
Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.
Eron Kiiza, lawyer to the incarcerated opposition veteran Dr Kizza Besigye, is serving a nine-month jail term imposed by Uganda's army General Court Martial after being found guilty of contempt of court.
People outside Uganda who have watched the scenes in the military court are both bewildered and impressed. They were surprised, as one observer put it, that the court scene that landed Kiiza in trouble resembled "something out of a chaotic village market". They were also struck by Kiiza's courage in the face of the intimidating military court. He seemed to have eaten a lion's liver for breakfast.Kiiza's methods, however, are quintessentially Ugandan, representing a contradiction that puzzles many outsiders.
Most Ugandans who travel abroad are often asked: "How is it that a country with a history of rebellions can be ruled by the same man, essentially as a dictator, for nearly four decades?"
A Tanzanian leftist scholar asked me, "How is it possible that a party [NRM] that fought a war on a radical and popular democratic platform has presided over its transition to a conservative dynasty?"
As a journalist, I find it remarkable that there was more media freedom when the NRM ruled Uganda as a one-party/no-party state between 1986 and 2005 than since 2005 when the return to a multiparty system was supposed to have brought more civil liberties.
When Paul Ssemogerere ran against President Yoweri Museveni in 1996, during the one-party era, he was inconvenienced on a few occasions, yes, but he wasn't beaten, tear-gassed, arrested, or shot at.
By 2021, 16 years after Uganda's return to a multiparty order, National Unity Platform's torchbearer Bobi Wine (Robert Kyagulanyi) had to campaign wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet, and Forum for Democratic Change's Patrick Amuriat was thrashed and had his shoes removed while on his way to file nomination papers.
Kiiza rattled the cage at the military court at a time when the security services have become even more violent and repressive when the punishment for such actions is likely to be ruthless. As political pressures intensified, we saw fiery opposition from scholars and activists like Stella Nyanzi.
Look around at other functioning multiparty states in Africa with more freedoms, and you won't find anyone matching Stella's fieriness. Nor will you find an author like Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, whose slash-and-burn book, The Greedy Barbarian, led to his detention, torture, and eventual exile.
Part of this phenomenon seems to result from political aging and the vulnerability felt by long-ruling incumbents as their country evolves beyond them. At 39 years, the NRM is no longer the new kid on the block, and its years of corruption and other excesses mean it is no longer the darling it was in the late 1980s and 1990s.
In a free and fair election, it would likely be voted out of power. Fully aware of this, it resorts to increasing levels of threats, bribery, and violence to maintain control. Newton's third law of motion states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
The extreme vulgarisation of the Judiciary has produced the fire-spitting Isaac Ssemakadde as president of the Uganda Law Society, elected in a landslide.The hard responses to state excesses, from MP Daudi Ochieng on February 4, 1966, bringing a motion to Parliament to impeach Prime Minister Milton Obote for alleged looting of Congolese gold (in cahoots with Idi Amin and others); to Archbishop Janan Luwum, assassinated in February 1977 after he boldly demanded that dictator Idi Amin stop extrajudicial killings; to Besigye in 2000, and the string of brave individuals who have stood up to the NRM over the last 30 years, did not start as mass movements.
They have mostly been the lone voice taking a stand, sometimes with just a few comrades. Even the NRA/NRM, the first domestically based Ugandan post-independence organisation to successfully seize power through armed struggle, started with a band of 41 men, armed with only 27 guns, attacking the Kabamba military barracks on February 6, 1981.Given this context, the common criticism of activists and opposition politicians for protesting with only a handful of comrades as 'irrelevant' seems to ignore our long history.
This has always been the Ugandan way of revolution and dramatic social change: it starts with one man or woman, or a small group, then others join when the initiative shows promise. And when victory appears possible, particularly when it is won, thousands of Ugandans rush to join.Eron Kiiza's plight offers one explanation for this: The cost of speaking truth to power in Uganda has always been very high. Only a few can afford to pay it.
Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans.” X (Twitter) @cobbo3