TRIBUTE
A few political
commentators tend to under-state the efforts of Dr. Kizza Besigye (KB) in
reclaiming the political space we have today. Although bravery is a scant
virtue among any oppressed population, KB's gallantry has concrete achievements.
The oppressed people often adapt to their state of oppression by submitting or
emulating the ways of their Oppressors. KB's successes in resisting all these
mechanism are monumental.
Oppression
tends to deform its victims – compromising their senses of reality, self-worth,
and imaginations by impeding both mental and physically developments.
You can
identify oppressed people by their dependency, timidity, and low confidence
when navigating their environment – many become socially obscure, coarse, and duplicitous
in their dealings.
To appreciate
KB’s achievements, one has to understand such environments and obtaining
circumstance where untruth operates as the truth and violence as state symbol.
After three decades of systematic oppression, people become weary, aloof, and
distrusting. Gallant men like KB only sustain their paradoxical existence of
hope/hopelessness.
The anti-KB
sentiments represent those on the side of hopelessness. It is a prerequisite
for holding a pie from the state's breadbasket.
The internalization process of oppression is appealing because it
attracts such rewards as Presidential appointment. Interpret the terse
environment in an imperceptive manner helps to validate their failures to
thrive independently, and thus, accosting providence.
In that way, KB
is a unique brand – a self-sacrificing living legend with a vision for good
governance and equality for humankind by breaking the traditions of oppression.
However, after
decades of oppression, any prospects of obtaining a state of liberation is
daunting to the oppressed. They have never known freedom - how to live free of
state patronage. To them, every aspect of life's glimmer arises from the
"glorious" benevolence of the tyrant.
There are
Ugandans who, without reservation, claim that KB's activism has not moved
Uganda far. Some even claim that KB is a spent force because he has not dismantled
the dictatorship. There are many strange explanations in dismissing KB; all
compromised versions of the truth, all of which help to rationalize the ascendancy of
the tyranny.
These
apologists never confront the social, political, and structural imbalances and
commonplace restraints mounted against a free society - the very conditions
upon which they are meticulously dominated, exploited, and oppressed.
There is
imperceptible fear to recognise sham rituals such as fake elections,
corruption, over-zealously militarised police, and personalised armies,
all of which conflate to the perpetuation of unequal society and oppressive
states.
How can an army
or police forces that are functionaries of dictatorship become professional?
The KB success
story cannot be told as a singular narrative isolated from the complex and
adverse political context in which it obtains. The roles of his colleagues and
institutions they built, without which, they could not have claimed the political
space that we have today must also suffice.
KB tested and
exposed the lack of professionalism in the various personalized institutions
that hold the tyranny in place and found them all wanting. The army is a personalized
instrument of power of Mr. Museveni, culpable to the highest levels of
nepotism, sectarianism, and corruption in as much as the Police, and other
departments in abeyance with that regime.
The Kayihura Uganda
Police, I think, is modeled after Adolf Hitler's notorious Gestapo.
Profoundly, KB
exposed the Museveni’s gibberish talks about constitutionalism and rule of law
– revealing that the people control neither the power nor the will to decide on
how they want to be governed.
And, KB exposed two contradicting societies – one that is above
the laws with command over every resources; and the other, constructed in the sub-state
zone under oppression and exploitation. It experiences egregious laws
requiring the state to decide for them when to associate, talk to each
other, laugh, play, and make merry or gloomy.
END.
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