The President walks a fine line between chaos and continuity
What you need to know:
Risk. By trying to be everything to everyone, however, President Museveni risks becoming nobody to everybody. And the by-product of this is the amorphous instead of structured shape of the Movement.
If you went to church today, you are probably right with your walk with Christ. And if you were part of the “Museveni’s Great Trek,” your walk with the Movement could be considered Christ-like.
By many accounts, this “patriotic” trek was as epic as a Biblical fable. Starting last Saturday and ending on Friday, it was a 195km (121 mile) walk from Galamba, north of Kampala, which ended in Birembo in Kibaale District where the NRA faced one of its toughest battles in the fight to overthrow “tyranny.”
Again, this trek culminated in the building of a historic NRA museum at Kanyara in Nakaseke District.
It seems fitting that the walk came to an end at the NRA museum, since most of the public thinks our leaders are so old that they belong in a museum!
Indeed, they should be encouraged to stay where the walk ended. As museum pieces, they might serve posterity better and serve as a reference point as leaders who stood at a fork in the road where a choice had to be made between the lust for power and their country’s future. And they heaved a deep sigh before choosing Uganda over their stomachs.
Sadly, their decision to not take a long walk off a short pier and thereby cling to power at all costs could be equated to attempting to lead God by the beard.
Why?
To answer this question, one must bear in mind that many of those soldiers who fought in the Bush War consider themselves more NRA than UPDF. And hence are more polarising than unifying in their quest to continually “revolutionise” the political space. So, as a consequence, instead of marshalling the population towards development, the President seems to be telling us that a martial spirit is the highest expression of development.
As humans, we can justify what we do by baptising it as how we want others to see it. For, in this world, the label is more important than what is labelled. So a civil war can be dressed up as a revolutionary call to arms in the same vein that Cristiano Ronaldo was named after former US president Ronald Reagan and yet the two have little or nothing in common.
True, this walk is also about the President demonstrating his physical vigour; an exceedingly literal display of his fitness to rule. Which, funny enough, could be turned by Bobi Wine into a moot point if Bobi should organise a run instead of a walk to demonstrate that the Movement has the moves, but he has the motion.
Beyond the symbolic point-scoring, however, President Museveni wants to show he is as fit as the Bazukulu who, ironically, are largely unfit from spending more time on their phones as opposed to being dialled into the life of the great outdoors. A place where one would find the Luweero Triangle: a locale where birds and not humans tweet.
In this sense, the more President Museveni tries to fit in with the times, the more he inadvertently alienates the past he seeks to invoke with his walk. You see, at the end of the day, statesmanship is about screwing one’s courage to the sticking-place, thereby choosing a struggle and showing up to wrestle it to the ground.
By trying to be everything to everyone, however, President Museveni risks becoming nobody to everybody. And the by-product of this is the amorphous instead of structured shape of the Movement.
Is it a party of the past, the present or the future? Being one of the three could mean he will be cutting off two of the others. And being two of the three could mean he risks a war of worlds found in the contradiction of attempting to serve two masters. And being all three represents an unholy trinity of bringing together incongruities which fit as poorly as OJ Simpson’s ill-fitting gloves.
And this is something we must avoid like a ‘rolex’ without tomatoes. So it is time to lift the past from the political playing field and place it in the history books for it to cultivate a broadened political (as opposed to provincial) appreciation of the present in order to safeguard the future.
That way, words like ‘freedom fighter’ will not be used as euphemisms that sanitise the romantic gunman in a dictatorship. For, as one humourist once asked: Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?
I will let you do the math.
Mr Matogo is content editor and writer with KQ Hub Africa
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