Violence and the President’s horsemen; Uganda’s wounds

Author, Charles Onyango Obbo. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

  • What happened in the Buganda region during the campaigns, and after the January election this year, are a stark example.

On the weekend, President Yoweri Museveni made one of his most dramatic U-turns, strongly condemning torture, the barbaric violence that the security services have subjected Ugandans to for decades, and the egregious violations of their rights.

Museveni himself has in the past been the cheerleader of these excesses. Following the shocking beating of National Unity Platform party leader and then-legislator Bobi Wine in Arua in 2019, Museveni later, and cheerfully, said he had  been “beaten properly in the right way”, and called the attempts to discipline the perpetrators “rubbish”. He got cheers from the NRM crowd.

On the weekend, he was emphatic that no Ugandan should be beaten, even criminals, and called the indiscriminate use of force “terrorism” and “counter-revolutionary”.

I shared a clip of the President’s whole speech with some scholars and journalists who study Museveni or have written about him seriously. One of them, surprised, sent me a note saying “it was aimed at a foreign audience, not Ugandans”.  Another, in disbelief, asked me if it was deep fake.

Some knowledgeable Ugandans told me they think that behind the scenes, there is a storm gathering with donor governments that could result in aid cuts, and that people in the First family are likely to get blacklisted and put on sanctions lists.

All these views proceed from the assumption that the about-turn on violence isn’t genuine, and is little more than a public relations gimmick to help the President get over an impending diplomatic difficulty, and avoid some catastrophic sanctions.

To me the most notable statement was when he said; 
“When you kill someone, it means that his argument is so powerful that you cannot respond to it”, and his argument that the superior path is to allow a contestation of ideas, instead of killing (and presumably repressing and jailing) people with different and critical views. I desperately wanted it to be true that this is what the President believes.

However, given how much Kampala has been working to squelch the very critical Turkey-based blogger Fred Lumbuye, who was seized in Istanbul and his whereabouts remain unknown, it is hard to believe that the president’s views were more a tactical posture.

It would be a delight if it turns out we are wrong. There is, however, clear evidence that political violence has frayed the Ugandan polity, and it’s likely the president and his court have seen it.

What happened in the Buganda region during the campaigns, and after the January election this year, are a stark example.

The 2021 elections were preceded by the most savage violence ever Museveni’s rivals (especially Bobi Wine and Patrick Amuriat) and their supporters have been subjected to. In April, FDC leader Amuriat said that between nomination in November 2020 and elections on January 14, 2021, he was arrested 41 times – sometimes more than once a day – and beaten badly several times by security agents.

In the Buganda region, where there was fervent support for Bobi Wine, the violence played out against a historical context and anger, because areas like Luweero and Wakiso had endured similar predations during the early 1980s Museveni-led war at the hands of the UPC government. They had taken it and paid a dear price, which eventually brought him to power. Now he had turned the whip on them.

The backlash resulted in a humiliating defeat for Museveni and NRM in the Buganda region. That level of repudiation did more than scuppering the bargain that brought the NRM to power.

There are some Ugandans who are working on this and I was honoured to be allowed to look at their analysis. 
 Their take is that two contradictory things happened in the January election. One, because a lot of the repression and violence of the period was overseen by the Special Forces Command (SFC) led by the president’s son Lt. Gen.

Muhoozi Kainerugaba, locally and internally he was the biggest loser of the election. His reputation had been tarnished, and if indeed he is being primed to succeed his father, the violence of that period had damaged him and made his path to the top extremely steep.

Secondly, that the violence had turned one of the most republican-fuelled elections, into a vote for federo in Buganda, and a rejection of the Uganda project, if all Ugandan power can do is kill and maim.  Put another way, violence against the people helped Museveni and the NRM keep power, and possibly even consolidate it, but they lost a country. After the north, northeast, state brutality had ejected large sections of Buganda from the nation. 

This is why one hopes the new anti-violence line from Museveni isn’t a stunt. That he sees that ending it will save something bigger than him—this Pearl of Africa, this Uganda.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3