Mr President, Ugandans are not cows to be flogged

On Wednesday, Uganda degenerated into a historical low. Stick-wielding security officers, some in police uniform, indiscriminately clobbered people in Najjanankumbi, a city suburb. Their crime: cheering or following ex-presidential candidate Kizza Besigye, or being suspected to do both!

Many road users not remotely associated with the day’s politics got innocently entangled and were beaten mercilessly. Some fell in roadside drains, brutally subdued. This is a mind-boggling level of impunity.

Mr President, expecting all Ugandans to love you is a mirage. Neither do they all love Besigye. There are so many so apolitical and just struggling daily to meet life’s demands. I don’t expect everyone I interact with to hold me dear, neither should our national leaders, and that is the fact of life. Plain simple!

It does not mean individuals who don’t like you, whether as a person or President of the country, or instead like your opponents, necessarily hate you. Yet they commit no crime by holding an unfavourable view of you as they would of any person.

Former US President Theodore Roosevelt in his 1926 work titled, Lincoln and Free Speech: The Great Adventure, wrote:
“…to announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” The same can, and should, apply to a Ugandan president elected by the people.

Mr President, I address you directly on this egregious indiscretion by some elements in our security forces because you are the Commander-in-Chief and Fountain of Honour. This in no way suggests that you sanctioned or was informed beforehand by the masterminds about plans to unleash this street brutality.
So, attempting to enforce citizens’ endearment to you through lashes besides being vain and counterproductive, is backward, unconstitutional and disgraceful.

Article 24 of the Constitution states: “No person shall be subjected to any form of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
And more specifically, the Constitutional Court found corporal punishment cruel and banned it. Therefore, there was no legal basis for the security operatives to swing swishing lashes on Ugandans. I don’t want to believe that you have lost control over the armed forces so that even low-cadre members can choose whether and when to act within or outside the law. Or that their command and control has decayed to the extent that perpetrators cannot be identified or held accountable.

If victims were suspected to have committed a crime, they should have been arrested and prosecuted as you promised in November 2015. Those tormentors had no power to beat up citizens like cows.

Animal rights activists are likely to pick issue with this example, and they are right. But in an indigenous Ugandan construct, herders generally find little, if any, wrong lashing stray cattle to keep them in check. Uganda is not a kraal, Ugandans are not cattle.

Edmund Burke’s mantra that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” found true expression in the security forces’ excesses on Wednesday.

I know that the majority in our country’s intelligence, military and police are polished individuals who each day do a thankless job and risk their lives to protect us and this beautiful country. They take the bullet so that we remain safe. They sacrifice at frontlines so that we, their parents and relatives, live in peace and dignity. They confront the enemy to limit their destructive reach to us all.

Yet on the city streets, a bunch of their power-intoxicated colleagues erode those very gains, undermine those sacrifices and defile the nation’s integrity and civilisation of its people. This has the potential to incite the masses against security forces and the government. And it must stop!
Let these minority stray characters be isolated, tried and punished as by law established.
Otherwise, how could you possibly be at peace, Mr President, when security forces you superintend rampage on the street whipping citizens, chipping away human security that you have repeatedly said you restored?

The author is a journalist and 2014/15 Fulbright (Hubert H. Humphrey) fellow.
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