia and Zimbabwe and got involved with British students and students from other regions on many other important issues of that time. In spite of being so far away from home and my family, I never felt sorry for myself. I felt fortunate to be alive and be involved in such important work.
VA: Can you please tell us a little bit about the transition from being in exile to coming back to Uganda. How long were you in exile?
WB: I did not have problems moving back to Uganda or getting a job. I had worked with others to oppose the dictatorships. When we returned after civil war in 1986, I belonged to an organization – the National Resistance Movement.
After five years of serving as Uganda’s deputy permanent delegate to UNESCO, I returned home to run in the parliamentary elections. Although I had seen women living in the war zones and struggling with poverty before, the elections brought me face to face with the situation of poor women in my country in a very real way. I was not a typical newcomer to politics as many other women were. I had political skills and had been politically active for many years. Although the men contesting with me were older, I was more experienced. My decision to run angered many people because they felt that I was trying to take away a man’s seat. The hostile response was driven by my decision not to take advantage of the opportunity created by the Ugandan interim constitution, which guaranteed a minimum of 14% of seats in the parliament for women. Though women could contest for mainstream seats, they were primarily expected to compete against other women candidates for the affirmative action seats. But I wanted to increase the number of seats women held in the assembly by winning a mainstream seat. I knew that I had the skills, track record, political allies and the capacity to raise enough campaign finances to compete and win against any male candidate.
VA: Why did you leave Uganda in the middle of your third term as a parliamentarian?
WB: I left Uganda because the political space was narrowing. It was getting increasingly difficult to take an independent stance on issues and to voice the concerns of my constituents. In parliament, I had led a very tough and long campaign against corruption and abuse of office both at the local and national levels. At the local level, I found myself deeply involved in political and legal battles with local government leaders who used their offices to grab land from poor and vulnerable people especially widows and orphans and to divert public funds. I had spoken up against Uganda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the plunder of its wealth and the violations of human rights committed by our troops there. Gradually, I had lost faith in the commitment of the National Resistance Movement to the poor. My criticism was not tolerated. >From 2001, I was in and out of jail. The government brought numerous flimsy charges against me, which tied me down to court processes. I could not even be effective as a parliamentarian, leave alone the trauma of imprisonment on my young child. I decided to withdraw from politics for a while to give my son a safe space to grow up. Then an opportunity with the African Union came up. I chose to accept the post of the Director for Gender and Development at the AU Commission because I could continue with women’s rights activism on a wider platform – an African platform. I could also transcend the political partisanship that had restricted my activism in Uganda.
My experience at the AU taught me the importance of keeping a critical perspective when working in the mainstream. The African Union was like so many other African institutions. It was highly centralized, hierarchical, weakly institutionalized, and male oriented. The Commission had a male-chauvinistic culture that tolerated attitudes I often found unacceptable. I felt slowed down by the bureaucracy. Though it would have been easy to become numb and accept the status quo, I decided to establish external and internal networks that would enable me to negotiate through the bureaucracy. I reached out to women’s rights organizations and networks in Africa and globally. In a short time, we were able to do some exciting work together.
VA: What were some campaign tools and techniques that helped you succeed in your election campaigns?
WB: I used non-traditional techniques in my campaign that questioned and exposed the old political culture and norms in my country. I reached out to poor people in their communities and homes, going door to door. While other politicians shunned those who lived in the slum areas, I visited women in their kitchens everywhere and listened to them. My techniques were criticized by other politicians who felt that I had an unfair advantage. Opponents demanded that I stop my visits to households. The political arena was dominated by middle class men who believed that leadership was their birth right and who had constructed campaigns on their own terms. The poor found the politicians in designated areas where they were addressed at rallies and then returned to their slums. I stuck to my outreach strategies and continued visiting women in their little kitchens and gardens under the sun while they did their chores – speaking and listening to them about their struggles. This excited women and made them feel that they had power through voting.
VA: How does being a female political leader and activist impact your leadership style and decision making?
WB: My leadership style is different because I am a feminist. I am deliberate in my decisions and in politics. I work to undermine patriarchy and to introduce an alternative concept of power. As a politician, I gave and showed respect to my constituents. From a feminist standpoint, I valued the work and contribution of poor women. I used methods of campaigning that stripped men of their traditional power and showed voters that I was capable of winning. I worked to show that power belonged to the people. I raised women’s issues on the campaign platform and when elected in parliament. When I sensed that men felt threatened by my message, I took time to explain how women’s rights benefit families and whole communities using local examples. I reached out to the people to reassure them that I was powerful and capable enough to win and make changes to make lives better for women, men and children. I did not compromise on women’s rights.
VA: What would you say is the key to your success in political life?
WB: I do not see myself as successful – the journey is still long. What I dream for my country, for Africa, for its poor and struggling women is still far from being achieved. In Uganda, millions of women and girls, men and boys are still trapped in camps, they are victims of a senseless war that has gone on for more than twenty years and could have been avoided. Women still walk miles and miles to fetch water and firewood to cook. They die during childbirth, malaria, HIV and other preventable diseases afflict them. Scarce resources from aid budgets are diverted by greedy leaders. There is still a lot of work to do to end wars, fight poverty, improve governance, and unleash the potential of African women and men to live their lives fully. I have been able to keep focused on issues of justice for the poor and voiceless – that may be what I can call my success. I never get tired or to divert from the causes I have believed in all my life.
VA: Was your support base primarily women?
WB: I went through three
elections in Uganda. In the first elections, I got over 80% of women’s votes. It
was very surprising, as I was not the usual candidate. I was a single woman, at
that time, cohabiting with a man. But in spite of that, I had strong support
from women. In the second elections, I maintained women’s support.
Unfortunately, in the third elections I lost a lot of support from women, but
gained more support from youth and from men.
The loss was as a result of a decision made by some of us to finally part company with the President, who we believed had digressed from our original agenda and who appeared to us to have become absorbed in consolidating his personal power. The president took our decision very personally and campaigned directly against me to prevent me from being elected. He personally chose a candidate to run against me and even sent soldiers to my town to interfere with the campaign. It was a very violent election, full of bribery and a heavy deployment of state resources against me. Unfortunately for me, because we had made many gains for women through the National Resistance Movement, the President as our leader had appropriated our achievements. Ugandans were not able to distinguish the leader from the organization. Most Ugandans do not appreciate the roles and powers of the different arms of the state. They attribute all state functions to the President. In his campaigns, the President had projected himself as the one who had been behind the positive changes. It was difficult to show that he had a passive role. As a result, I lost women’s votes because they could not understand why I had opposed the President who they believed was on their side. Much as I tried to explain, many women at that time could not understand that the agenda for women’s rights could not be pursued in a closed political space and that everything we had was at risk because Uganda’s democratization process was stalling.
Looking back several years’ later, people realized what had happened and how much the country had veered off the democratic path. For example, the presidential two-term limit had been removed from the constitution so that the President, who had already served twenty years, could seek a third term.
VA: What advice can you give other women leaders and candidates trying to
succeed in their political careers?
WB: Politics is not just a career, it is
a calling. A politician should have a cause and believe in it firmly. You need
to have a cause and persistently work to fulfill it. If a woman leader is
passionate about equality and women’s rights, like I am, (not all women believe
in this cause and we should accept that too) she should pursue the cause within
a broader agenda for justice in order to build winning alliances. Women
candidates face problems in mobilizing resources. Fundraising is difficult for
most candidates but more so for women. I would advise women to articulate their
agendas very clearly and to be consistent, because it helps to raise money. A
candidate gets financial backing for the issues she raises and the potential she
has to address them through the political process. It is also important to have
an organized way for fundraising and to distance oneself from directly managing
money. For example, I always had someone who managed my funds and collected any
donations that I received during my campaigns. This way, people knew that I did
not use the money for my personal benefit.
More importantly, women should be very active in fighting against corruption and bribery in elections. Women should be at the forefront in calling for reform of electoral laws to restrict the use of money in elections because women, more than men, face this barrier. Campaign finance is a serious barrier for young people too
VA: You have just mentioned that you have always been an activist and
questioned institutional frameworks of the places you worked for. What are the
implications of such an approach for your work at UNDP?
WB: Well, people
often ask me what it is like to work in a bureaucracy such as the UN. But I
always remind them of where I am coming from. UNDP is highly decentralized and
once the big decisions are made, such as budgets and strategic focus, the
country offices and different units, such as mine, are empowered to make most
decisions and take their plans forward. At UNDP, I have space to innovate. This
is important for my work.
UNDP is a family of likeminded people who believe in the human development concept. But people at UNDP do not always understand the differences that exist between women and men. It is my duty to help them to see that. Whether it is work on civil service reform or on macro-economic policy frameworks or on mainstreaming environmental issues in development plans; the situation of women and men has to be taken into account. It cannot be taken to be the same because women and men often have different roles in the economy and society, have different levels of control and access to resources and assets and different needs and interests. The same policies can have different impacts on women and men, girls and boys. Sometimes there is a lot of resistance to see this, because the people at UNDP are professional and have been trained in particular disciplines and have internalized their approaches and perfected their skills. Asking them to reflect on the gendered implications of their work is like questioning the bases of their training and skill. This can be threatening, in a way I try to find a way to break the professional barriers and help them see how women and men can benefit equally from their work. We have a lot of work to do. In that sense, UNDP is an institution that needs to be transformed from a feminist perspective.
VA: What do you do to form coalitions in your work at UNDP?
WB: I use the
same strategies as I used at the African Union. I connect to women’s networks
that I have come to know over the years and try to do a lot of the work with
them. I am also looking at the rules and procedures and will at some point
propose changes. It seems that many rules at UNDP were put in place when the
organization dealt mainly with governments. Now that it has opened up to civil
society and the private sector, the rules need to be modified to allow for more
flexibility in engaging with non-state actors.
VA: Which strategies have you used to mentor and nurture the new generation
of women leaders?
WB: I believe that sharing knowledge and skills is very
important. Together with nine colleagues, I established the Forum for Women in
Democracy (FOWODE) in 1994. Within the forum, we designed a project to support
women to become candidates and leaders. But we did not go the usual training
route. We did not want to import western ideas and success stories to a
political culture that was very different. We strongly believed in a feminist
transformation of the way politics was practiced in Uganda. That meant
introducing critical perspectives to women candidates and addressing our
political culture very directly.
As a part of the project’s activities, we brought in experienced Ugandan women leaders who had already run for office several times and who shared our thinking about transformation. We asked them to mentor women aspiring to be candidates. We helped aspiring candidates focus on why they wanted to run for office and what they hoped to achieve. We delivered advisory services on request. That way we addressed the particular needs of individual women. Our mentors were trained in counseling, and their feminist consciousness raised. The women who came seeking advice got assistance in many areas including setting agendas, using the media, developing campaign and finance strategies, and etc.
Another exciting initiative was the inter-generational learning project which brought together women activists and politicians from four generations (1940s to 1990s) to share the issues they worked on and their experiences. That way we had young and old learning from each other and being able to write how they had shaped the history of our country since colonial times. As a result of these discussions, we put together a book and a documentary, organized a photo exhibition, and staged a play that showed the contributions of women activists in the public domain over a fifty year period. The play also showcased how the women’s movement in Uganda had adapted and embraced different issues at different times, and how it had survived through political repressions and civil wars as well as the ways through which older women passed on the baton to younger ones. Through this experience, young women learnt that the history of Uganda was not made only by men and that women had also played a significant role in it. Now, there is a summer school where young girls come for summer camp to explore alternative and transformative forms of leadership
VA: iKNOW Politics is a global platform aimed at supporting women in
political life. How do you think we can make it relevant to all women around the
world?
WB: I must say that I have been pleasantly surprised by the numbers of
women and men accessing the site around the world. While I had expected women to
use the internet in accessing business opportunities, I wondered if they would
be interested in using it as a tool to reach out to others about politics.
However, it is important to recognize that technology comes with its own culture
as well and that access to technology is different in every country. It is
important to respect the cultures of poor people and avoid cultural
dominance.
VA: If a female candidate runs for presidency in Uganda, what do
you think her chances will be and what obstacles will she need to
overcome?
WB: It is possible for a woman to win in a free and fair election.
I believe that I could win a presidential election if I decided to run. The
issue is that the elections are not fair and they are monetized and militarized
in Uganda. It is possible to overcome the financial hurdle. The partisan use of
the military in elections by the incumbent President poses a serious problem to
any other candidate, whether woman or man. I am a founding member of the party
that is trying to de-militarize Uganda’s politics and to bring the country back
on a democratic path.
VA: Thank you very much for sharing your personal insights and stories with us and especially about your path to politics and pursuit of social justice. We know this interview will be inspiring and useful to the iKNOW Politics members worldwide.