Of Salim Saleh�s captains and Muhozi�s cadets
STRANGE BUT TRUE: With Andrew M. Mwenda
Dec 29, 2004
We are back to State House Nakasero on this 17th day of November 2000.
President Yoweri Museveni is chairing a high-powered meeting of the historical high command of the Uganda Peoples' Defence Forces (UPDF).
All the two-star, three-star and four-star generals of the army are present.
The generals had been expecting the discussion to focus on a report their committee, after visiting army units across the country, had written identifying problems and recommending solutions to the Commander-in-chief.
As we narrated last week, the meeting is now in suspended animation as the generals' report has not been discussed.
Instead, President Museveni has called his son, 2nd Lt. Muhozi Keinerugaba into the generals' meeting to present a paper he (Muhozi) had written on military deployments and was recommending courses of action to take.
As Muhozi personally hands the report to his father, and M useveni gives his personal secretary Amelia Kyambadde the report to distribute to the stunned generals, the President is not noticing the expressions of the generals' faces.
Be that as it may, when the report is distributed, it turns out after receiving it, President Museveni had already personally written instructions on it in his handwriting to Army Commander, Maj. Gen. Jeje Odongo, directing him to "implement" Muhozi's recommendations.
The generals are even more angered that while the recommendations of their own report had not been discussed, the recommendations of Muhozi's report are being distributed to them when the President has already assented to them and instructed the Army Commander to implement them.
You can say anything about Yoweri, son of Kaguta, but credit goes to him for one important thing: he is his own man.
Unbothered by what more the generals could or could not say, the Commander-in-chief then tells them that he has trained over 750 c adets to "take command and control of the UPDF."
To many of the generals, this is the crop of young graduates whom Muhozi had recruited from the Makerere University into the UPDF under the controversial "Kasenyi LDC scheme."
Maj. Gen. Salim Saleh, the only one confident enough to ask a question, but also the most affected since the new crop owe allegiance to Muhozi, asks about the fate of over 900 majors and captains already in the UPDF.
"Those are your people, you can take them and do whatever you want to do with them," the President, almost unguardedly answers.
The shift in control of the Army from Saleh to Museveni had began.� 2004 The Monitor Publications
ps: where is Kakooza Mutale's Kalangala Action Plan?
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