Tumukunde’s chickens come home to roost

These general-duty criminals here, baptising themselves good names, I hear kifeesi; I don’t know why not ka-face,” Lt Gen Henry Tumukunde said while assuming the Security minister docket in 2016.
Although the eloquence of Barrack Obama would never be used in defining Tumukunde’s diction, Tumukunde’s diction is defining when it comes to what Obama termed as ‘audacity.’ For each time he opens his mouth to say anything, Tumukunde looks like a python about to swallow an antelope.
His fiery words often leave social niceties roasted on a spit, so we forget that he is a former spymaster.

Indeed, what we usually see of him is just a tip of a political iceberg, placed in the way of the Opposition’s ‘Titanic’ hopes for change.
All told, the gilded cage of the Security ministry was never the natural habitat for this restless man.
No, Tumukunde clearly wanted more. Since he belongs to that intellectual set of UPDF soldiers whose bookshelves are lined by Leo Tolstoy and Karl Marx.

Being an action-junkie, an image of him is easily conjured out of olive-green military duds, with a bullet hole on the left trouser leg courtesy of the Bush War.
As a veteran of the NRA, Tumukunde’s coming of age was a baptism of fire and not a cup of warm milk and a lullaby. So he knows war is about deception, and he is, therefore, comfortable with saying one thing while meaning another.
In a 50-50 split between fact and fiction, he would happily turn the hyphen into a minus sign so that fact has nothing on fiction.
Tumukunde is full of the calm bluster of the all-or-nothing man. Yet his strategic angles seem to be right on the money in terms of how he fortifies his fortunes according to expediential flexibility.

Which reveals a close reading of Clausewitz’s On War and the realisation that political contest, like war, is a constantly mutating monster.
So his maverick streak could be a distraction, a red herring to divert the heated attentions of the charging bull of radicalism.
In this instance, a State House divided against itself might be fronting him to reconcile divergent interests in the succession cue. An expert at laying traps, Tumukunde used to cover deep holes with kisanja leaves and wait for Obote’s soldiers to come strolling along and fall in!
Still, he could conceivably be both John the Baptist and Jesus Christ of Ugandan politics with glasses fitted with rose-coloured lenses to see the coming Messiah when looking in the mirror.

His letter to the Electoral Commission asking for clearance to “consult” the electorate is Tumukunde’s way of knocking on a hotel door that has a “Do Not Disturb” sign. And so, by “consulting”, he has stepped onto the death ground.
In the Art of War, Sun Tzu calls it desperate ground when you’re pushed back against a physical boundary and you must fight your way out or be annihilated. There is no escape route. This is a zero-sum outcome. It’s kill or be killed.
Unfortunately for Tumukunde, President Museveni has been on such desperate ground for all his adult life.
As an undergraduate at University of Dar es Salaam, Yoweri Museveni wrote a remarkably clear-eyed thesis entitled, “Fanon’s Theory of Violence - Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique.”
Frantz Fanon is the OJ Simpson-lookalike psychiatrist who argued that, through violent struggle, the native rids himself of his inferiority complex towards the White colonist.

In his thesis, Museveni described how the combatants in Frelimo had developed a new confidence and moral stature. They were not frightened of the Portuguese soldiers. In the liberated zone under Frelimo, theft and violent crimes were minimal.
Tribalism had also been undermined as people from different parts of the country came together to fight colonialism. Museveni went with five other undergraduates to Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique.
They learned how to handle guns from a deputy base commander who had been a house servant in Tanganyika.

“Our long stay in the Western citadels of learning notwithstanding, we learnt the ABC of liberation from a former houseboy. This is what authentic national liberation means - making the first last and the last first,” Museveni wrote.
Ironically, in the spirit of national liberation, Mr Museveni’s thesis serves as the perfect alibi for Tumukunde to justify a presidential bid in order to make Museveni last and himself first.

Mr Matogo is content editor and writer with KQ Hub Africa
[email protected]