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Many times I am asked the questions: ‘Don’t you get tired? Can’t you see that it is impossible at this time to change anything?’ How wrong they are on both counts! To start with, how can you gzet tired of a cause in which you are passionately consumed? It’s a very difficult sentiment to relate to someone who has never had the courage to pursue their passion but those who are doing what they love will understand how good it feels to be in the grasp of an overwhelming passion. There is never a dull moment in Ugandan politics.
Take for example the latest campaign against the nascent FDC. Having failed to splinter the Party, NRM has changed tactics and their new mantra to dissuade people from joining FDC is “Don’t trust them: They are just like us!” You have to be so low on humor not to be tickled by the twisted reasoning
of this mantra. The NRM-O is actually implementing a campaign based on negatives, the locus being: “Look, we are all failures and wouldn’t you rather trust a failure that has more experience in failing than a new failure who will bungle up at failing and lead us to chaos!”
In case you missed it, the President put a seal of approval on the campaign somewhere in Eastern Uganda, when he declared that Mugisha Muntu, a retired General and Museveni’s longest serving Army Commander, is a failure. He later echoed that not only Muntu but all the army officers who had abandoned the Movement for FDC were failures. And as expected the usual suspects jumped in to stoke the fires of the President’s pronouncement. I would have continued laughing at the absurdity of the campaign without caring to rebut a word but then I know how gullible the public can be.
It is almost incredible the manner in which Museveni plays on people’s minds with a duality and conflicting approach that makes him the victim and his opponents the perpetrators, the persecutors and the liars. For example, Museveni’s abhors sectarianism when he is not the one propagating it.
During the 2001 elections the opposition brought up the number of URA employees and scholarship recipients who were children of well heeled Ugandans originating from the Nyabushozi area. Within no time Museveni’s campaign had counted the number of Bahima in URA and compiled a list of scholarship recipients whose relatives had aligned with the opposition.
The opposition’s message on lack of transparency in the policy of URA recruitment and scholarship allocation, was quickly lost in the accusations that “the Bahima are being victimized and yet we are all the same”.
Unfortunately the Elect Kizza Besigye Campaign did not have the resources, the access or the time to disprove the statistics that Museveni had assembled but it does not take a rocket scientist to see that a certain ethnicity dominates Uganda’s most coveted positions and that they have an overwhelming presence on the State House external scholarship list. And it will take a full compilation by an independent organization like Transparency International to convince Ugandans otherwise.
The key characteristics needed to pull off the ‘We Are All Failures’ campaign are audacity, arrogance and a propensity to tell lies without blinking, while spontaneously calling the other party the liar. Take for example the recent presidential speech at the internment of the remains of Shaban Nkutu. Without butting an eyelid the President says his government has never killed an opponent. To which the increasingly bold opposition leaders retort ‘What about Andrew Kayira?” Unfortunately for the opposition it is Museveni who still has the loudest microphone and the most prominent platform and so he points to where they are seated and call opposition leaders the liars.
Once again he succeeds in twisting facts and playing victim to the ‘failures’ who used to persecute opponents.
When Senyondo pulled out a hammer to knock the Cotter Pin, the President went on radio and pleaded with the population to protect him from an opponent who wanted to hammer him. He was the victim once again! Never mind that by declaring himself Cotter Pin he invited a hammer to knock him out. He had to be the victim.
And John Kazoora had better watch out because if there is any arson during this dry season he will be accused of trying to burn the President who has taken to wearing a garland of Kisanja. Because in the twisted jargon of the spin doctors Kazoora was not fighting the policy of clinging to power but he was instigating a crime.
Perhaps the most disgraceful is the one about liberation and armed struggles. Museveni feels that he alone has the right to resort to violence and this is the most sensitive because it is perhaps the one that Museveni most believes. In his 2001 manifesto and in almost every major speech that he has given over the last three decades, Museveni boasts of the number of Ugandans killed in the name of democracy and security. Never mind that security remains elusive to some 1.8 million people in camps in northern Uganda and democracy is still a myth in the country.
Anyone else who dares to think of using military means to remove dictatorship and bring security does so at the risk of being stampeded out of the country. And those who continue to warn that violence invites violence are the perpetrators, the inciters, the liars and the ones who will be crushed by the one and only Ugandan who does not kill opponents but who kills Ugandans in the name of peace, provided that he labels them traitor, terrorists, rebels or criminals…
Think about it.
The writer is a member, FDC.
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