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.