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
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