Let Muhoozi carefully read Museveni’s lips

When the late maverick Maj Gen Samuel Wasswa Kasirye Gwanga retired from the army after 46 years in service, it was thought he was excited about taking a break.

A week later, Kasirye Gwanga was back in the army. His reason was that he found living with civilians unbearable because they just did not listen.

The army is an institution where giving and taking orders is a way of life. There are no ifs or buts. None of this business is about my opinion, my rights. So, for a man coming from that background for almost all his adult life, must have suffered cultural shock.

If you have done some work around professional soldiers you won’t fail to miss their sensitivity towards rules and procedures. Military discipline teaches that. If he had been told to drive to a location in a certain time frame and he finds you blocking the way he will ask you firmly to move. If you fail he will push you away to fulfill the orders of his superiors or risk reprimand. That is probably why soldiers tend to be aggressive toward civilians. They don’t appreciate that we all don’t come from that conservative background.

In a way, the former Commander of the Land forces, Gen Muhoozi Keinerugaba, found himself in a similar situation but in more ways than one.

As a soldier who has been a senior officer for most of his time in the army, he was used to giving orders without being questioned or contradicted.

Secondly, as the  First Son for most of his life, he has lived with people who are willing to roll in the mud just for his sake, in both his private and public life. If you look at Balaam Barughahare you will get the drift.

Then social media became the thing for people who want almost instant communication with a myriad of people. A public rally setting in a virtual space. Only that, here there are almost no generally accepted ground rules of engagement. In fact, the more dishonest and rude one is, in many cases the more space and following.

So here is a son of a president, perceived as one who is being groomed to succeed his father. He comes from spaces where his word is an order and lands in a chaotic environment where he is hardly spoken to with respect, by many people who can hardly load data on their phones. Even when he talks tough and threatens almost nothing happens because this is virtual space and the people he is dealing with may be out of his physical reach.

So he tries to get out of the petty world of arguing with ‘silly’ people, wajinga, and concentrates on proving his worth as a highly trained ‘modern’ military officer in his own right.  This is the sort of officer who has a good grasp of geopolitics, international relations, history, and economics. His father, President Museveni, to whom many compare him, is comfortable in his articulation in most of these areas - and many more.

So how did Muhoozi end up in hot water? It is quite obvious reading his tweets that he was a man on a mission to prove that he was not the protected, pampered project that most people accused him of being. His major undoing was an apparent race against time. He seemed like he wanted to achieve too much, too quickly by way of acceptability and recognition as a serious officer who could easily transition into politics. Something akin to his father.

But his father comes with over 50 years of experience in very many leadership-related matters under his belt.

Like him or not, Museveni knows how to say what people want to hear, how they want to hear it, and when they want to hear it. He also knows what and whom to talk about, and what and who not to talk about. He knows how to exist in an environment where he can easily find an escape route in case he is challenged. He also knows how to speak through other people who may deliver his message as court jesters.

The same applies to having the knack of hedging his bets and knowing which horse to back and which one to abandon for his perpetuation and patronage.

Those things Muhoozi did not seem to have developed or been gifted with whenever he engaged the public on social media. Soon some of his tweets contradicted his father’s, and Uganda’s positions on many matters of global importance like the Ethiopian- Tigrean conflict, Russian and Ukraine, etc.

It was only a matter of time before he would land in an ambush from which it would be difficult to extricate himself.

He got away with a lot until the tweet about ‘his’ Ugandan army taking two weeks to land in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. Why this one irked and prompted his father Museveni into action is that as mundane as it sounded, it was akin to letting military secrets out of the bag.

The world over, corporate and management culture reserves a good amount of time for presaging, predicting, and scenario building with the help of history, trends, and intelligence. It helps in taking appropriate actions in case of an unexpected occurrence in the future. Such will find a semblance of contingency measures in place, just in case, it happens the way it was predicted or close to that.

For instance from history, a Kenyan election may result in violence and disruption of the route to the sea. When one, out of the blue, talks about ‘his army’ taking two weeks to get to Nairobi, whether it is true or not, a serious Kenyan army is assumed to suspect that its security was the subject of a scenario built by Uganda. Such would probably be based on intelligence - which implies spying and compromising national security.

It creates an impression that Uganda expected an impasse in the August election, resulting in chaos. This would necessitate intervention from Uganda which would ‘take two weeks to get to the capital, Nairobi.’

Most likely on realising the gravity of the matter, all the other light-hearted tweets that followed like staying in Westlands after the arrival, were meant to dampen the ‘Nairobi tweet’ and make it seem like one big joke.

That is why after several government officials trivialized the matter, President Museveni; an experienced hand in the business, took no chances and cleared the air with an apology and clarification.

It is obvious that Muhoozi will be in a much better place if he learns to carefully read his father’s lips.

Mr Sengoba is a commentator on political and social issues

Twitter: @nsengoba