UGANDA: Could we even report regime’s impunity to God?

IMPUNITY 

In recent weeks, a special group of so-called powerful people have emerged in Uganda who appear intoxicated with power that they no longer fear God. A regime where its leaders do not fear God is surely a scary one because the Constitution which should constrain them is far below God!

 "Impunity" implies unequal treatment of certain individuals in society, who become exempted from punishment, and/or free of the injurious consequences of their actions.

Recently, we saw Deputy Attorney General, Rukutana, in broad day light, running his mouth against the authority of the Chairperson of the Lands Commission. Rukutana even dared God in his verbal utterances. Few days later, we saw the chilling video of Gen Matayo Kyaligonza, nearly strangling a female traffic police officer on duty. Not long from these events, Gen Kasirye Gwanga shot a car tire belonging to a celebrity aligned to Museveni.

We have Police officers, who, out of over zealousness while on duty, have tortured, maimed, killed, humiliated and abused their power and code of conduct. The video of armed men in civilian clothes clobbering a DP/People power activist on the streets of Kampala, and recently in Jinja remains fresh in our minds. The impunity arises from the fact that the culprits, far from facing punishment, are treated as heroes and recycled within ranks. These culprits have overtime, obtained a power status far beyond that of law enforcement and even of God! They are the judge, the jury and the executioner.

Just think about how many horrendous things happen to Ugandans. Have you ever imagined who are held accountable for these atrocities? Who are behind these acts of torture, killing, land grabs, demolishing buildings, vicious attacks on our domestic and game animals, rape of our women and sacrificing our children, neglect of hospitals, corruption, et cetra?

Impunity of this magnitude is usually the mid-section signal of failing regimes. The pervasive impunity also exists within every department and branch of government, such as Parliament.

Take for instance, the recently released COSASE report and the hype about the committee’s irreplaceable “star” performers! COSASE report became an everyday heartbreaking outcome of Parliament, itself an incubator of impunity.

During the COSASE probe of Bank of Uganda officials to establish circumstances of closures (liquidation) of several commercial banks spanning over two decades, few patterns emerged.

The first clear one was that certain privileged individuals, acting as power brokers with the state, conspired to rob these banks of major assets and shares. Second, traces of hidden hands – politics and informal practices – flaunted banking rules as major decisions were made in bars and bedrooms instead of the boardroom. Third, key managers within Bank of Uganda colluded with third parties to subvert laws and due processes, including compromising evidence during the probe.

COSASE seemed blinded to these criminalities to recommend punitive and cost-recovery actions against these individuals. By ignoring these culprits, Parliament as government, has created an environment for impunity to fetter.

The COSASE report itself is a revelation of impunity, and the Committee as a institutional legitimating mechanism of impunity!

That dastardly report affirms that whatever happens within this regime is designed to reinforce our collective sense of powerlessness - as a subdued people. Parliament thus, situated itself as a legitimizing institution of hegemonic impunity.

The COSASE authors dishonored themselves with their insensitivity to the fate of people who lost their livelihoods through the impunity of commercial bank closures. Those whose fortunes grew from the rot in the banking sector, will uphold Hon. Kantuntu-led COSASE as their gods!

On their part, COSASE can defend their report as bounded by term of reference.

Damn right! For all that the taxpayers spend financing Probe Committees and Commission of inquiries, so little concrete outcomes materialize.

So, who gives a damn if not Parliament? We couldn’t report these fellows even to God. Some may strangle or shoot God. Right?

Mr. Komakech is a Ugandan Social Critic. Can contact via mordust_26@yahoo.ca

Kiwanda’s trial-and-error tourism promotion demeans women.

DEMEANING TOURISM

Tourism Minister, Godfrey Kiwanda is in the media not for tourism that he should promote, rather, for his demeaning style of promoting tourism which commodifies and objectifies women – or, to be specific, curvy women.

There is a gross miscalculation in this whole tourism promotion project. The NRM regime seems to have adopted a trial-and-error modus operandi in doing business.  This partly explains the high frequency of botched up business deals with contractors and investors. Trial-and-error seem to be the standard operating procedure of this regime for transacting business.

However, we must also note that the general attitude of any government official in doing business is driven by the desire to exploit - strike fake deals, fake interventions, and make fake decisions to secure kickbacks, bribes, and political favours for personal aggrandizement.

Hon. Kiwanda’s dilemma, therefore, cannot be delinked from the general social and political environment in which he operates. The Museveni regime survives on an elaborate structure of exploitation entrenched through a mesh of greedy, well situated and protected cadreship. Hon. Godfrey Kiwanda may not be an ignorant person to fail to understand basic concepts of commodification and objectification of women that have ignited public outrage. 

When you commercialize women’s bodies, in a country where Ethics Minister has outlawed tight clothing including miniskirts, then you are being contradictory, and least, condescending – borderline lawbreaking. To expose curves, women must wear tight dresses, which could land them in jail for erotic-raising body manifestation, as per Lokodo’s Law.

Hon. Kiwanda’s belligerence and outlandish mannerism may not reflect an innate inability to comprehend the complexities of modern tourism. His dilemma comes from his rational function within the elaborate structure of regime’s exploitation machinery – to create avenues for further exploitation. This time, the avenue happens to be the curvy bodies of our women, most of whom appeared to have motherhood fats.

While the curvy pageantry serves another purpose, its fails miserably to promote tourism.  The obsession with women’s bodies is one such late infatuation that the corrupted NRM officials wish to cash in on.  The danger in a tourism promotion triggered by perversion on one end and greed for exploitation on the other, may extend to the display of curvaceous trunk-like limbs of certain breed of privileged women, justified that they appear below the rims of the decency skirt; the gluteal endowments of our women and, the display of small and largely neglected Albino, Batwa or nodding disease children of Northern Uganda for tourism attraction. Tourism is the source object for exploitation, and anything they can land on. 

I read Mr. Museveni’s defence of Hon. Kiwanda’s inexcusably lascivious curvy pageantry. It reveals the source of this perversion driven greed, and a sense that Museveni has lost control in this industry. The perils of leaders who over stay in power is that they need to be replenished with modern logic, theories and emerging trends in modern tourism – what motivates and attracts tourism world-over, and how do successful tourism destinations constantly reinvent, sustainably?

Museveni should have known that beauty pageantry is an industrial complex sustainable on its own and independent of tourism. Those skinny women serve particular interests in a complex sex and perversion industry well entrenched in the European and North American capitalism.

In sum, tourism in Uganda should focus on valuing what we have and can create or produce. For instance, our investment in tourism has not expanded beyond the source of the Nile, few national parks and the Equator. We are not investing and modernizing our natural and national endowments – our cultures, history, institutions, environment, peoples, and creative imaginations. 

The beauty and value of our women matters in as far as their achievements as equals in society, in their role of promoting those elements for a vibrant tourism industry - not their curvy bodies. This trial-and-error modus operandi demeans women and cheats society of decency.

END

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.   

Youth Unemployment Gap: Call for a collective response

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT

I read an interesting analysis in the Daily Monitor of 31/10/2018 by Charles Onyango Obbo from his Oslo escapades with the #PeoplePower platform. Charles demonstrated his grasp of the social and economic pitfalls in Uganda that has made young people unrestful, unemployed and generally distrustful of the current regime.

In that analysis, Charles outlines the failures of universal education system as foundational to youth unemployment today for delivering substandard quality.

Everywhere you go in Uganda, the poor quality of university and college graduates reflects a weak early educational foundation they received. When we evaluate the gaps in universal education, we examine a constellation of factors – from policy, financing, structure, content, the quality of those who manage and deliver it, to the conditions under which the education is delivered. 

Numerous reports indicate that graduates and teachers of UPE and USE hardly have basic literacy skills in language, logic, critical thinking, history and arithmetic. The disparity is glaring between urban and rural settings – the education system, far from its inherent flaws, is not equitable. Thus, the high rates of drop out in rural and among female students.

Even then, the distinction between College and University remains nebulously explained. In Uganda, College path is deemed for failures, yet Colleges provide the necessary hands-on skills needed for entrepreneurship and employment.

Universities may have been traditional spaces for knowledge and ideology production, but the colonial colleges were places for skills acquisition.

Most countries where youth unemployment is kept low have invested in high quality education and early childhood development. These countries adhere to education as a pathway to reproducing high quality labour in all areas of its economy. For instance, in German, there is an emphasis on appetenceship as a form of education. In the United States, and Canada, community colleges provide students with needed skills for employment.

Previous Uganda Census data confirm that over half of Uganda's population comprises youth, under the age of 29; Labour statistics estimates that 86% are unemployed, under-employed and or at the level of getting to employable.

Moreover, of the unemployed youths, those who become unrestful have education but lack skills and competence to work efficiently – even basic skills such as to show up at work daily and on time. For an economy that is strange to meritocracy, well prepared youths tend to be excluded from gainful employment and opportunities.

There is a big incongruency between the National Youth Policy and National Development Agenda since both are politically inclined rather than labour focused. We see money for politicizing these and not for honing youth’s skill or financing transition programs from school-to-workplace through internships, mentorships and other forms of professional socializing essential for entry level employment.

The large pool of unemployed graduates may reveal that the economy is actually shrinking rather than expanding. In 2016, UBOS found that 90% of all Ugandans under the age of 25 had no job; 58% of all Ugandans were unemployed and a whopping 65.2% of women and 47% of men were unemployed. The sanitized UBOS reports in 2018 may present a different case, but here are some of strides that Uganda must pursue urgently to integrate more people in productive work.

     a)   Invest in soft skills and digital jobs as pathways for harnessing youth energy productively. Youths have taken up social innovation using apps and communication through social media to participate in the digital revolution.

     b) Responsible taxation policies to stimulate and encourage innovation.

     c) Apprenticeships and work-based learning programs for youths to socialize early to work place settings. The graduate training program at Uganda Revenue Authority and the Partnership between Ministry of Gender and the UN Volunteers could provide models for policy makers.  Work-based apprenticeships should become the face of universal education.

     d) Young people involvement in research – a tradition of systematic inquiry; and high level of creative writing for publishing.

     e) Create a fluid skills-focused education system where a person can change career at least thrice in a life time as it is in developed countries. Current system is too rigid to allow people change career.  

End.

Torture in Uganda: From Panda Gari to Panda Kamunye

STATE TORTURE

Insecurity in Uganda today brings back frightening memories of our bloody past complete with its “ganda gari” traits. Except that for this one, it is panda Kamunye – matatu used by plain clothed state operators to kidnap victims of its violent arrests.

 We should be frightened that the state operators, rather than criminals are selecting gross violation of human rights, torture and all forms of incivility as a political tool contrary to all international treatise against torture and inhuman treatment that Uganda is signatory.

This torture video clips that confront us every day, such as that of Yusuf Kawoya, arrested of persons for hosting opposition leaders, and many others, only loops us back to the Idi Amin’s days of horror.

Uganda is on its path to a catastrophe because soon this insecurity will engulf the nation as people will start to roll back their cooperation with the state. For now, the population seems frozen in fear of this iron fist totalitarianism. At its climax, people will unfreeze and become insurgent to the state as they did to Amin and dictators elsewhere.

The ripple effect of violent arrest and torture of Hon. Kyagulanyi with 33 others from Arua's by-elections should have restrained this belligerent regime from its extra-judicial domains. The state may have monopoly over violence and coercion, however, there must be sufficient justification for applying that brute force. Mass arrests and torturing supporters of #Peoplepower or murdering those Muslim clerics will not solve Uganda’s woes. The problems we face today – the agitation, violence, criminality, corruption and dereliction of duties by state and non-state actors, have roots in the pervasive economic inequality and entrenchment.  

Recently, I asked a People Power adherent whether she had heard of Panda Gari. She had not. I concluded that she must be one of the “Bazukulus” (grandchildren or the bushwar). I asked if she is familiar now with Panda Kamunye, the Yusuf Kawooya situation, and she frowned. Reality had hit her. There was no need to explain what panda Kamunye was, except the parallel with Amin’s operations.

Hon. Winnie Byanyiima once twitted that Museveni’s regime is a mixed basket of good and bad. The bad are the episodes of those old dark days of violence when human life was easily dispensable, human where mere biological substances, and security was a variation of insecurity.

 The last two years were unique for Museveni in his effort to undo Amin’s days of terror and horror. It has been a near daily experience that Ugandans are violently arrested, harasses, kidnapped and killed in broad daylight. The helplessness on the faces of those who watch these atrocities, or the ones who have to bear the agony of their lost ones are even more horrifying.

Nowadays, people get frozen – powerlessly watching impunity unveil before their eyes. They even leave and return to their homes more disempowered, demoralized and dehumanized. The way people fear to be victims of crime is nearly commensurate with the fear to witness crime. It leads to immense psychological suffering which becomes embedded in transgenerational trauma and mental illness. Fear is disempowering, and to watch a fellow citizen die, humiliated, reduced like an object conjures a profound sense of powerlessness for law abiding citizens.

Interestingly, dictator Museveni normalizes, justifies and encourages such impunity as an act of self-defense.

Ugandans are, by any means, a very resilient people that have encountered many traumatic episodes since independence. However, the abuse of the citizens, and the havoc that the Museveni regime is wrecking on our people, the economy and whatever residual public institutions left, must be halted.  

Uganda is certainly an unsafe destination for tourists, investors, researchers – not even for Ugandans in the diaspora already shortlisted for arrests upon arrival at the airport for demonstrating against savagery of the state.

No one should panda kamunye for holding opposing ideas in Uganda.

End

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