Sort the politics to fix insecurity

President Yoweri Museveni. Let the President, and all of us, reflect with maturity and insure our collective future by building a Uganda that is just and inclusive. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

The issue: Insecurity
Our view: Let the President, and all of us, reflect with maturity and insure our collective future by building a Uganda that is just and inclusive.

Uganda is caught in the throes of eroded human security. The irony is that the guns of active rebellion went silent in 2005. In theory, therefore, citizens should be enjoying peace, reaping from their labour and powering development.
This desirable trajectory has run into headwinds.

Targeted killing of and gun grabs from policemen, pitiless murder of women, armed robberies, violent killings of civilians, kidnaps and assassination of high-profile public officials engulf us.

We find in this meltdown an exhibition of the 1921 Nobel Prize laureate Albert Einstein’s refrain that: “Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order - in short, of government.”
Ugandans are being waylaid at their gates, commuters stripped of valuables even in public service vehicles, scalawags snatch phones and cash from owners in broad day in the city.

In the countryside, gun violence is widespread and life is being lost on the cheap in criminal enterprises.
We echo the chorus --- by politicians, religious, and community leaders and businesspeople --- that uncertainty about individual safety eats away a citizen’s confidence in the government and its ability to lead and protect them.
Restoration of security of all persons in Uganda and their properties was second of the 10-point bush agenda that endeared the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) to civilians and catapulted it to power in 1986.

Thirty-two years later, the proposal on the table is military snipers and bullet-plated escort cars to secure 456 Members of Parliament as if their lives mattered more than the rest of the Ugandans that elected them.

This Animal Farm-approach, of two legs good and four legs better, is counter-productive because it inflames the passion of and agitation by the excluded. The result is diminished public cooperation with authorities and widening mistrust. These potentially fuel insecurity and conflict.

Whereas we welcome the President’s 12-point plan to solve the security challenges, we argue that the current spate of insecurity is an outcome of economic exclusion, social injustice and political impunity.

For instance, police exist to safeguard lives and property of citizens. The Force, however, collapsed at the core because its leadership elected to work with charlatans and drive a political agenda to prop up one party and subdue dissenters.
The short-term dividends have now shackled Ugandans in a crime web where no one is sure of their safety.

Let the President, and all of us, reflect with maturity and insure our collective future by building a Uganda that is just and inclusive.