We come not to laugh at Gen Kayihura but to cry for our disregard for history

Daniel K Kalinaki

The Chief Magistrate’s Court in Makindye lies at the end of a long bumpy road near the top of the hill, in one of those large clearings that must have been, in colonial times, a chiefly outpost with a large open court for natives to gather.

Depending on which side you look, you will see past the towering shade trees, grand and crumbling houses that smell of old money and proud grandchildren, who refuse to sell; a private members-only club where the ‘one per centers’ meet to play tennis, swim and gossip; or ugly new-money concrete shacks with their ubiquitous hair salons, mobile money shops, mom-and-pop grocery stores and loud speakeasy bars where big-bummed waitresses squeeze past uncomplaining patrons as they fetch their roast meats and suspiciously cheap beers.

The court itself is a sad, sleepy and sombre place. Defendants amble down the corridors, their faces made up with several layers of different shades of innocence; State Attorneys go about their prosecutions with a bored, robotic routine; magistrates look magisterial; court orderlies feign a seriousness of purpose and process around their personages; accusers and State witnesses wear their victimhood on their sleeves, and prisons warders lurk, waiting for any prisoner foolish enough to get ideas about endurance running.

On August 10, 2016, then Inspector General of Police Gen Edward Kalekezi Kayihura was due to appear before Makindye Chief Magistrate’s Court as a defendant in a private prosecution brought by victims of alleged police brutality. He did not appear. Instead a large and unruly crowd of his supporters did and violently protested against his prosecution. The applicants fled for their lives while their lawyers hid inside the court buildings.

Police officers deployed at the court merely looked on. Here is what this column said about those events the next day: “Under General Kayihura, elements in the police are working with hard-core criminals and have turned their guns against ordinary people.

“Police officers accused of complicity in murder are protected and promoted. Public crimes committed by police officers are defended and ignored… There was a time when you needed the police to rescue you from the hands of criminals. These days the media are full of stories of well-known criminals, from Kiboko Squad to Kifeesi, capable of rescuing you from police custody.

We have gone from police officers protecting criminals from the law, to criminals protecting police officers from the law.

“As counter-intuitive as it sounds, this is the exact outcome of our actions of politicising law enforcement. Once the police shifts its core focus away from preventing crime to preventing political activity, it always loses the support and confidence of many ordinary citizens, and relies, instead, on the support of nefarious characters… as the line between law breakers and law enforcers gets increasingly blurred, we should get used to more and more police officers standing in the dock as criminal defendants.”

The column argued that the action of the private prosecution was a form of citizen agency – ordinary people standing up for their rights – while the clash outside court reflected the partisan division in society. What your columnist did not appreciate then was that a system of criminality remains inherently unstable, whether it is dressed in police uniform or in a hoodie. To paraphrase Mike Tyson, every crook has a vow of silence until they are smacked in the face – literally and metaphorically.

Almost two years later, Gen Kayihura is in Makindye, a few hundred metres downhill at the Military Barracks. Many of his right-hand men, operatives and informers – including many who would have been people of interest in the failed private prosecution – are in the same place on assorted charges.

Gen Kayihura has, at the time of writing, not been formally charged and they all remain innocent until proven guilty, but as symbolic and as tempting as it is, there is no sense of schadenfreude here, not even a smug sense of I-told-you-so.

All there is is a sense of sad déjà vu and the realisation that the more the characters change, the more the moral of the story remains the same: The tiger always eats the rider.

If Kale had turned up in the magistrate’s court up the road and stared into the future, it is possible he could have been spared this unwanted holiday. Thus we come not to laugh at Kayihura’s changed circumstances, but to cry for our repeated unwillingness to learn from our history. Those in power, who build sand castles of oppression ought to always remember that the tide, when it eventually comes in, reminds us all that Karma is a beach.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s
freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.