Mr President, revisit Bush War agenda No.1

President Museveni’s six-day 195-kilometre trek to retrace his liberation journey is significant in many ways. It provides learning points to our young generation on key highpoints and battlegrounds of the Luweero Bush War. More importantly, the trek should remind us of our country’s trials, and dreams of a freer country that forced Mr Museveni and comrades into five hard years of Bush War.

But such journeys mark rediscovery, and teach humility and grace. And this seems to have been for President Museveni too. For the first time in a long time, Mr Museveni was greathearted towards his Bush War comrade-at-arms, Col (rtd) Dr Kizza Besigye. While writing on the Galamba-Bireembo trek, Mr Museveni paid a rare tribute to Dr Besigye for having saved him when he fainted from dehydration on Bulaga hill. Yet today, Mr Museveni and Dr Besigye don’t see eye-to-eye.

Sadly too, after 30 years of National Resistance Movement (NRM) rule, key Opposition figures have refused to grace national celebrations presided over by President Museveni. Worse, political intolerance and chaos, violence against opponents including deaths, accompany our political seasons.

Not less are accusations of corruption and manipulation of voters and poll results. Yet, the No. 1 agenda of NRM’s 10-point programme, the irreducible goals that drove them to the bush, is democracy, and ushering in a new and better future for all Ugandans.

Regrettably, more than 30 years after NRM captured power, Dr Besigye, and Opposition politicians are tortured in a manner worse than common criminals, by security agencies. This is why there is an urgent need to rethink the agenda of the Luweero Bush War.

The current practice of politics still run counter to the concluding sentence of NRM’s 10-point programme on democracy, which is categorical that “unless the political question is amicably resolved, there will be no economic recovery in Uganda.”

Precisely, this is why this second journey by Mr Museveni and deputies should reawaken them to the sticking issue of political intolerance – the key reasons that drove them into Bush War.

It is, therefore, imperative that Mr Museveni’s singular moment of noble and generous spirit towards Dr Besigye, his four-time challenger for the presidency, should encourage architects of the Bush War, to rethink their unique mission as self-professed compasses, to give national direction and create a Uganda with open political spaces for all.

Let the organs of NRM party, the army’s High Command, and active officers of the former National Resistance Army (NRA) under President Museveni, remember the 10-point programme.

They should remember that when Uganda’s political questions were mishandled, economic problems and chaos ensued. No one needs a replay of the 1980s.