Death and loathing on Arua’s campaign trail
Death. Beatings. Injuries. Vandalism. Tears. Arrests.
A single by-election produced all that mayhem. Even if the deadly chaos that descended on the final day of campaigning in the by-election for Arua Municipality MP has become standard in Uganda, these sorts of things remain scary.
Probably more than before, an election in this country now is chance not for political opponents to engage on issues and a little bribery of voters on the side, it’s a vicious mini-war. Presidential convoys too are falling in the crosshairs.
The stakes appear to get ever higher. Contestants stake their inheritance to get to Parliament. Parliament is attractive because the returns in salary, allowances and free time are ridiculously high compared to the amount of work one has to do. Our Parliament is a clear case of too little meaningful work for too much pay. I would also kill for such a workplace. Or weep in the very least, like candidate Jackson Lee Atima.
Talk of killing, I can’t find a single justification why many of our elections — general and by — tend to claim a life or two before calm returns. It is as if we are engaged in fulfilling some ritual that demands a life, usually a young man’s.
In Arua Municipality, Yasin Kawuma got fatally shot on Monday night. To what end?
If the Arua election did not stand out for its violence, it almost marks the NRM government’s taking a stand against MP Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine.
Bobi Wine entered Parliament in 2017 with wide name-recognition, earned from more than 15 years of a successful career in music.
He built up a fan base. It is part of that fan base he has brought to politics.
So far he has used that base to campaign successfully for several solid Opposition candidates. When he broke from Opposition mainstays like Dr Kizza Besigye in the municipalities of Bugiri and Arua, his candidate won.
The strings of victory are yielding new loyal fans, this time from the political end.
He now has the advantage of fusing his fan bases from music and politics, which makes him a potentially potent political force.
Ruling NRM party operatives have noticed and in Arua they took the first step to stop Bobi Wine. You just never know the man could unleash a juggernaut that could imperil NRM fortunes.
By roughing him up and throwing him into jail on charges of treason or some such, the usual tactics that have worked well against people like Dr Kizza Besigye have come to bear. Will those dirty tricks work against Bobi Wine as well?
The other ugliness to come out of Arua is the usual one: beating up of journalists.
Police and other security agents see nothing unseemly in beating up reporters doing their jobs. Apparently, journalism is a crime.
For reporting the killing of Yasin Kawuma, a Bobi Wine driver, on the bloody evening of Monday, August 13, NTV journalists Herbert Zziwa and Ronald Muwanga were shown fire. They were arrested and clobbered. And at the witching hour were transferred more than a couple hundred kilometres to Gulu.
The NRM government, through its security agents, is a wickedly merciless operation and it appears its only saving grace is to seek to do deranged things away from the spotlight.
If journalists be present, they must pay.
The NTV duo now faces charges of inciting violence and malicious damage to property. A little bit of live reporting from near the car in which Kawuma was gunned down apparently amounts to stirring violence. The irony of this charge is very annoying because it speaks to arrogance and impunity of power. And which property did the journalists damage?
Obviously, these are some kind of holding charges meant to harass and force self-censorship. They will be quietly dropped and we move on to the next barbarity.
We have normalised these State-perpetrated atrocities. We should not. The thing is, you never know when it is your turn. I suspect President Yoweri Museveni has had a moment from his busy schedule to reflect on the brazen boulder attack that destroyed the back screen of a vehicle in his convoy that Monday night.
Beware. The machine is raging.
