Enough with Andrew Mwenda's mercenary propaganda

BADMOUTHING MAFIA

At his 2016 inaugural speech,  Museveni assured the nation that he would terminate all opposition by 2021. Since then, Andrew Mwenda has gained reputation  as the man on this mission by exploiting that window of opportunity to make fortune. By promising to eliminate opposition, many understood Museveni to mean containing the influence of Rtd. Dr. Kiiza Besigye, his arch political nemesis.

The 2016 elections was the climax of election rigging mixed with a coup - military operation code named Fagia Uchafu, a swahili term to mean clean the dirt, or the unwashed from claiming power. That coup defined what should constitute politics of electioneering, quite discernible from democracy - a contested concept in the political discourse of Museveni’s Uganda.

This article is not about democracy or obvious lack thereof. The purpose is to bring a spotlight on Andrew Mwenda's violence. We have watched and read the violent verbal and psychological assault that Mwenda launches on our conscience, and against the opposition leaders with their organizations without countering.

Mr. Mwenda is a senior journalist, a political and economist hawk, at times presented as a strategist obscurantist. Mwenda might have legitimately earned his position in society as everything he claims to be, and he is within his constitution and human rights to exploiting his this capital for his own end.

I have taken the liberty to review some Mwenda articles written since Museveni's 2016 swearing in speech and it is obvious that both Mwenda and Museveni have targeted Dr Besigye and FDC for immobilizing.

Until the rise of the youthful Kyadondo East MP, Hon. Robert S. Kyagulanyi, Mwenda’s violent and virulent attack concentrated on Dr Besigye and FDC. The attacks were so intense that it attracted a rebuke from the amiable Hon. Norbert Mao (Read DM 01/11/2017: The Hazzard of Besigyeism in Opposition: Has Mwenda got a point?). 

The manifest contents in Mwenda’s numerous articles were consistent, persistent and strategically aimed at framing Besigye as a symbol of commotion, uncertainty, fear, extremism; FDC as the vehicle upon which these besigye traits and that of his avid followers were festered and cascaded in society. His conclusions are the same - that KB and FDC Party agents were worse that Museveni and even more violent given their street activities, threatening societal stability.

These narratives formed the basis of self doubt and feeding into the ego of the opportunistic elements within the opposition parties. Within months, Judases had emerged to sellout Besigye and Peterses heard the crow thrice to deny and distance themselves from Besigye. 

 Some randomly selected Mwenda articles could affirm his propaganda narratives and agenda setting, such as “The future we must fight for” published on 11/10/ 2018; A frank memo to Uganda’s Opposition” (published on 20/11/2017) in Independent, and; Uganda’s deluded Opposition posted on Mwenda's facebook on Dec 15, 2017, and amplified by regime friendly fakenews channels.

Upon subjecting these to critically reading, they reconcile Mwenda’s positions on all his utterances on television, radio and what he writes. In all these articles, Mwenda recasts the Museveni violence onto the Opposition, and more with an artsy obsession with Besigye and FDC.

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Themes from a cursory discourse analysis reveals sustained themes of violence as the main framing against the opposition. According to Mwenda, all sympathetic opposition elites are ignorant and emotional; deluded; extremists. Mwenda creates adversarial image of elites in opposition dismissively to obscure the brutality of his masters in power. On the mission of Opposition, Mwenda paints Opposition as the same or worse than Museveni, a powerful symbolism of disaster at the cusp. Mwenda’s strongest onslaught came through his “A Frank Memo to Opposition”, where Mwenda rubbishes the search for good governance as “a cliché”, “a delusion” since Uganda is underdeveloped.

Mwenda’s obscurantism emerges through his pettiest recommendation – the problem of Uganda can be solved by creating real forces within society to check those in power. Mwenda neither explains how this can be achieved, nor recognizes that the purpose of opposition in any healthy democracy is for creating that real force in opposition and civil society to check those in power. Mwenda presents many internal inconsistencies, but his target has remained clear – obliterating Dr. Besigye and stifling nascent Bobi Wine.

In analyzing these articles, the explicit content of Mwenda’s text and words are more damaging than an atomic bomb thrown on an innocent population.

In part, the splintering of New Formation from FDC, and the subtle quisling within opposition seems partly to be an impact of Mwenda’s mercenary propaganda. Let me give Mwenda credit so those who self-doubted themselves after listening to Mwenda to feel dumb enough!

Curious scholars will refer to Mwenda’s articles in future to study devices of mercenary propaganda. In many of Mwenda's writings, he applies techniques such as bandwagon -broad  brushing opposition with one stroke as extremists; use of loaded language to frame opposition as unworthy of governing Uganda, violent; and normalization of the Museveni’s brutality. On his TV shows, you witness a lot of snob appeals. The most powerful tool at Mwenda’s disposal is his false image as an authority in what he discusses. We have heard enough of Mwenda’s garb already!

End

Predicting 2019 to be the year of desired change

PEOPLE POWER

The year 2019 is going to be a year of mixed bags of fortune as agents locate themselves strategically for electioneering. I also predict that this year, the change that Ugandans are searching for will obtain a concrete shape, form and face.

Each year, Ugandan politicians disappoint us for our lack of cohesion makes us unable to respond, except for our resilience. In fact, majority of Ugandans are on a roller-coaster behind the political class with absolute power and resources. Each year, we also endure renewed forms of repression, oppression and abuses that we fail to prevent or fight back. 

Some vivacious entrepreneurs find pleasure in justifying and normalizing this powerlessness. The last humiliations came from enacting the Public Order Management Act, which then provided a legal cover for removal of Presidential age limit, depriving indigenous Ugandans living abroad of their citizenship and others. Typically, we have largely watched passively and helplessly.

The windfalls of doom seems to embrace and fill us up afloat the ground like neon balloons. The regime has contemptibly mounted pressure to annihilate us, and yet the resolve to fight back gets internalized. Everywhere we go, land grabbing and illegal evictions are on the rise which shows that soon a majority of Ugandans will be landless and homeless. Luckily, our collective suffering is traced to the power center. Such impunity where villagers are evicted in Amuru or Lusanja in full tow of armed police can only direct us to abuse of power from the center.

But, do not get deceived that Uganda is a country of lawlessness. The law is only oriented and mobilised to protect power and its formations. The law exists in its crudest form when being applied to subdue ordinary Ugandans into a silent majority.

Debates about corruption in Judiciary is one part of this seeming breakdown in the law, however, the politicization of juridical functions evidently attest to several variations in the laws, how and when they are applied, and to whom reveals how effective the law actually is.

The year 2018 revealed quite a lot of this inequities for all to ruminate on. As such, we are able to predict with some precision, events of 2019. Since these events are not discrete categories and are resistant to change, we can conclude that the law of the land when justly applied, usually regulate societal conduct. If the heart or the lungs are uncoordinated, the body functions with frailties. This is a natural law!

Take for instance, the pervasive corruption that has become personified and institutionalized. This gives birth to anomalies like the corporatization of the Jesus, witchcraft and politicised music industries. The duplicity lies in how NRM zealots stretch to invent artificial fissures between music, faith or business from politics and corruption. These industries arise from, and sustain interests for which power is contested in any society. The contest for power is politics!

There is no more evidence of deliberate thinking in the NRMO narratives, whether as silent majority or the people in power. Their obscurantism contrast sharply with realities of people's power and loud cries of the suppressed populace.

The overbearing logic is that if the majority are silent, the oppressed are loud. Music is one avenue to self-express; beauty pageantry, poetry, dance, defiance and corruption are the others. Now, your survival depends on gagging free speech, jailing and torturing dissenters, and taxing their views. Are you not coercing even the loud minority into silence? Dictatorship is indeed the climax of cowardice!

Incidentally, many Ugandans are insecure, subdued and emotionally hurting to participate meaningfully in sham elections that replaced democracy. Those whose music are muzzled, and whose cries for freedom are taxed; the many who suffer torture and humiliation, still rise from their abyss to embrace a call for peaceful transformation in their humiliating existence.

There is an unmistakable consensus that Uganda is ready for change. That change will come to pass. The year 2019, however, may be the year that this change shall acquire a proper shape, form and face.

End.