Age limit: Time to allow senior citizens to tell their story
Watching John Nagenda, the Senior Presidential Adviser on Media Relations, pour out his heart live on NBS TV in the early morning of July 31 was very touching. For the first time, I saw Nagenda as an ordinary human being who chose the perfect moment to let whoever was watching him decide whether to show him gratitude, sympathy, ridicule or whatever.
Clearly, Nagenda wanted viewers to know that their opinions about his candid views on the constitutional age limit for running for the presidency didn’t matter because there was a “method” to his “madness.” That “madness” apparently revolves around something he says he loves more than Museveni – Uganda.
Nagenda wants Museveni to retire in 2021 when the President’s current term expires.
Between now and then, Nagenda says the President should be thinking about “agriculture, cooperatives and the afterlife.” He is wrong on agriculture and cooperatives. The ruling National Resistance Movement government, whose symbol is a bus, missed the bus on agriculture and cooperatives during its long “reign” of 31 years.
Indeed, it is NRM that destroyed the cooperative movement that, since before independence in 1962, served as a backbone to the agriculture sector, which provided cash and food security to the majority of citizens. There is simply no magic wand that Museveni can wave in the four remaining years of his presidency to modernise a sector whose productivity he left to go to the dogs many years behind us. Peasants Museveni found us, peasants he will leave us.
Nagenda is right about the afterlife, though. Museveni will be 77 in 2021, according to the guesstimate of his daughters.
But there are people who swear by their mothers that the president has seen more Saturdays than his daughters calculated. That means Museveni’s eligibility for the hereafter is a matter of “how soon,” not “if” it happens.
That is why Nagenda is going full steam ahead to tell his story to the media. (See also ‘My nightmare is if Museveni dies in office without naming successor’ in Sunday Monitor of July 30.
I do not agree that it is Museveni’s business to anoint a successor.
The Constitution is clear about eligibility for running for the presidency of Uganda: Just be a citizen of sound mind aged between 35 and 75. Also, let us leave matters of hereditary succession to monarchies.
However, Nagenda seems to be justified in his plea for Museveni to choose a successor now so that, as he explained to Sunday Monitor, by the time of actual succession “… many people would have heard it and maybe they will be ashamed to start killing …” I think this is where more and more wazee (old people) should be encouraged to share their experiences about the wanton and thoroughly traumatising mass killings that have taken place in our country as a result of poorly managed and unconstitutional changes of government.
I was a 12-year primary school kid when Idi Amin overthrew the government of Milton Obote in January 1971.
I had just become eligible to vote (those days the voting age was 21) when Amin’s regime was chased away in 1979. And I was a young reporter in Kampala when the governments of Obote (II) and Tito Okello were similarly overthrown in 1985 and 1986 respectively.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I wish never ever again to see the kind of mass killing and destruction of property that took place during those violent changes of government.
This is the time for wazee to impress on younger people, especially those in NRM, that the perceived invulnerability of their party and the indispensability of Museveni are nothing but illusions.
A willingness to overestimate the powers of any political party or individual, a preference for closed-mindedness and a yearning for the kind of group cohesion that can give rise to the ethos of exclusivity (“us versus them”), are recipes for the kind of killing Nagenga is worried about.
The future of our young people lies on how we collectively avoid the mistakes of the past.
Dr Okodan is a lecturer at Kampala International University.
