Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
At what would be our last in-person meeting, John Kazoora insisted, as usual, on picking up the bill. I had invited him to catch up and talk shop after all, but John being John, insisted on paying even if he had been out of Parliament and regular income for more than a decade.
It was something to do with his pride. Many people met John through his book, Betrayed by my leader, one of perhaps half-a-dozen leitmotifs from a generation of Ugandan politicians who fought or worked alongside President Museveni, only to fall out with him.
Many years after its publication, John remained disappointed but not bitter. He picked, for our lunch spot, a Kampala restaurant owned by the wife of one of Museveni’s wheeler-dealing relatives. As we ate – he, a diet-enforced soup, me a salad out of respect – he remarked at how many Johnny-come-latelys were cashing out from the regime he and others helped install. He despised the owner of the restaurant but dined there anyway because the food was decent.
This ability to separate the stomach from the heart, as it were, was what made John interesting. He remained critical of Museveni and his “bastardisation” of the country’s politics, yet also acknowledged the inherent calculus contained in sharing power with the masses (fisherfolk) without losing control of its levers. John shared a little about his health challenges and, when I pushed, he confirmed to me that Museveni was helping to cover some of the bills. He said it matter-of-factly, with neither shame nor sense of entitlement, then gave several examples of people the President continued to support even after falling out with them.
I have replayed our conversations in the days since I heard of John’s passing to try and make sense of the changing of the guard and the passing of the tide that each transition represents, individually and collectively. In every rendition I return to the sense that we lost something that was just being born, like a newly hatched chick that was carelessly smothered by a brooding mother hen. John belonged to a generation of politicians that emerged out of the post-constitutional order of the mid-90s when it looked, for a bright moment, that Uganda would build a political culture based on the competition of ideas and argument. Many came from within the folds of the NRA/M but a few, like Norbert Mao and Cecilia Ogwal, to name just two, came from the older parties.
Together, they represented the spirit of a new Uganda and a sense of what was possible, even in a cross-generational and bipartisan way. It now appears, and future generations will possibly confirm, that one of the biggest body blows to our democratic efforts was the methodical way these progressive and reformist views and voices were plucked out of our politics. The Parliamentary Advocacy Forum, which John belonged to, brought together progressive NRM MPs including Augustine Ruzindana as well as Kassiano Wadri, Issa Kikungwe (DP) and the likes of Ben Wacha and Abdu Katuntu (UPC).
The falling out within the NRM after the controversial lifting of the presidential term limits in 2005 provided a platform on which to build a new national political church but this was not to be as the system around President Museveni targeted and removed most of the leading lights of this renaissance. For instance, the 2006 election in which John lost his Kashaari seat also saw defeats for Ruzindana, Mike Mukula, Zachary Olum, Cecilia Ogwal, Jacob Oulanyah, Aggrey Awori, Mike Sebalu, Salamu Musumba, Frank Nabwiso, Martin Wandera and Jack Sabiiti, among others.
These and others like Sam Njuba, Okullo Epak, James Mwandha, et al, were some of the country’s better legislators and many had system-backed candidates handpicked to run and defeat them. In the years that followed some, like the late Oulanyah and Ogwal, were able to return to Parliament either by joining the NRM to toe the line or by working out non-compete arrangements to only paint within the margins. This decimation of legislative quality has, in my view, set the country’s democratic efforts back many years and the commercialisation and “bastardisation” of its politics by many decades.
The death of individuals like John and others is obviously a loss to their families and friends. At the macro level, Uganda and Ugandans continue to lose key pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is our nation-building effort. In John, we have lost another piece of the puzzle. As families cry, Uganda mourns.
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @Kalinaki
