Why there is more to Aine return than meets the eye

On the evening of Thursday April 7, NTV news aired in its Luganda and English bulletins an exclusive story.
The former head of security for the Amama Mbabazi campaign team, Mr Christopher Aine, announced his return from hiding. Aine is said to be a former intelligence officer and soldier in the Special Forces Command (SFC) in the army and had joined the Mbabazi Go Forward team in 2015.
During a Go Forward campaign stop in Ntungamo District in western Uganda in December 2015, NRM supporters confronted Mbabazi’s supporters. A fracas followed, the police intervened and photos and video footage showed Aine roughing up policemen and some NRM supporters at the scene.

At a press conference a few days later, an angry President Museveni condemned the Mbabazi camp over this encounter and warned that whoever had dared attack NRM supporters had touched the anus of a leopard and would pay for it.
Soon after, Aine was arrested and held by police. Within days he had disappeared from public view. Speculation about his whereabouts turned into a frenzy when a photo of a badly-beaten body was published on the social network Facebook.
A Kampala political analyst and former intelligence officer Charles Rwomushana was arrested in January over the source of that photo which he published on his Facebook page.

The Mbabazi camp insisted that Aine was in the hands of the police while the Museveni camp insisted that the Mbabazi camp should produce Aine.
The police issued a public notice, offering Shs20 million (just under $7,000) for anyone with information on the whereabouts of Aine.
Coming so soon after the President’s threats and the arrest of Aine, many in the general public concluded that this was indeed Aine’s body and he had been tortured and killed by the security forces.
Those not sure if this might be Aine’s body were still left with a feeling that there might be a direct connection between the President’s angry remarks, Aine’s arrest and his disappearance.

Whatever the truth at that stage, the photo of a body showing obvious signs of torture sent fear through the population, the same way a 1998 photo obtained and published by the Daily Monitor of a woman named Candida Lakony being forcibly shaved in her private parts allegedly by soldiers in Gulu had horrified the public.
Western diplomatic missions and human rights groups too expressed concern at the whereabouts of Aine.
As the general election drew closer and FDC presidential candidate Kizza Besigye continued to bear the brunt of police arrests and obstruction, Aine faded from the news and by the end of March had dropped out of the news altogether.

Aine’s re-appearance in public immediately set off a storm of commentary on the two main social networks Twitter and Facebook.
Most Museveni supporters posted sarcastic messages and comments directed at the Opposition and the Mbabazi camp in particular, taunting them over intentionally misleading the public over Aine’s fate.
Feeling relieved and vindicated, some NRM supporters even went on to suggest that just as the Mbabazi camp and the other Opposition groups had lied about Aine’s murder, they had lied about the February 18 presidential election being rigged by the Museveni camp.

That then is how the Aine saga started and ended. Aine, dressed in a brown T-shirt, wearing glasses and in dark jeans, stood all through the NTV video recording, showing how uncomfortable the whole episode was for him, how little control he had in the matter and how much a chess piece he was, contrary to his declaration about being tired of hiding.
That he was not even offered a chair on which to sit says a lot about how he really got to appear before the TV camera.
Unfortunately, the end of this bizarre saga raises as many questions as it appears to have answered.
First, for such an important matter of security, crime, law enforcement and the damage it had undoubtedly caused the Museveni government at home and abroad, it seemed strange that only one media house, NTV, should be called to break this exclusive development in the Aine case.

NTV is regarded as sympathetic to the Opposition, going by the public utterances by the President himself. This should have been a press conference at which all media was invited.
Why was NTV singled out? The answer is mainly because NTV is the most-watched television station in Uganda and, more importantly for this story, the most credible.
Those who arranged this news scoop needed it to be believed and needed a source that is believable among the public.
So the invitation to NTV and NTV alone to break the story shows there were mind games at work behind-the-scenes. This was a public relations pitch, a political manoeuvre.
The goal was not to settle a case that had puzzled and frightened the public but to score a political point. The question is: What was that point and against whom was it being scored?

The answer, clearly, is it was a point being scored against Amama Mbabazi. But what was that supposed to achieve? Make him look bad? Unmask his schemes? If so, what schemes?
In a note on the network Twitter on Thursday, April 7, the journalist Andrew Mwenda, obviously relishing the fact that he had been vindicated, wrote that “I didn’t predict Aine was alive. I knew he was. He was in hiding with the knowledge of Mbabazi. But politics!”
In January, Mwenda had been insinuating that the Mbabazi camp had Aine in their possession and, it would seem, were staging his disappearance to imply that Museveni’s brutal security men had liquidated Aine and by that, hopefully, win public sympathy ahead of the election.

Following the reported burglary at the offices of two of Mbabazi’s lawyers, Mwenda on Facebook also declared that from his detailed investigation of these break-ins, this was an “inside job” (his words) by Mbabazi and company.
Mwenda, as it well-known, is one of the best-connected journalists in Uganda in as far as the centres of power are concerned. He meets often with President Museveni and is a phone call away from anybody from Cabinet ministers to the heads of the police, prisons, army, intelligence and others in the NRM state.
So if as early as January 2016 Mwenda “knew” Aine was alive, presumably so too did the police and intelligence agency ISO and military intelligence.

Why then did the security forces not storm wherever it was that they knew or suspected Aine was being held by Mbabazi’s group? During the January presidential debate, Mbabazi brought up Aine’s disappearance as proof of how much he and his supporters were being harassed by the State.
The government did not respond to that or do anything to bring this matter to an end when it had every interest in preventing this matter from doing any further damage to Museveni’s prospects for re-election.
What we see, then, is the government – if it really knew the whereabouts of Aine and knew he was being used as a political pawn – either playing along as part of its calculation in a future game of intrigue or unable to get the Mbabazi camp to admit to possessing Aine and forcing Mbabazi to produce the soldier.

Whichever of the two possibilities is true, one thing stands out: the intra-NRM rivalry between Museveni and Mbabazi that many thought had been settled is still far from resolved.
Some had thought that the NRM parliamentary retreat at the National Leadership Institute at Kyankwanzi in February 2014 would settle it; others thought the dismissal of Mbabazi as prime minister in October 2015 and later as NRM secretary general in December 2015 would close the chapter on him.
Still others thought that by being dealt the sound defeat at the ballot box in February 2016 and losing the election petition before the Supreme Court in March 2016 would finally close the chapter on Mbabazi.
Evidently, this is not so.
Ever since the end of the Kyankwanzi meeting, this writer had warned starting in the Sunday Monitor of February 16, 2014, that the story of 2016 would not be a contest pitting the NRM against the main Opposition party the FDC, but rather it would be a power struggle of NRM versus NRM, Museveni versus Mbabazi.

In subsequent articles, I argued that behind the public events an intelligence and counterintelligence war between the Museveni and Mbabazi camps would shape 2016.
Unable to score a decisive and final victory over Mbabazi, President Museveni can only resort to try and outmanoeuvre Mbabazi by covert action and publicity stunts such as using his chief trouble-shooter and brother Gen Salim Saleh to produce Aine.
But Museveni cannot seem to knock out Mbabazi in quite the way he has his other political challengers over the last 30 or so years.
Why that is so, is a story for another day.