Jan 4, 2004
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni likes boasting that unlike other Ugandans aspiring to leadership, he has a very clear picture of where the country should go and how to get there.
It is an obvious exaggeration of the presidentâs talents. The problem is that â after so much repetition â the president is now speaking as if he believes the claim, and those at his court are parroting it as if they understood what vision he is talking about. Furthermore (indeed the most dangerous part), the president is talking as if he is divinely compelled to carry the country through this âvisionâ.
Talking to the BBCâs Robin White about that vision, Mr Museveni says that he cannot have a situation where in 2040 Uganda is still a âbackwardâ country, implying that the only guarantee against stagnation and backsliding is his judgment. If so, then his invitation to others to âdiscussâ the vision can be reduced to a simple ultimatum:
âCome, compare your vision with mine; see how inferior yours is and capitulate. If you cannot see how superior mine is, then you are damned. I will see to it that you are damned; for the sake of our country.â
So, if âdiscussingâ with the president you must boil down to agreeing with him, then the most natural course is that he stays on as president.
It is his vision after all. And this is not a pure world. In a less than pure world, you cannot trust mortal proxies. Many have invoked the names of great prophets and done some good; but you can also invoke the same names and burn heretics or justify slavery, suicide bombing and commit mass murder.
To the argument that the great visionaries in human civilisation often passed on or stepped aside and left other people to implement their visions, Museveni should start countering that. This is precisely why the world (except Uganda) is full of chaos.
Jesus, if you are the son of God, why didnât you âdeal withâ the opposition and put up a throne out here to rule over your dominion for two thousand years, telling people exactly what you want, instead of sitting on an old rocking-chair in heaven? And you, dear God, you are careless.
If you spoke through Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Mohammed etc â and you are a magician as well â why didnât you leave some of these noble gentlemen around to âguideâ your supporters in the Middle East the way the president has instructed Prof. Gilbert Bukenya to do in Uganda?
It is of course easy to get carried away. For there are casualties. And one of the early casualties is poor Gilbert Bukenya; a professor who has now been put in such a tragic, such a comically pitiful spot that he cannot speak on the âthird termâ project without sounding as brilliant as an average tomato vendor.
But the greatest casualty may be something abstract. It is the moral basis for political power itself. You must have noticed that even as Museveni in a recent missive acknowledged that participating in the wars of âliberationâ was not a prerequisite for leadership, he at the same time attempted to undermine Ruzindana on the ground that Ruzindanaâs participation against Amin and Obote was negligible.
Similarly, in his vicious rebuttal to Eriya Kategayaâs anti-third term arguments, the president grabbed the opportunity to insert somewhere that Kategaya had not fought (with Museveni) on the battlefield, because Kategaya was in the political wing of the resistance.
He grabs another opportunity â although not quite in context â to proudly assert that he, Museveni, had courageously faced the enemyâs machine-guns, insinuating that those (like Kategaya) who were in the political wing were cowards.
This simplistic conception of resistance is vintage Museveni.
In a series of articles which have been appearing in Sunday Monitor, exiled former president Milton Obote has timed his adversary with precision.
Dismissing Museveniâs war effort against Amin (1971-1979) with total contempt, characterising Fronasa/NRA as a late arrival recruited mainly from refugee camps, and Museveniâs present regime as a âdictatorship of charlatansâ.
I have argued before that Museveni desperately needed Obote to justify his crusade. And Obote has been kind enough to stay around, ranting in the wilderness. But now he is claiming some dividends.
Museveni has a list of two villains: Obote and Amin. Obote has a list of two villains: Amin and Museveni A headache named Joseph Kony would complicate Museveniâs already enormous troubles in northern Uganda if allowed to entrench itself in the Lango area. So Museveni is giving support to local militia groups to fight Kony.
In a drought, you will save some unlikely roots. With many of Museveniâs erstwhile comrades in open revolt, the western region may be up for grabs towards 2006. So, on top of anti-Kony militias, Museveni is using emissaries and some kind words to woo Lango into the Movement party.
But this also means that Museveni would be unwise to attack the patriarch of Lango (Obote) with his old venom.
Talking to Robin White, Museveni admits having personally killed people, but more (or especially) during the fight against Amin. And yet it is in this fight that Obote and most people would say Museveniâs role was marginal.
After Museveni has toned down his triumphal rhetoric over Obote, and with Obote seeing nothing in his diaries to celebrate about his 1981-86 war with Museveni, the two are focusing on the common denominator on their lists of villains. They are now vying to show which of them fought Amin more heroically.
But Obote so thoroughly abused his power that he had no moral basis for fighting Amin. The tediously detailed chronicle of his involvement only confirms that Obote, totally devoid of humility, had only made the yoke of his countrymen under a brutal unsophisticated Amin that much heavier.
To make fighting Amin per se the ultimate national good is a deliberate distraction from the evil of the others who failed and are failing to rule justly. It is, once again, to renounce political morality as a basis for political power.
Museveni therefore did not sound sincere when he told Robin White that to him all these wars (including Konyâs) were âdiversionsâ. That he was most in his element when talking about developmental issues.
The evidence shows that war is central to the presidentâs doctrine. And the events unfolding now show that the âcorrect lineâ is not to fear that old wars will continue and new wars may be unleashed should the third term project stay on course. For there is a solution: streamlining and strengthening the army.
When Robin White asked about the size of Ugandaâs army â over 50,000-strong â he obviously had in mind the overall poverty of the country. Museveni had already singled out âlistening to donorsâ who forced him to reduce his army as his (only?) âfailureâ.
Now he answered Whiteâs concern by comparing the (nearly equal) areas of Uganda and Great Britain and observed that Britain had eight times as many soldiers, in spite of Ugandaâs more difficult forests.
Donât laugh. And donât try to count the number of doctors, nurses or UPE teachers per square mile in his country. For then you may be accused of challenging the president to look for less weird ways of interpreting statistics if he wants to turn Uganda into a developed country by 2040.
 2003 The Monitor Publications
