Rumours, conspiracies, and tall tales have taken their place alongside the regular mudslinging, accusations of sabotage, clawing and elbowing to get to the front of the party in Uganda�s transitional politics.
It�s never a dull moment in the newsroom, and here at the Monitor Publications, the season�s catch of the nefarious, the ridiculous, and the low-down-dirty is being described by ecstatic editors as a bumper harvest in news drama.
This writer�s obsession with the elite crisis in Uganda, the inability of our Harvard, Makerere, Oxford and Kyankwanzi elite to cause social transformation and bring home a progressive political agenda for real hope, security and progress to Ugandans, has now given way to total perplexity at some of the headlines pushing healthy newspaper circulation.
Take one, the angry revelations of our upland rice advocate and amiable Vice President, Gilbert Bukenya. Only in Ugan
da will
you hear that a census of a VP�s cows, pigs and paw paws constitutes a covert exercise by his political enemies to pluck him from the bosom of the President. His answer to the phantom detractors is spiced with a tinge of Biblical irony: let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.
Bukenya
The Bukenya blues sound very much like the strategy of a squealer in a major heist, who to protect his part of the loot threatens to tell on the rest. This is because as it turns out, Bukenya is no different from the wraiths he says are haunting him.
The IGG Faith Mwondha has shown he was aware of a verification process and now appears to have been referring to a more sinister inquiry into his activities by his political rivals, who he probably planned to shut up by his scarecrow interview with the Daily Monitor.
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| FOR PRESIDENT? First Lady Janet Museveni |
Bukenya may have beaten the bush to scuttle the snake but according to the Kafunda Press, his boss, the President could have been holding his hand to push a counterweight against the influence of the Sicilian outfit of Mbabazi, Kutesa and Mwesigye Inc., the trio the New Vision now says the Vice President did not name.
Nevertheless the VP�s revelations of an inner government, or the Akazu is so typical of fading revolutions and appear to be a counter reaction of the privileged elite to maintain themselves by subsidising the ideological deficiency within the state through the purchase of support with cash and favours as well as appealing to loyalties based on tribe, clan or filial relationship, concentrated within a small circle of trust. (Akazu is a Kinyarwanda word, which means small hut popularised by former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his wife, and refers to the inner circle around the President and his family as well as its political and commercial
network).
Akazu are not indigenous to Africa either. The Akazu of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his mad wife Imelda Romualdez, plunged their country into civil war after Marcos tried to hang on indefinitely, lifting term limits on his rule and fanning a military crisis including the staging of a fake assassination attempt to impose martial law, politicising the army, promoting his clan members and training squads of private mercenaries under a gigantic intelligence machinery.
After a 20-year miss-rule, Ferdinand and Imelda fled their Makalang Palace on February 25, 1986, just as Museveni was beginning his own rule here in Kampala, leaving a trail of loot, massive human rights abuses and an economic crisis.
In Rwanda, Habyarimana and his wife, Agathe�s Akazu helped organise the 1994 Rwandan genocide, while in Ghana, the deterioration of the African Union visionary and Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah was observed thus by Professors Ali
Mazrui
and Michael Tidy in their book "Nationalism and new States in Africa".
Nkrumah
�The personality cult gradually made Nkrumah less and less accessible to frank advice. Presidential flatterers soon monopolised the business of advising the Osagyefo (Nkrumah was baptised the saviour and redeemer). This was bound to harm the level of decision-making in the country. The Court of the Ghanaian Czar was soon intellectually impoverished - there were too few courtiers candid enough to warn the ruler against certain causes of action.�
The revolutions which have lost steam are as many as the examples of administrations hijacked by Akazu.
In an effort to keep the state going and maintain their privileges, they offer a transfusion of replacement ideologies which are often outside accepted legitimacy. They include a fascist entitlement of a particular group to rule or some pre-destination theory dressed in the unique qualities of their chosen leader.
In the case of Uganda, recent references to Museveni as being the only
one with
a vision, a messianic destination (revealed by his wife) and a good man surrounded by evil are manifestations of this syndrome.
It is important that the negotiations of political forces for the reordering of power take into account how to deal constructively with this type of thinking.
Another messianic theory about Museveni is linked to a Bachwezi prophecy according to Daruis Kabona, a local cultural preservationist and Chwezi scholar. Some quarters here speculate that the Museveni era could have been predicted by an soothsayer, one Mujenje, who hailed from Karagwe in Tanzania but visited the court of the Omukama of Karo (Greater Ankole) early in the 14th Century. Mujenge apparently predicted that a ruler would emerge after a period of wars, political strife, and moral degradation after wandering in the �bush� and restore order in the region. That this leader will not be a royal and shift the fortunes to the underlings.
Some wagging tongues have connected
the
Chwezi prediction to Ankole politics, and the �abolition� of the Nkore cultural Kingdom as an inconvenience within the new rulership of Kaguta Museveni. There is a claim that Nkore royal drums, signifying the authority of the royal palace are not within the Museum but somewhere at State House.
Binaisa
Others like maverick ex-President Godfrey Binaisa wrote about Museveni on June 8, 1994, that Museveni�s political career after 1986 as a � socialism quickly deteriorated into Fascism similar to Benito Mussolini, with a little mixture of the Nazi's "herrenvolk" theory based on birth and looks�.
Binaisa was referring to the contemporary myth that Museveni was trying to establish a Hima-Tutsi domain in the great lakes region with him at the helm as a member of this group of rulers.
Similarly, a pastor with a local Church told this writer that a religious conflict exists within State House between Christian evangelical lobbies close to First Lady Janet Museveni (they are bargaining to elevate their status to that of the traditional Catholic and Anglican Churches) and traditionalists (read President Museveni).
� There is a war here between good and evil,� he said.
So much so that a senior official with the Uganda Joint Chri
stian
Council, representing the traditional churches, told this reporter: � The balokole (born-again Christians) may be planning to declare Janet Museveni as their Presidential candidate in 2006.� Shocking!
As a journalist fearful not to kill a lead for another great headline, we checked out this last claim by calling Pastor Alex Mitala who could neither confirm nor deny any plans to support the First Lady should she desire to take a shot at the Presidency.
While academics turn their noses at these conspiracies, their emotional worth is not lost to praise singers, wives, nieces, and chauffeurs, that comprise the Akazu with the ability to substitute democratic institutional actions with the authority of their chosen leader.
The reality remains that Ugandan politics is basic, it is tribal and it is a competition between an ideologically impoverished elite to maintain the reins of power and the keys to the national purse.
The writer is a producer with KFM.
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