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What does President Museveni lose if…?

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Alan Tacca

Last weekend, after more than 50 years of ruthless rule, the Assad father-to-son grip on power to which Syrians were condemned was crumbling, thanks to a perfectly timed rebel offensive against an army that could not fight for President Assad.

Before searching for serious international broadcast content on Syria, I sampled the output by a local station where a bunch of pastors chat endlessly on all sorts of subjects every Sunday morning.

The station happened to be playing back snippets of a President Museveni speech, apparently addressing some formal international gathering.

When it is expedient, President Museveni can assess correctly the general character and reigning mood of a gathering and craft a thought-provoking speech that makes the gathering clap. This time, Museveni was asking powerful countries a row of rhetorical questions formatted: “What do you lose…?”

In a nutshell, what did the powerful countries lose if economic and other forms of justice were spread more evenly around the world?Thank you, Mr President. You are a master at shifting responsibility from your camp and your shoulders and finding people to put on the defensive. Thank you very much. Some dignitaries must be still clapping.

However, Mr President, let us also ask: What do you lose if you embrace the laws of probability, which suggest that there is no nation or even sizable political party on earth that can only produce one viable leader over a span of 40 or 50 years?

What do you lose if you admit that such an illusion can only be sustained by making a disproportionately huge investment in propaganda and rented loyalty, as well as constructing barriers and coercive security mechanisms for blocking the emergence or healthy development of political alternatives?What do you lose by admitting that far from being faultless, the ruling NRM always had a disregard for institutional integrity that has now grown into a cancer threatening to cause a disintegration of the State?

What do you lose by conceding that the horrendous corruption and criminal inequality under NRM rule has been possible because it is primarily driven by the greed of regime insiders who have historically enjoyed easy and improper access to the country’s resources in an environment where they also bore a stamp of impunity?

Corruption has now virtually become a type of ‘work’.Indeed, it is exceedingly hard to figure out how the very party, NRM, finances its amorphous operations except through some form of authorised corruption.

What do you lose by conceding that in an agreed process where pieces of paper are used as ballots, you could lose an election to someone who may not match exactly – or even at all – your picture of a Ugandan President, which is now probably severely distorted after almost 40 years in power?

What do you lose by rereading accounts of your thinking in the early days, in whose depth you would find the wisdom for resolving the NRM’s central dilemma between power and reason, and for transcending the affliction, overstaying, that you rightly diagnosed plagued the continent’s leadership?

What do you lose by letting the country breathe, and re-interpreting your ‘journey to heaven’ as a devotion to redeeming your legacy in a nation of earthly mortals?

What do you lose by remembering that you have always understood the meaning of justice, and making a vow that you are a dignified man who will never bring closure to your exercise of power in a manner anywhere, even remotely close to the fate of the Assad’s of this paradoxical world?

The writer, Alan Tacca, is a novelist and socio-political commentator.
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