Should Ruth Nankabirwa be  sacked or made a general?

At his  Impact FM Wednesday 6am talk show on December 2, the presidential media advisor, Tamale Mirundi, told his listeners that before presidential contender Bobi Wine went through Kiboga, the Kiboga MP and government Whip, Ruth Nankabirwa, called the Inspector General of Police, Martins Okoth Ochola, asking him not to deploy his security men to terrorise Bobi Wine’s supporters.

Reportedly, Nankabirwa reasoned that State security violence was turning voters away from NRM candidates like her.

According to Mirundi, there was no State violence when Bobi Wine went to Kiboga.

Now, this story is intriguing, because most of Nankabirwa’s NRM colleagues understand the public outrage. 

So, given the sustained violence, do we have anti-government security forces aiming to undermine the NRM? In that case, the government has been too incompetent to correct its forces.

On the other hand, it is possible that the violence is delivered on orders from ‘above’. In that case, the government is evil. And it would have probably calculated that its election goal could be achieved more easily through violence than seeking public goodwill.

 When autocratic rulers are masquerading as democrats, the moral question of (how) they get votes is of little consequence. Their conscience is half-dead. They know that goodwill delivers votes, but that fear also delivers votes.

Many ordinary citizens cannot overcome the fear of what might follow if they did not vote for the ‘strongman’, the controller of life and death. 

Furthermore, the strongman’s demonstration of violence shakes and undermines his rivals. Tormented, humiliated, they have less courage, less energy and radiance before the voters.

A dictatorship often calculates that the losses in appeal that intimidation imposes on its rivals are greater than the gains the rulers are likely to make by being humane.

So, voters are terrorised to force them in line; and political rivals are terrorised to make them look small.

However, sometimes a political rival refuses to be a coward, and voters refuse to abandon him. Up to now, NRM honchos have this matter to sort out: some of Museveni’s political rivals have refused to collapse.

Seeing the signs, Ruth Nankabirwa made the plea to the police chief.
Now, here is a catch. If the violence is deliberate NRM/State evil, then Nankabirwa interfered with secret government policy. 

She was a disrupter who spoiled the pattern of violence and exposed State immorality. Under an efficient official terrorist dispensation, the government Whip would be sacked.

An apologist of State barbarism noted recently in this paper, that if eliminating Bobi Wine was a specific target of our security forces, which have excelled in Somalia and Equatorial Guinea, Bobi Wine would not be alive. 

Ironically, this only confirms that the randomness we have witnessed is deliberate policy.  Randomness, or ‘generalised targeting’ – characteristic of terrorism – is then a more precise description than ‘stray bullets’, which government officials are blaming for the death and injury of so many innocents. 

However, if the violence is rampant because the government is too incompetent to stop it, then we must marvel how a telephone call from Nankabirwa prevented violence in her constituency.

For, although her military experience does not stretch beyond donning clothes that “closely resemble UPDF military attire” at Kyankwanzi (a huge crime in Uganda), Nankabirwa was able to persuade the leaders of the security forces to act firmly and rationally. It is something that all Uganda’s decorated generals have failed to do.

If Uganda is a merit-based dispensation and not a terrorist State, she should at least be made an honorary general.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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