The travesty of patriotism

Something called the Patriotic League of Uganda (PLU) was reportedly launched recently, apparently to replace another rather bizarre outfit called the MK Movement.

For the uninitiated, MK is the acronym for President Museveni’s son, Mr Muhoozi Kainerugaba, about whom a lot has been said in the last few years (including here in the Majority Report) and who himself has had quite a bit to say, especially on Twitter in ways that patently offend the basic rules that govern serving army officers.

If you are reading this and might not know the context or somehow need reminding, Mr Kainerugaba, a General in the Uganda People’s Defence Forces, our national army, was long rumoured to be an heir-apparent to the father, Mr Museveni. In recent years, he ramped up rather explosive rhetoric on Twitter, openly and incredibly bidding to wrestle power from his father who is also his commander in chief!

Back to the Patriotic League! Uganda’s political landscape is characterised by all manner of charades. We have all sorts of contraptions that make one sick to the stomach, and this Patriotic League is yet another, perhaps an even more annoying act of grandstanding and absurdity than its supposed predecessor, the so called MK Movement.

A hotchpotch of hangers-on, journeymen and schemers are on a mission of selfish interest but somehow cloaked in the flowery terms of patriotism! Sadly, in this collage of characters you find even otherwise brilliant and ordinarily thoughtful Ugandans, and you have to scream out loud what in the world are they doing?

If we were a country of laws, the prime figure behind this whole thing, or at a minimum the one on whose behalf such absurd moves are made, should already have appeared before a military court.

He would have had to answer to charges of gross misconduct and acts prejudicial to good order and discipline of the national armed forces. What exactly is the patriotism being packaged and paraded for the country? Patriotism is an alluring concept and a seductive ideal especially in the context of desperation and deep-seated national problems.

The irony of the whole circus of the Patriotic League is that someone who is a prominent ruling party leader, a vice chairman to boot, appears to instead prefer an alternative avenue where the son is a better option to the father!

Thus, he is inclined to root for the Patriotic League of Uganda, which is ostensibly a force to unseat the ruling party. There have been spirited arguments that the new thing is not a political party and that it’s not against the reigning ruler. That is true!

All this would be funny if it weren’t potentially extremely dangerous for the country. Part of the problem here, of course, is that the ruling NRM party really exists only in name. It is not a political party. In the main, the NRM is essentially Mr Museveni.

But consider this, the President’s son, a serving army office who is explicitly barred from engaging in partisan acts and has to be loyal to the civilian leadership, nevertheless came out to pointedly refer to the ruling party as a most reactionary organisation!

You have to wonder which of the two is worse, a non-existent ruling party as an institution, which is what I believe is true, or an organisation that is reactionary, meaning it is against the agenda that moves the country forward and is beholden to regressive ideological currents?

At any rate, to be draped in the colours of patriotism, resistance, nationalism, pan-Africanism, etc. is now such a worn out and hollow selling-point, a ruse that has to be seen for what it truly is.

For this is precisely how Uganda’s current rulers presented themselves to the masses, now nearly 40 years ago, yes a long four decades during which we have painfully lived through rule-by-plunder not patriotism, ethnocentrism and blatant nepotism not nationalism and anything but the cause of pan-Africanism.

In the course of these many decades, we are routinely reminded that those ruling us actually fought for our freedom and liberation. They sacrificed.

Many years ago, in fact a good two decades have now passed, a distinguished jurist and member of the Bench, the former Principal Judge, the Honourable James Ogola led an inquiry into gross financial abuse in the health sector.

Appearing before Justice Ogola was a key figure in the group that claims to have liberated us in 1986. With glaring evidence of wrongdoing, Justice Ogola implored that person to look into the camera and do a small patriotic act of apologising to the public. Instead, he asked Ogola where he was at the time this person supposedly responded to the patriotic call of joining the forces that liberated Uganda in 1986! He’s still a Cabinet minister.

The bottomline is that the current rulers and those seeking to position themselves for a post-Museveni rulership are patriotic to their stomachs. The idea of some grand mission and a higher purpose for Uganda is a mirage. The evidence of the last 40 years is all over for Ugandans to see.

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