Bobi Wine: Fraternizing the Uganda Opposition

SOLIDARITY LIBERATION

For decades, young people have listened to people in government talk passionately about "Liberation", "Freedom fighting", and the most misused term, "revolution", as in NRM 1986 revolution!

 

While we agree that these reactionary concepts pertain to removing human conditions that are considered unbearable, repressive, oppressive, exploitative, and therefore unjust or unfair, to set humans free, the concepts of liberation, freedom fighting, and revolutions have now mutated to different meanings.

 

For Museveni, freedom fighting, liberation and revolution are all about himself - advancing his ideas for the success of his children and grandchildren.

 

Museveni's position contrasts sharply from that of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Dr. Obote, Julius Nyerere and such thinkers in their epoch. To these ideologues, freedom fighting, liberation and revolutions were not an opportunistic vehicles, they were akin to legitimate self-sacrifice for popular causes. There was a unanimous agenda – that of freeing the masses from the trappings of oppression and repression; from colonialism, imperialism, including the consequences of their exploitative social, economic and political formations.

 

The difficulties that confront us in recycling these concepts is that they have lost their ideological and traditional meanings. Karl Marx and his adherents would object to the Museveni definition of "revolution" on the account that it is self-serving, and immediately reproduces the very conditions of oppression and repression upon which the oppressed must desire to eliminate.

 

In fact, the extent to which the Museveni regime has buttressed itself as an oppressor, exploiter, and imperial agent, calls for nothing short of a true revolution, in its traditional meaning.

 

However, for a revolution to obtain, the opposition ought to organize studiously, persistently and vigorously to build that wave towards a critical mass. Favourable conditions are now abound, at home and abroad. Without a critical mass, a peaceful revolution becomes a phantom.

 

The task of removing the repressive regime of President Museveni lies in organizational capability of the Opposition groups. The group vying for power must show better qualities than the group in power. In the process, the Opposition should be aware that Museveni's instrument of repression does not go to sleep. These are well-entrenched, polished and financed enthusiasts with monopoly over means of violence and legitimation of it. If anything, the fate of the tortured #Arua33 is a testament that the Museveni's regime is more lethal than past colonial administrators they emulate.

 

The colonial administers knew their mission and limits when suppressing natives, partly for fear of a backlash at home. Colonialists also knew that Uganda was a Protectorate that would at some point revert to Ugandans. The Musevenists have no such conscience or limits. They are simply fused with the state. To them, separation from the state is unimaginable.

 

Therefore, Opposition groups have to spend a portion of their time studying the characteristics of the enemy just as we studied plants and animals in agriculture or botany. The struggle in pushing the frontiers of liberating Ugandans therefore, is both scientific and artistic. It is also a human service calling for absolute self-sacrifice among its leaders. The opposition must become elastic, to self-replenish without capitulating over internal contradictions.

 

Thus, the excitement among certain quarters of the Opposition pitting one leader against the other is unwise, and unproductive. It is self-defeating and militates against the mutual interest of liberation.

 

The struggle against Museveni will take longer if it is reduced to a personal struggle, a struggle to become a presidential candidate or president. This is a protracted struggle that aimed at overhauling this mangled-up society.  We need all resources and tools to liberate ourselves against a well-entrenched and resourced enemy of the people.

 

The opposition is a fraternity, a stream, not an individual zeal or process. When we individualize the struggle, we become vulnerable to compromises, either by will or coercion, and destroyed in earnest.

END

Handle Kyagulanyi's (aka Bobi Wine) generation with care

 TYRANNY UGANDA

The high handedness with which the state has handled Kyadondo East MP, Hon. Robert S. Kyagulanyi and Mityana Municipality MP, Francis Zaake moved Uganda to a new level of tyranny. MP. Zaake is hooked up on life support, in a medical vegetative state. Only the grace of his Makers save Zaake's life!

Museveni needs to be reminded that Uganda has matured through many decades of state violence and rough tides. In the heart of each and every Uganda there is a craving for peace a good government. This is primarily why Ugandans have not picked up arms to fight against Museveni's autocracy. People have respected Dr. Besigye for not opting for the armed insurrection despite provocation from this rogue state.

There was a time when politics in Uganda was known to be a very dirty game. Many people rightfully feared to indulge in politics because it was the fastest route to dying, being killed.

These conditions should have gone with the many bloody contestations for good governance. Instead, we are now back to the dirt where one is tortured and killed for participating in an election.

National stability is not defined solely in the interest of Mr. Museveni. The agenda of annihilating Ugandans considered a threat to their stale ideology is a sign that violence, rather than conviction has become the ideology.

Certainly, this tyranny is not a profitable manner for a progressive society to harness its intellectual wealth. In a country of nearly 40 million, you cannot have one singular dominant thinker such that 39,999,999 people who feed and protect that one person are treated as infinite fools.

When we return our politics to the regressive era of 1970s, we end up with more desires for violence. Violence begets violence.

This is why Museveni should handle Hon. Kyagulanyi and his colleagues very carefully because the youthful population, who is the majority in Uganda,  has a propensity for violence. The reaction from this section of the population that the youthful Hon. Kyagulanyi commands may be more than what the nation is ready to handle.

In 32 years, the dictatorship has suppressed two generations of Ugandans and subverted their indulgence in seeking for fair governance of through rigged elections.

There was the generation that became of age by 1986 when Museveni took over power. That generation was dispensed as post 1970s hangover  and Oboteists. They paid the price for the ills of the 70s and early 80s through retrenchment, HIV/AIDS and Siasa/hate politics. Now in their 60s and 70s, this generation looks back hopelessly at their predicaments.

Then emerged our generation of the 90s and 2000s, bred and groomed within the NRM dominance, violence, genocide, corruption, nepotism and more hate politics. We were sidelined by bush-war historicals, their children and grandchildren.

The generation of Hon. Kyagulanyi, that Museveni cynically calls his grandchildren,  is the embodiment of the failures of NRM ideology. If chronic repression deforms a society, then the BW generation is the socially deformed generation. This group is not very trusting, and rightfully so. They are industriousness, consumate consumers, and innovative. This is the social media generation who understand WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Mobile money. They are mostly idea oriented, largely unemployed but very tenacious, vicious.

It is this latter group that are restless for accountability from Museveni. Museveni should not think that he can hide behind armed guards, armoured vehicles, torture or killing to avoid that moment of accountability. Each time Ugandans go to an election, they go there with one thing in mind – accountability.

 Museveni has reacted very angrily at Hon. Kyagulanyi for leading a troop of disenchanted citizens to defeat NRM in Arua polls. By harming Kyagulanyi and torturing Hon. Zaake to near death, Museveni is returning the politics of Uganda to the dirt we emerged from.

End.

Ugandans are disoriented by state tyranny

CHANGE AGENDA

The death in Arua of a 26 years old Yasin Kawuma, a driver to Kyadondo East MP, Hon. Robert Kyagulanyi, (aka Bobi Wine), subsequent detention of the Arua Municipality by-election candidate and hordes of his supporters cast a shameful light for those who validate the Museveni-type legal tyranny.

Ugandans should wake up to realize that democracy is meaningless in Uganda and Museveni will never let up through the ballot. Frequent rigged elections on its own, does not imply democracy. Democracy thrives alongside respect for human rights, constitutionalism, rule of law, and independent institutions such as the media, Judiciary, Legislature and rule of law.

What we have in Uganda is an eviscerated version of democracy deprived of all its supportive institutions, militarised and lethal - In Bugiri a youth lost a life and now in Arua. The relevance of democracy in a liberal society is to promote free thinking and reaffirm social and political rights of individuals. The state should guarantee and not abrogate these rights. Mr. Museveni has ably duped his foreign backers - USA, UK, EU to believe in a sham democratic credential. Uganda has regressed from the ideals of a liberal society with liberal rights. To a greater extent, Mr. Museveni has succeeded in creating his counterfeit version of each and every attribute of democracy by adopting a veneer of its main components, while exenterating out substance.

In practice, the regime subverts democracy using legal means to sustain a legal tyranny. All their duplicitous policies are channeled through the legislative process and approved by the Court systems for legitimacy. To an outsider, these processes appear all perfect and democratic, from inside, these systems and processes are grossly flawed and ignoble.

The most abused is the concept of people's power which is also recognized and symbolized in the 1995 NRM Constitution. In that document, which has since been abrogated as deemed, the people of Uganda have arbitrary power, and are allowed to exercise it as they wish. That provision ends there in theory. In practice, Ugandans are some of the most dis-empowered lot world-over. They have no control over the exercise of their social rights as citizens. If elections allows the exercising of this power, then the routine vote rigging, and doctoring election outcomes by a tightly controlled, impartial and appointed cadres in Electoral Commission denies people of this exercise.

The institutions that arise out of this sham electoral processes also lack legitimacy to serve a function. Under the NRM, the legislature and Judiciary serve a functionality rather than a function. A judge performs a function when s/he dispenses justice as per the laws and authority derived from the constitution under the doctrine of separation of power. The Judiciary does not perform the function for which they are qualified for as Judges of the various courts the moment their judgement are swayed by political gerrymandering to legitimize the tyranny of the regime.

The media on the other hand is bullied, bought-off or subdued to the point of self-censor, thus compromising scrutiny and accountability. In all these narrowing public space, Mr. Museveni has eroded and diminished the values of democracy to a level that he is has seamlessly fused himself with the state, and is the state. Soon, Mr. Museveni will ban elections, Parliament and Judiciary like Amin, and his western backers will offer him a red carpet still.  Every action Mr. Museveni takes now subverts democratic institutions, thus producing leaders with dubious democratic credentials, highly corrupted and unpatriotic.

To know that Ugandans are powerless, any attempts to criticise the regime is matched with excessive force, detentions, torture, annihilation, unreasonable taxes, endless legal battles, and grabbing their land. Discrimination from public service and resources are used as political weapons to silence dissent.

Ugandans are so fed up with Museveni that they are disoriented and now feud over strategies to remove the regime, and when!

END