Is President Museveni a good political crime preventer?

The expression ‘crisis’ is relative. With an otherwise incompetent and corrupt regime that has made security its forte, albeit partly in myth, as Uganda’s ruling NRM has done since 1986, it is right to condemn in the strongest terms the current insecurity, unless the NRM agrees to surrender its forte.

If we accept that Uganda is all right because her violence has not yet reached the levels in Syria or Somalia, then those who died during the NRM rebellion died in vain.

There is a piece of wisdom that often comes from our rulers, which on a clear day they, too, could benefit from.

They always caution the individual citizen not to encourage criminals.
Be vigilant. Do not move around carelessly with big amounts of cash. Look out for and report any suspicious characters. In short, make yourself a difficult target.

If this code is strictly observed, there might indeed be indications of some success against amateurish hoodlums who wield guns.

But what about the uncompromising professional; the hitman who works on a carefully laid out plan and is cool-headed enough not to make too many mistakes, and whose motive may be deeply political, even to the point of suicide or martyrdom?

The majority is sometimes mistaken, but most watchers suspect that the current violence has a disruptive dimension aimed at preventing President Museveni from enjoying fully his unending hold on power, after virtually all the original 1995 constitutional provisions intended to limit him (or any future president) were dismantled.

President Museveni knows this argument, whether the perpetrators of today’s gruesome crimes are ‘pigs’, ‘lice’ and ‘hooligans’ from outside, and/or ‘weevils’ and ‘jiggers’ from inside his establishment.

And more than any other citizen in the republic, Mr Museveni should understand the meaning of provocation. When he started flirting with Marxist revolutionaries and, later, training in their methods of violence in Mozambique and elsewhere 50 or 60 years ago, he was preparing for a time when the rulers in his country would become evil enough to provoke an armed rebellion.

Uganda’s rulers did not disappoint him. The 1960s, the 1970s and early 80s were marked by enough State-inspired barbarism to make ‘crisis’ a continuous condition. The 1980 rigged election just provided a final excuse for Museveni to push for power.

He, and many of us, including me, called it a liberation struggle. The authorities at the time called him a ‘bandit’. According to the law, his bush exploits were acts of treason against a country’s elected government.
But clearly, the rulers of the day had not done enough to prevent Museveni’s ‘crimes’, and many people backed him in his struggle for power. So, ‘people’ and their ‘power’ is not really a new concept.

Fast forward… 2005… but especially since 2016, and the damage to the integrity of the man for overstaying in power has brought Gen Museveni to a reality almost as hard as that faced by his predecessors; a condition of continuous crisis that his enemies masquerading as friends are describing as ‘normal’.

However, ultimately, by its very stubbornness, that condition speaks for itself, testifying that the President has not done enough to prevent the crimes that grew out of the NRM’s ideological and governance bankruptcy. And just as he rose in his day as a ‘bandit’, he may be unable to stop the wave of the ‘hooligans’.

In short, President Museveni has not looked enough over his shoulder, and he has not reasoned well enough to be an effective political crime preventer.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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