Dear Mr Obbo,
Remember what you said: that in the articles you write you always throw in one, once in a while, to rile a few of us.
How can I forget the lies you concocted that it was Ben Kiwanuka who was behind Obote's attempted assassination at Lugogo in Dec 1969.
Obote himself now in his Andrew-Mwenda interviews is telling us that it was the Steiner mercenaries in South Sudan working with Amin who were the architects.
Can you then ever have the decency to apologize to all who hold so dearly in their hearts the memory of the late Benedicto Kiwanuka.
And by the way, due to the off-hand way you talk in your article below about Luwero and the British, I am taking liberty to copy to you a small piece I wrote for one of our discussion groups, on Luwero and what happened to our Secondary School Mathematics teachers, explaining possibly why up to today there are no teachers for A-level Physics/Maths in schools like Kako SS etc......... :
Read on............
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| Carson's bite and the tale of the ugly Briton | ||||||
| May 18, 2005 | ||||||
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Will the recent token suspension of aid to Uganda by Britain, and the criticism that President Yoweri Museveni is turning the country into a family corner shop by former US ambassador to Kampala Mr Johnnie Carson have any immediate impact? No, they won't. They won't because this is the wrong way to pose the question. It's more productive to ask where all this will lead down the road in the years to come. Recent history helps us with some answers. When Gen. Idi Amin took power in 1971, the international community (read the western countries with money in their pockets) accepted the regime because Britain said he was someone the west could do business with. This is because in Uganda, the west has tended to follow Britain's cue. It was only after the Brits became the ugly imperialists in Amin's eyes, and London broke diplomatic links with Amin's military government, that the international isolation of the regime was possible. The world has changed, but the old fashioned "spheres of influence" still remain. It's the wrong way to manage world affairs, but it's the reality.
In that context, it is important to note the Brits are usually the last country to pull the plug in their spheres of influence. The best example was what happened during the Obote II government (1981-82). As torture by security forces grew, and the killings of innocent people in the Luwero Triangle during the war between the UPC government and Museveni's rebels increased, Amnesty International issued its most scathing attack on a Uganda government since Amin's fall in 1979. The report dominated the talk in political circles in Kampala for weeks. It was so chilling in its details that no one dared say he or she had read it, only that they had heard people talking about it. It took the unprecedented courage of the cyclostyled DP-backed newsletter, Munnansi, to highlight the shocking bits. Within hours, Munnansi was off the streets, reportedly snapped up by the security services, and Police was interrogating their editors. Reading that AI report would give one goose pimples today. That is why the courage of the Munnansi journalists, led by the late Anthony Ssekweyama, was amazing. They weakened the Obote government by reporting things that no newspaper or radio station would dare in more "free" times today. Munnansi's stories about conditions in the "protected camps" in Luwero were worlds apart from what we read of the internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in the north today, and the terrible things people tell you are actually happening on the ground there. That is one of the many respects in which the current political situation is different. There's nothing equivalent to Munnansi, nor media activists of the stature of Ssekweyama, on the frontlines of democratic agitation. As long as the campaign against attempts by the Movement to institutionalise a one-party state and amend the constitution to create a president-for-life is not backed by the bold hard reporting of the facts on the ground that we saw in Obote II, the actions of the British and the Irish governments can only remain as warnings to the Museveni regime. In 1982, the dogged efforts of platforms like Munnansi in reporting violations meant that the US State Department could credibly issue its very robust attack on the UPC government human rights record in 1982. The 1982 AI report and the criticism by the State Department were, in diplomatic terms, the external catalysts for the end of the Obote government. But, even then, it took three whole years, and a crisis in the military created by the war against the Museveni rebels, for the regime's collapse to happen. But even at that point, the UK made only token cutbacks in aid to the Obote government. Its police training programme was kept going at high levels. The World Bank and IMF kept a presence in Uganda, and their programmes were running. But assuming Muhakanizi is wrong, fish-and-chips economies like Uganda still never generate investor confidence because they are wealthy, but because of the stamp of approval of donors and international finance institutions. Even small donor disapprovals can dry up large amounts of private foreign investment, and that means that tax revenues would quickly dry up - throwing the president's "no-aid" plan in disarray. One reasonable conclusion we can make is that because of the present absence of internal conditions offered by the likes of Munnansi in the past, the pattern of the ping-pong between the donor countries and African tin pot autocrat has to be different this time. What the British are doing is parachuting early; buying an alibi because they know the roof will come down in Kampala if the regime stays on its present destructive course. My sense is that we are at a point where people are clearing their throats. The real tough talking will come after all the political dirty tricks of the referendum and constitution amendment, and the 2006 elections - possibly in June 2007 ahead of the 2007/2008 budget. Despite the official bravado, when that moment comes every wise Ugandan with money in the bank would do well to take out insurance. Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
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