Ugandans are Museveni’s greatest blessing ever

Today I am going to drag a war hero no less than Gen. Museveni’s brother, Gen. Salim Saleh, to a corner and show him that he should not despise his fellow Ugandans so much. At a recent Economic Forum at Makerere University, when a question was raised about Museveni’s performance, Gen. Saleh reportedly cautioned the skeptic to go slow on his President, adding: “He (Mr Museveni) is very clever and it is unfortunate that he is leading Uganda. You know how you Ugandans think. If he was leading another country, it would be very far.” (See Are Ugandans Overdosed on Museveni’s Visions? Sunday Monitor, May 5)

I am reminded of the late Col. Muammar Gaddafi, years before his delusions damned him.
Gaddafi looked east across the frontier. Out there, in the wake of its ancient power and magnificence, was the new Egypt. With its checkered twentieth-century history, the country was now being steered by a rather boring President Anwar Sadat.

Wistfully, Gaddafi lamented: “Egypt is a country without a leader; I am a leader without a country.” But in his last pictures, Gaddafi did not look much of a leader. Even his Libya, the country he despised, was too big for him.

Yet we are now here, not in a forest reserve looking at an exhibition of some drunken pigmies dancing around the carcass of an elephant, but at an Economic Forum at Uganda’s top university, with supposedly serious people in attendance, and a usually likeable Gen. Saleh is wishing that Gen. Museveni had a more deserving country!

How do “you Ugandans think”, eh? Like green bats?
Gen. Saleh’s proverbial “hump” (ettumba) needs unbending. First and foremost, the general must be persuaded that he does not belong to a region somewhere between Museveni’s high pedestal and our lowly kayoola, from where he can judge us. He is absolutely and irreversibly one of us, the pips on his shoulders and his billions notwithstanding. And President Museveni’s fully paid job is to lead us as a country.

We, including Gen. Saleh and his beloved kinsman and their in-laws; we who tinker with or remove anything that belongs to the taxpayer, from billions of shillings to school chalk; thinly disguised criminals masquerading as people at work on our jobs. We and our insatiable greed, as hungry today as we were 27 years ago; we and our ghost teachers, ghost soldiers and junk helicopters.

We are the people from whom a whole general emerged and cheekily dared any Ugandan to define corruption and even put a Shs10 million reward on the challenge, suggesting that in his own vocabulary the word corruption did not exist.

We are the laziest lot in East Africa, except when we are stealing. We are a poor lot, except when we are buying toys of war and pumping money into our imperial presidency; which brings me to President Museveni.

Actually, no other African ruler has a country that suits him the way Uganda suits Museveni.
If Museveni had more enlightened citizens, aiming “very far”, as Saleh implies, they would have voted him out many years ago. A Nordic government minister said just as much a few weeks back. But lucky Museveni is still in power, thanks to citizens who “think like (us) Ugandans”.

We who periodically remember and instantly forget that there is no government money except taxpayers’ money; we who are so gullible we cannot tell the difference between a 1996 deception repackaged every five years; we and our little-minded village chiefs who assist vote riggers for a fraction of Judas’s silver; we Ugandans who are not as brave as Museveni was in 1981 and are therefore not going to start a revolution. We are the blessing the gods agreed to give to Museveni. And humbly, on both knees, he must thank them.

Allan Tacca is a novelist and socio-political
commentator. altaccaone@gmail.com