Backlash over Dollo rebuke of Buganda

Buganda should rein in some of its “wicked people…lumpens” to rescue the region from falling into an “abyss”, Chief Justice (CJ) Alfonse Owiny-Dollo has said, sparking outrage and condemnation.
The National Unity Platform (NUP) party led by Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine, whose supporters the CJ berated, accused him of personalising and “ethnicising” legitimate questions about bad governance and the country’s poor health infrastructure, resulting in senior State officials flying for treatment overseas and in some cases dying there.

NUP secretary general Lewis Rubongoya also said they never organised last month’s protests by the diaspora community outside the US hospital where then Speaker Jacob Oulanyah was admitted.
President Museveni on Sunday announced that the Omoro County lawmaker had passed on. The government is yet to confirm the day for returning his body while his successor is due to be elected today.  
In no-holds-barred comments about the public criticism and demonstrations over the cost of flying and hospitalising Jacob Oulanyah, the 11th Parliament Speaker, in the United States, Justice Owiny-Dollo said:

“These are wicked, wayward people who are not representing Buganda. But what pains me is that the [good] Baganda … have not spoken up to condemn this. I have not seen it anywhere and people are judging you by the action of evil people.”

READ: Oulanyah died of natural causes - Dr Oloya

He directed his rebuke at some overseas NUP supporters who on February 7 besieged Oulanyah’s hospital in Seattle, holding placards with inscriptions mocking the irony of the Speaker being evacuated for specialist care abroad, yet he had praised Uganda’s leadership, at one likening President Museveni to Jesus.
Some of the protestors asked the stricken Oulanyah to return to Uganda.

“When Jacob was still alive and strong, he saw the wickedness that was exhibited by people who come from here [Buganda]. ‘Oulanyah, go back home’...That ‘why do you come to hospital here [in the United States]? You should come and die here [in Uganda],’” Owiny-Dollo said in apparent reference to the February protests.
He did not explain how he concluded that the protestors in the west Pacific coastal city were Baganda even though the leader of the party, Bobi Wine, hails from the region.

“Forget this thing that we are seeing today, that’s not politics. But Buganda will produce a national leader and will want to go and speak about the true Buganda we know. The political leaders in Buganda have not spoken up [about the attacks on deceased Oulanyah], they’re not speaking about it in Church because they are now subdued by these opinion leaders who are taking Buganda to the abyss,” Justice Owiny-Dollo who, like Oulanyah, hails from Acholi Sub-region, said at a wake on Wednesday night.
When news about the former Speaker’s indisposition broke out, netizens on social media and other platforms, seizing on claims that the charter of a Ugandan Airlines plane to fly Oulanyah out cost tax payers Shs1.7b, said there would have been no need to fly him or any notable government official for treatment overseas had such cash been invested to upgrade facilities at struggling public hospitals at home.

As the fallout from the death of Oulanyah continues, Owiny-Dollo said some Buganda elements demonised the Speaker in life as in death, including the ruckus stirred by his overseas treatment, and asked “is it because Oulanyah [was] an Acholi”?
“It is only a fool, and I really said [it] deliberately, it’s only a stupid person who thinks they should fight someone they hold different views with- both in life and in death. He (Oulanyah) was struggling for his life and what did we see? Fellow Ugandans holding placards [reading] that ‘Oulanyah, go back home’; that this dying man should go back home! That they have spent tax payers’ money to charter a plane to take Oulanyah to America,” the Chief Justice said in comments the previous day.

He added: “But your ethnic leader, you, you, you who were demonstrating, your ethnic leader was transported in a presidential jet to Germany using public funds. He was not entitled. You did not demonstrate…only a wicked person can fight a person who is fighting for his life, only a super wicked person can fight the dead. For us, it is an abomination which has no name.”
Mengo, the seat of Buganda Kingdom, yesterday said it will issue an official response to the diatribe today.
In a rejoinder, Mr Denis Bugaya, who speaks for the kingdom’s land board, said the head of Judiciary was being economical with the truth.

“The Chief Justice is not telling the truth…especially about the presidential jet, it is clear [that] he is not telling the truth or he is not informed,” Mr Bugaya said, adding, “The issue of protests is also below the belt, the CJ is supposed to be judicious –he has to look at all angles and sides. He is the top most person in the judiciary. Anyone putting on a red beret or speaking Luganda, doesn’t mean he or she is a Muganda.”
In response to the targeted attack on NUP, secretary general Rubongoya said that they did not mobilise the diaspora members to protest against a stricken Oulanyah.

“They are also Ugandans and they have a stake in this country. So, when they wake up and go and they do a protest we don’t have control over them and they do not even consult us,” he said.
In yesterday phone interview, he accused Owiny-Dollo of stoking ethnic flames, yet Ugandans abroad had previously demonstrated against other Ugandan leaders seeking treatment there.
“The people who live in the diaspora are not from one ethnic group and people in the diaspora have protested against other people from other regions; ...Judith Babirye and [former minister] Ronald Kibuule. No one came out to ethnicise the demonstrations. Why now?” he asked.

The Seattle demonstration, according to Mr Rubongoya, was not against Oulanyah, but bad governance and rights abuses back home.
Justice Owiny-Dollo in the Wednesday speech told mourners that he had come to Buganda aged 16 and has always known the Baganda to be “very welcoming and accommodative people”.
Majority of the referees for his deputy CJ and CJ jobs, he said, were Baganda.

That overall good standing of the Baganda is being ruined by some “lumpens” who accused the Acholi of propping up “Museveni, the dictator” by voting massively for him in the January 2021 elections, Owiny-Dollo said, yet the Baganda for more than three decades backed the President and his government.
Mr Museveni, who barrelled his way to power, domiciled his 1981-86 guerilla war in the Luwero Triangle, in Buganda, and won majority votes in the region when he began subjecting himself to the vote in 1996 until last year when NUP candidate Bobi Wine, who hails from Buganda, swept all the districts in central. Other the other hand, Museveni gained traction across northern Uganda, including Acholi sub-region, a long-time opposition bastion.

READ: Owiny-Dollo: My recollection of Oulanyah’s final moments

Bobi hits back
Bobi Wine, without naming names, yesterday tweeted that “some regime apologists have been trying to divert the attention of the nation from the questions being asked. Too bad for them, they too are potential victims of the same system that is being accused of eating its own children”.
“This must concern all of us” he wrote in a tweet soon after he signed a condolence book for Oulanyah at Parliament.
There is no evidence as of yet that the NUP leadership in Kampala, or elsewehere, directed the anti-Oulanyah protests in Seattle, capital of Washington state, despite the Chief Justice’s rebuke of the party as “tribal” and “taking Buganda to the abyss”.
An unknown person on March 14 updated the profile of the Speaker, who had been reported in critical condition, on Wikipedia to reflect that he had died. Both Parliament and the government denied the report.

As the news of Oulanyah failing health spread, Bobi Wine was among high-profile Ugandans who back-to-back posted words of encouragement to, and commiserations with, the Omoro County legislator, “despite our different political affiliations”.
Following his death, which President Museveni confirmed on Sunday, Bobi again sent condolences to Oulanyah’s family, friends and the people of the Acholi region.
In a follow up interview with our sister broadcaster, NTV, the Opposition leader said “in a time like this we must be respectful to the (Oulanyah) family and if you cannot mourn with them, at least respect them. Let them mourn their loved one honourably. And as human beings we should be standing with the family”.