The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise. Its earlier version was completed sometime between 500 and 430 BC. The work, which is attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, is composed of 13 chapters.
Already, that sounds like bad luck. Not because the number 13 is commonly associated with bad luck. But because ‘Triskaidekaphobia’ is the fear of the number 13 and it will be your terrible luck to have to spell that word to a psychiatrist diagnosing your abject fears.
Anyway, Sun Tzu seemed to have been talking directly to Uganda when he wrote this classic. If you don’t believe it, read on.
Sun Tzu said: “When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardour will be damped.” That is why the minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs said last year at a Human Rights Convention: “It’s not my duty to come here and sanitise the human rights situation in Uganda. I am disgusted by it myself. I want to tell you there is no more image to protect. The government, in terms of human rights, is stark naked.”
However, the minister has been making some rather muscular attempts to remove Mzee from power since 1990. But Mzee has jammed. So the minister has lost his ardour and doesn’t have the will to quit a government with its pants down. He would rather stay around to see if this Ekimansulo situation is redressed.
Sun Tzu piled on: “Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardour damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity.”
That’s why a parliamentary commissioner is challenging his party principal as if it were his party’s principle to have party members impersonate neckties by being at each other’s throats. Of course, other chieftains will follow suit.
Mzee’s people already have cheques and bank balances at the ready. The cheques are the mechanisms which limit the power of those who oppose Mzee, by sexing up their pockets to give them cheques appeal. Bank balances, meanwhile, ensure a wide variety of mouths are represented in the feeding frenzy otherwise known as potential government employment.
Sun Tzu also explained how Uganda ended up in the DR Congo. He said: “Poverty of the state exchequer causes an army to be maintained by contributions from a distance.” He also told us that “contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished.”
And so it followed that Uganda’s DRC expedition led to a case first brought against Uganda in 1999, when DRC asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to compel Uganda to pay it $11b as reparations for the deaths, looting and general economic damage caused by Uganda’s military occupation of parts of DRC in the 1990s.
Sun Tzu did not forget KB. The man has been disturbing Mzee since 1999. Now he is in jail with Diddy, even though their prison stays are in different countries. They are both jailbirds. So Sun Tzu explained why. “Now in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger; that there may be advantage from defeating the enemy, they must have their rewards.”
KB and his co-accused are accused of being in possession of two pistols and soliciting “logistical support in Uganda, Greece and other countries with the aim of compromising the country’s national security”.
This means KB was planning an attack on the military. Well, that is what the charge sheet says and that is what roused the army to anger. One of the rewards of defeating KB, the enemy, is that the army can rule long enough to topple future governments when the ‘oil curse’ hits our country.
Sun Tzu concluded: “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an entire army than to destroy it.”
This is why the NRM decided to take FDC whole, as it recaptured what is allegedly a second-string NRM party.
