Brutality: How do armed men without uniform leave barracks?

What you need to know:

  • In my own wisdom or lack of it, I would at this point think that it is better for the police to be left to do their work without necessarily appearing to imply that working with the army is mandatory.
    This would leave each of the different security agencies or institutions to showcase their own true face and colour.

The Baganda have a saying that ekiswaza amanyo, kusesema (loosely interpreted as “what shames the teeth, is for the owner to throw up”. The teeth are designed and it is expected that they properly tear up or grind everything that passes through the mouth and destined for the stomach.

As such, one would not be expected to throw up whole pellets of whatever they have eaten.
The Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) soldiers have over time won the people’s confidence given their humane behaviour - just like the teeth do before the ugly reality of vomiting.

However, the recent brutal arrest in Kampala City in broad daylight of Yusuf Kawooya, whom the gun-wielding had even subdued into submission, leaves a lot of bad taste in the mouths of many of us who had trusted the army.

This incident comes in the wake of the recently released results that ranked the Army as being second to the Uganda Police Force in torturing citizens.
This other nasty incidents in which soldiers have been involved in together with the police - although the latter has always proudly owned up in view of the Constitutional command for cooperation under Article 212(d) - leaves some of us wondering whether it is not the UPDF that has or is spoiling the police image.

Now that last week’s incident seems to have caught everybody unawares, it was too late for even the police or the Executive to own up and this left the army alone exposed and isolated to the ugly reality.
It is commendable that the perpetrators have been arraigned before the UPDF Command structure. But woe to the wombs that carried those perpetrators and woe to their immediate families. This brutality leaves the following questions for the army:

How did these men leave the barracks armed and in civilian clothes? What about the forged number plates on the mini-bus taxi? Ugandans need to be assured that they are seeing the last of such barbaric scenarios. The security forces can operate in a more civilised manner than this.

In my own wisdom or lack of it, I would at this point think that it is better for the police to be left to do their work without necessarily appearing to imply that working with the army is mandatory.
This would leave each of the different security agencies or institutions to showcase their own true face and colour.

Paul Galandi,
[email protected]