TIM:
I see it has taken you 20 long years for you to come to the conclusion that Yoweri Museveni's Uganda is coming to a total collapse!! Yes indeed, unless some thing dramatic happens, and the NRM is out, the republic is coming down surely!!! Like the bible says "no stone will be left unturned"!!
MK
Uganda: Is Uganda On the Road to Total Collapse?
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The Monitor (Kampala)
OPINION
October 18, 2006
Posted to the web October 17, 2006
October 18, 2006
Posted to the web October 17, 2006
Timothy Kalyegira
The forced resignation last week of the long-serving managing director of the government-owned New Vision newspaper, William Pike, has raised many eyebrows and it is widely believed that this is the start of the end of one of Uganda's best-known companies.
Many informed observers are not as worried about the change in the editorial direction of the paper (even though that is a cause enough for concern) as
they are for the future financial stability of The New Vision.
It is fairly well-known that the main reason for the collapse of so many government-owned corporations since 1986 had less to do with incompetent management as it had to do with an astonishing onslaught on these companies' bank accounts and unbelievable sums of money stolen.
Usually Uganda's top political leaders have either looked the other way or themselves been eager participants in the embezzlement.
It was Pike who put up a determined fight to keep political hands away from The New Vision accounts that explains the paper's success and why it has survived and grown to the level it is today.
It does not take much thinking to arrive at the conclusion that the new acting managing director, Robert Kabushenga, will be helpless to
stop the grand theft of The New Vision's treasure.
He will be ordered to approve money for the topmost politicians who, these days, are rapidly running out of sources of free public cash to loot. Kabushenga will not have the nerve to stand in anybody's way.
All this state of affairs in Uganda was seen 20 years ago by a minister in the then UPC government.
In May 1984, the UPC government was preparing to celebrate the Hero's Day, commemorating the day, May 27, 1980, when former President Milton Obote returned from exile in Tanzania after nine years.
An advance team of senior UPC officials led by party secretary general Dr John Luwuliza-Kirunda and the minister of Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, Patrick Masette Kuuya, headed for the western town of Bushenyi where the day was always celebrated.
Bitter reality
During a stop over at the New Ankole Hotel in Mbarara town, Masette Kuuya, over dinner, got into a few comments on the NRA guerrillas led by former Defence Minister Yoweri Museveni, who at that time were fighting the Obote government. The NRA's top leadership was dominated by people from the Ankole tribe.
Masette Kuuya remarked that if the Banyankole ever came to power, Uganda would be destroyed and there would be corruption of a kind Uganda has never seen since independence. It would be naked, shameless, relentless corruption.
Dr Luwuliza-Kirunda, who was from the eastern tribe of the Basoga, chipped into Masette Kuuya's comments and angrily accused Masette Kuuya of being a narrow-minded tribalist. Masette Kuuya calmly told Luwuliza-Kirunda to wait and see.
Less than two years later, the NRA came to power.
As soon as Museveni seized power in
1986, his mindset was immediately one of a man clinging to power about to slip from his hands.
Museveni, from day one, came into office with no illusions about his popularity. He knew that he had lost the 1980 election and even if it had been the freest and fairest in Uganda's history, he was an irrelevant quantity.
He knew that in order to win the support that brought him to power in January 1986, he had to undermine the support that Obote enjoyed: Obote had to become unpopular in order for Museveni to gain the public's favour.
As Obote claims, acts of brutality had to be committed against the civilian population carefully disguised as the deeds of the UNLA government army, in order to turn the population in central Uganda against Obote and to Museveni.
Obote narrated these deeds in the Luweero Triangle in his 1990 document Notes On Concealment of Genocide
in Uganda, which has been read on the UPC website (upcparty.net).
This utterly cynical mentality and the view of power as a brutal struggle is something that was new to Uganda.
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But in 1986, very few people noticed that they had entered the chapter of national destruction.
Obote viewed himself as the natural leader of Uganda; Museveni had a cultic lust for raw, unbridled power.
The belief of the former led him to try to do all it took to be popular among the people; the attitude of the later drove him to invest in all and any means never to lose that power, even in the event that he was no longer liked by the people.
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