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On The Mark
By Alan Tacca |
Congo's timber and Otafiire's 'firewood'
September 28, 2003
| The humorous reference to commercial timber as "firewood" was not in fact from Col. Kahinda Otafiire's wit, although it is entirely within his creative range. Our gratitude should go instead to Ms Janat Mukwaya, minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, who apparently had her own spell of inconvenience with timber-related crime-buster Capt. James Okello (or private, according to Col. Otafiire. Indeed perhaps even "Ghost" Okello, according to the family of one late Capt. James Ewadu Okello).
The living Okello of course has been linked to controversial Major (or Captain, according to Col. Otafiire) Kakooza Mutale and to Fox Odoi, President Yoweri Museveni's acting Principal Private Secretary. The dispute over his identity, rank and method of deployment aside, the essence of his mission almost certainly had the blessing of the President. Other commentators have already remarked on the chaos, the unco-ordinated activities of the myriad of military and paramilitary units created to perform corrective and enforcement tasks at which the President thinks existing organisations have failed. But why does the military aspect persistently rear its head? President Museveni cannot be cured. He believes that the soldier - in the abstract - is intrinsically good. He appears to believe that the soldier's training, experience and his implied readiness to sacrifice himself in battle raise him to a higher type of individual. By the same token, he tends to despise the non-warrior. When civilians fail on some score of duty or trust, he instinctively wants to deploy soldiers. When a commander appears to be at the end of his military road, he sends him to do another military course, instead of counselling him to join a hotel management college to help the man run his dream hotel business in retirement. When established military organisations fail, he comes up with new military organisations. When he identifies a civilian who has "good leadership qualities", that person's qualities are not properly sealed without a stint in military school. When he wants the general population to become good citizens, the best prescription is for as many of them as possible to go for political and military education at Kyankwanzi-like institutions. I rather think that the President now grossly over-values the moral capital in militarism, partly because it is almost the only feature of his tattered revolutionary ideology that survives. And it survives because it is the one feature that can be most readily used to impose control on the citizenry and to secure advantage over political competitors. The sad thing is that, because the President himself cannot be cured, he would have no credibility even if he one day chose to talk of demilitarising the mindset of his officials. During the 2001 parliamentary elections, a hitherto highly respected Ms Mukwaya dented her image by reportedly speaking in overbearing militarist tones to overcome post-ballot hurdles before she secured her closely contested seat. A week or so ago, she went further down-scale in the public eye when she apparently defended the regime's unprincipled manipulation and outright political injustice on the basis that it was the duty of those in power (anywhere) to do whatever they could to stay in power. If she was not misquoted, one can almost hear through her voice the tick of militarist arrogance. Do you like her guts? There is a brutish beauty in being one of the tough guys.
Uganda is probably too small for Hollywood, but there is a genre in silver screen-bound fiction that deals with just the kind of intriguing questions the timber saga suggests. Did the President's men find a suitable person to head Forest Produce Monitoring and invent for him a military identity? Or did they just enhance the credentials of an otherwise genuine junior soldier? Did military administrators deliberately (with a touch of mischief) offer a "ghost" for State House use, knowing pretty well that a spook eventually haunts? Did schemers take advantage of Museveni's militarist doctrine and the incompetence of State House officials to penetrate the system and pull off a daring masquerade? If State House, right under the eyes of the Commander-in-Chief, can only deploy a dubious officer to head one of his pet units, how credible is the rest of the military establishment? This does not mean that Col. Ofafiire should smile. The long-awaited International Criminal Court opens this week with the Congo (DRC) case as the first on its agenda. State House has obviously bumbled with Okello, but the Forest Produce Monitoring Unit might have been partly aimed at limiting the actions of those who - even so late in the day - would be tempted to confuse Congo's timber with Uganda's firewood. |
� 2003 The Monitor Publications
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