So what are Kony’s and Museveni’s secrets? It is easy to say that the two men deal firmly with opposition to their leadership. However, even Amin did the same and he didn’t survive as long as Museveni. And, it hasn’t helped Kony much. He is forced to operate out of Uganda, and he never achieved his goal of ousting Museveni from power. Museveni, on the other hand, reached his goal of being Uganda president.

However, Museveni himself likes to boast of the territorial reach of his and Fronasa/NRA-NRM’s activities—in Tanzania, in the Mozambique liberation war, having cells in Kenya, links to (late) Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, passages through Burundi, and so on.

It would seem that when a political organisation has to operate through many countries and situations, it becomes highly adaptable.

Kony and the LRA too have been all over: South Sudan, (North) Sudan, DR Congo, Central African Republic and Chad. Kony, it would seem, has been a better student of Museveni and Fronasa/NRA-NRM than we had realised so far.

Even some of the debates about LRA, if Kony were captured or killed, mirror the debates about the NRM when Museveni retires or is retired. There are those who believe that the LRA is finished, and it is the tricks of Kony that are keeping it alive. That if he were to be killed, the LRA would be finished. No, others disagree, someone else will arise and take his place.

Likewise, there are many people who think Museveni is NRM, and NRM is Museveni, and that when he is off the scene the party, corrupted by the comforts of being a military-state organisation, would die off. No, say others (especially NRMs), the party is solid, and it will rule for another 50 or 60 years at minimum, because it has many cadres who can fill Museveni’s boots.

It would seem, also, that the wider social and political factors that helped NRM when it took power, also benefitted the LRA– in reverse.

Uganda was broken, bloodied by war, poor, and its citizens exhausted by marauding military goons when Museveni took power. They were willing to support NRM as long as it didn’t take the country back to the nightmarish past. And they were willing to be forgiving of any crime that was not as worse as Amin’s or Obote II’s.

Kony arose when, it seemed, rebellion was no longer paying—and looked unlikely to succeed in unseating the government in Kampala. People who joined LRA’s ranks (we are not counting the abducted ones) probably didn’t expect regime change. The LRA, probably attracted the people who were too angry with Museveni and the NRM, they were willing to support anything against them. those who, not expecting to come to power in Kampala, joined the LRA to find reward in the rebellion itself – like abducting the women of their choice anytime they wanted to.

Perhaps the time when the LRA will disappear, is also the time when the NRM will lose power. Both of them seem to draw their energy from the same source; LRA and Kony feeding off the negative one, the NRM and Museveni from the more positive drift.