I had always taken Bro Charles Onyango-Obbo to be a dyed in the wool apologist for our two tin-pot criminal dictators, Kagame and m7.
He seems to have got fed up somewhere along the way. Wellcome aboard dear friend.
For the first time he is even mentioning the likes of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe; dirty words in the crowd of the West's darlings like N. Mandela of the new breed of African 'leaders'.
Have you ever heard the ANC and Mandela acknoweldge the presence of others on Robben Island? Sobukwe? Never.
In Canada, we have the case of Dr Muniini-Mulera. For over 10 years he had a mu7 fawning gang that you crossed only at your peril. They even had a local weekly to drum into our thick heads the vitures of 'fundamental change'.
But below the surface it was clear the base was 'we Southerners vs they'. You became a curiosity if you refused to fit. 'Hey you are from the South aren't you?', was a constant.
I don't know why Dr Muniini-Mulera changed, or even whether he really changed. mu7 has not become any worse than he ever was.
Now you hear that 'Baganda' have been indifferent to the suffering in the North.
When Hon Nuwa Amanya Mushega was still Min of Ed, he told a crowd in Toronto that NRM was rebuilding the country, which had been ruined by Baganda. I cried out. It was fellow Baganda who said I was putting them to shame for my vehment disgust. The only sympathy I got was from a lady from West Nile!!
Hopefully after 17 years fellow Ugandans have seen the real mu7. But that is an awfully long time. Imagine the cost. The blood of all those fellow Africans. Men women and children!!
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Ear to The Ground By Charles Onyango-Obbo
They’re corrupt because they’re poor; dictators because they’re not democrats
Oct 15, 2003
We continue to desperately look for the answers. Why is corruption so high, especially among key politicians and cronies of the rulers in Uganda?
And why is our country that had a “revolution” in 1986 and saw dramatic improvements in life and the economy up until about 1998, sliding back into oppressive government?
Why is the independent Uganda press under the boot again? In short, why has the attempt at democracy in Uganda failed?
The search for insights first took me to a dear friend, who offered an explanation that came to him after he finished reading an autobiography by Zubeida Jaffer (an anti-apartheid South African journalist) and an encounter with Elinor Sisulu. Elinor has just won the Noma award for her biography of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, her parents in-law.
His impression is that in contrast to these people, most of the leaders who are shaping the political destiny of Uganda today are just “pseudo-revolutionaries”.
Or better still, “fakes”. He writes that; “the high ideals, deep morality, humility and simplicity that defines these amazing people who paid such a high price for freedom, is in very sharp contrast to your President Yoweri Museveni’s ways of doing things.”
My friend is a scholar of African affairs, and visited Uganda when the African National Congress forces were based in Luwero during the last years of apartheid. He says he fears that;
“In Uganda, Museveni [and elements in the military and Movement faction that are close to him] has personally appropriated everything good and noble in
Uganda’s post-colonial history.
“Museveni has dominated political space and continues to shape and define political discourse. The result is that political culture is a mirror image of himself and his faction - it is imperial, violent, and nearly ‘decadent’”.
Corruption in Uganda has the same root causes with greedy government in most of Africa, where he observes: “there is an obsession with becoming wealthy and living in excessive (but tasteless) comfort, something that comes with a late escape from poverty! The debates have become more and more shallow, parochial, cynical (what hard-line Movementists call pragmatic) and retrogressive.”
The point here being that the parents of most of Uganda’s leaders (and us their “subjects”) and top bureaucrats were either poor, or if they were rich were only the first generation to live in wealth.
This late escape from poverty inclines us to rob taxpayers. (If you think of it, apart from the Kulubyas, there are possibly no more than three Ugandan families that have had money consistently for two generations i.e. 70 years).
Yet, while this gives us a good view of the underbelly of the corruption beast, it leaves unanswered the question why democracy hasn’t resulted in more freedom and enlightened governance in the end.
Instead, it is degenerating in less freedom. To this, I found an answer from a diplomat who told me he’s struck by how Latin American countries have not, as has happened in several parts of Africa, slid back into dictatorship even in the midst of the region’s economic crisis.
He has developed his theory of “dictatorship by democracy”. This, he told me, is the situation where the government uses democratic forms to carry out anti-democratic actions. Thus the press is free in practice, but the repressive media laws remain in the statute books and, more importantly, the government ignores what it reports.
A government appoints a human rights commission, and passes laws that offer more liberties, but in practice it acts in violation of these same rights. When it’s put to task by Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, it points to the free press, and human rights laws as evidence that the accusations of it being a dictatorship are unfounded.
Political parties might have rights under the constitution, but there isn’t an enabling law allowing them to be freely active, and the Police routinely deny them permission to assemble. And, of course, the Military Police is sent in to disperse their rallies.
An anti-corruption body like the Inspectorate of Government is set up, but corruption continues and it can only investigate those who are not well connected or politicians who have fallen out of favour.
When the big people are caught stealing, they say; “how can you say we are thieves and condone corruption when we are the people who set up the IGG?” Sound familiar?
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
© 2003 The Monitor Publications
Mitayo Potosi
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