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On December 2, 2004, I read a statement that you issued in response to the story that appeared in The New Vision of Wednesday December 1, 2004 to the effect that you had written a letter to your half-brother, president, Yoweri Museveni advising him to drop the whole idea of ekisanja.
I remember shouting loudly: �Long Live Saleh.� �Saleh, Juu, Juu Zaidi.� I even went further and rang my young friend Andrew Mwenda who was down in bed with a cold and asked him whether the story was really true to which he told me he will find out.
I did this because I have always believed that in all human affairs, not everything is lost even in the worst of conditions because the human spirit prevails and shows us the way out of impossible situations. I thought that this spirit had at last come through you and I talked to many
people in very high spirits about the significance of your decision.
I therefore felt let down when I read the following day that you had not only refuted the story, you had even gone further to reinforce the arguments for life presidency for your brother. I could not believe that any pressure had been put on you to renounce the story, as the carton in the New Vision of that day seemed to suggest!
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| Gen.Salim Saleh(2ndR), together with brother officers Gen. Tinyefuza(R), Col. Rusoke(l( and Brid. Kayihura |
I felt that either you were playing games with your brother to bamboozle Ugandans, or that you were perhaps making fun of us for I have heard on many occasions the president calling Ugandans �primitive� and �backward.�
We some times feel as if we were a colonised people ruled by people who have come from another planet!
Be that it may, I found that your statement went further than was justified to refute the story. To begin with the statement seemed to suggest that if president Museveni were to �exit� politics now, he would be surrendering �to the old entrenched lobbies� such as religious bodies and �tribal clubs� as well as to the new forces such as FDC and SEYAS, etc. Here, General, you forget that NRM is already an old force in Ugandan politics, which has resorted to tricks of violence, beatings and detentions
in Safe Houses� in dealing with their opponents.
When NRM came to power, they blamed these kinds of practices on the �sectarian political forces.� Now you have gone beyond them to engage in the practice of political bribery never witnessed in the life of Uganda�s politics. You also seem to suggest these other forces have not constitutional rights to take part in the politics of their country. This is extremely arrogant and will lead to prolonged conflicts in Uganda. The UPDF that you represent should not uphold such attitudes if it is to be a truly national institution.
Secondly, in your statement you seem to be telling us what you believe we should be doing in developing a new �radical but liberal groupings that can concretise the relationships that have been struck by the NRM.� What are these �radical groupings?� We now know how corrupt the NRM leadership is and the kind
of relationships it has built with entrepreneurs have been based on bribery and giving of billions from the Bank of Uganda to favoured individuals such as Basajabalaba, among others. Are you saying this is a radical step?
Please general, stick to your job as a soldier and give Ugandans a break.
You cannot create new leaderships outside the constitutional arrangements that the people of Uganda have put in place, including the term limits for the presidency. There is no place for ebisanja politics nor for experiments �known as the �glazier effect,� whatever this may mean.
The manipulations going on at grassroots by bribed MPs are illegitimate and cannot produce any new constitutional order beyond what is in the 1995 constitution. Also the gimmicks going on in Parliament about constitutional amendments are already discredited however much the NRMO and the government may
be trying to say.
Until you reveal the sources of the resources the NRMO is using to bribe elected officials, the process will remain clouded in illegitimacy. Any manipulation of the Constitution under these circumstances will amount to its abrogation, which will have very serious consequences for the whoever is engaged in it. Those who have doubts should look at article 3 of the Constitution.
Thirdly, you point to the need for �African values� to be incompatible with western values of liberal democracy and human rights. This is an old story on which the NRM monopoly of power was based since it was said at the time that the old parties were �sectarian� and that African democracy did not have opposition parties.
This �experiment� of �No Party Democracy� has been discredited and that is why the NRM Executive Committee and the NRM National Conference last year, under
pressure from the Donors, submitted to the opening up of political space. Do you want us to go back to the drawing board, where we can even scrub off from the constitution the Bill of Rights that Ugandans have achieved but which the NRM continues to deny them?
General, if you are NRMO supporter, you should now understand that your time is up and Ugandans are not interested in these �new� theories of governance, which belatedly question even concepts such as �good governance,� which the NRM itself has been selling in the country since it became a blue-eyed boy of the IMF and the World Bank.
Fourthly, there is no room for Ugandans to be told about the �unfinished struggle� of the NRM. NRM will be in power 20 years in 2006. In that period, it set in motion a democratisation process that led to the 1995 constitution. It is not now the time for us to be given new songs about
�unfinished struggle� nor do we have any more time for Museveni to tell us, at an appropriate time, �the length of the struggle, how much mileage we have covered and how long is remaining.�
I think Ugandans are quite knowledgeable about all these matters and we do not have to put ourselves at the mercy of an all-knowing-leader who must, from time to time, adjust his programme and tell us how much more time he needs to �complete the vision.� These are theatrics of dictators who want to justify perpetual personal rule. We now have a constitutional order, which we shall struggle to keep against these kinds of dreams.
Finally, there is also no room for the signing of �social contracts� between Ugandans and the dictators where the citizens, according to you, must surrender their rights to politics in return for �fast economic growth and prosperity.� According to you Ugandans
will be required to �refrain from interfering in political governance� so long as the leader has delivered! What a dangerous ideology, General. You want us to abolish democracy and politics for pieces of bread? Never on your breath!
Is this also the reason you do not want good governance and western liberal democracy in Uganda? Is this why you want �African values� instead and under that guise impose one-man rule that can alone tell us �how much mileage we have covered and how long is remaining?� God Forbid. Please leave us alone because if you do not, you will have contributed to the disintegration of this beautiful land into so many Somalis.
If you want �African values� to be practised in Uganda then you better leave the traditional institutions at peace and stop harassing them. We do not need dictators to tell us about African values and economic prosperity where a few favoured individuals amass wealth while the vast majority of Ugandans languish in abject poverty and ignorance on which dictators of the Museveni variety survives.
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