Kayihura ban warning to Uganda’s powerful
The United States Treasury Department last Friday publicly designated former IGP Kale Kayihura, rendering him ineligible to travel to the US or conduct financial transactions through the American banking system. Washington alleged that it has “credible evidence” that Kayihura, while the IGP from 2005 to 2018, “involved in torture and/or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, through command responsibility of the Flying Squad, a specialised unit of the Uganda Police Force that reported directly to [him]”.
He swiftly denied any wrongdoing and rebuked the US that retails itself as a global gold standard for rule of law, for punishing him unheard. He sought to cushion himself, and flag America’s double-standards, by trumpeting that during his reign, he worked closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and asked that its agents be sanctioned. This sabre-rattling may have domestic political value, but changes nothing. Kayihura’s new headache epitomises humans’ vulnerability to power.
This is most aptly captured by Lord Acton in his 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
We do not conclude that Gen Kayihura is a bad man. It is not our job to do so. However, we would be irresponsible not to point out police excesses under him as IGP. Police routinely brutalised Opposition politicians and choked citizens with teargas.
The Rapid Response Unit (RRU), a precursor to the Flying Squad, was disbanded in December 2011 after deaths of two detainees at its Kireka headquarters and grotesque rights violations. Special Investigations Unit was sullied with similar accusations. Flying Squad that followed SIU deployed worse cruelty. Its operatives abducted and tortured citizens at will. Nalufenya detention facility, which the US cited in its designation of Gen Kayihura, was the agony chamber.
In 2017, the then Kamwenge mayor, Mr Geoffrey Byamukama, became a poster child of police ruthlessness when they dumped him at a city hospital crippled by festering wounds. Months earlier, in December 2016, some 141 Rwenzururu Kingdom loyalists limped from detention in Nalufenya to a court in Jinja where many displayed wounded palms and limps to the consternation of Chief Magistrate John Francis Kaggwa, who ordered investigations into their torture.
The US ban on Kayihura alongside wife Angela Gabuka and their children - Tesi Uwibambe and Kale Rudahigwa, educated in the US and United Kingdom respectively, is a warning shot to Uganda’s powerful. For the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, enacted in 2012 in response to breach of the rights of Russian lawyer and auditor Sergei Magnitsky, has a borderless reach, and bites.
