Why Museveni needs Ruzindana’s advice

At the last check, our ruler of more than three decades, Gen Yoweri Museveni, had more than a hundred presidential advisers. 

Some years back, an investigative report in one of the newspapers revealed that most of these advisers never get to meet their boss, which in effect, means they really do not perform the task that goes with their official positions.  
The ruler himself has been on record saying he does not need anyone’s advice. Why then does he appoint so many redundant advisers? 

Maverick former presidential spokesperson Joseph Tamale Murundi provided a succinct answer: Presidential advisers are welfare appointments, made on humanitarian grounds to help individuals in need of an earning income. It is part of the vast patronage machinery, integral to Museveni’s rule. 

Mirundi made the ‘welfare’ remark in retort to one of the many ‘welfare presidential advisers,’ Mr John Nagenda, a long-surviving presidential adviser on media and public relations. The latter had made some disparaging comments against the then official presidential spokesperson.

Before long, Mr Mirundi got a welfare appointment for himself as a presidential adviser after he was sacked. Both Mirundi and Nagenda have rusty tongues and the uncanny knack for savaging critics of their boss and doing too hard to find fault with just about any government official other than the supreme ruler, understandably so since they depend on him for their welfare.

Mr Museveni sees himself as a super being, so it may well be that indeed he does not need any advice on how he goes about the business of running the country, except perhaps when it is about very arcane and highly technical matters. 
As he becomes deeply entangled and entrapped in a president-for-life project, and with every passing year making it very difficult to turn back and find an exit route, Mr Museveni urgently needs very kind and candid advice. Many potential Ugandans can play this role, but my choice is Mzee Augustine Ruzindana. Here is why. 

For those who may not know him, Ruzindana has been around for quite a while, a long time in public service and now ably managing a private life in retirement. He was with Museveni in Fronasa, the forerunner to the National Resistance Army that brought Mr Museveni to power in 1986. 
He served as the first Ombudsman under Museveni’s rule, moved on to represent Ruhama County in Parliament until the full State machinery deployed against him in 2006 to deliver the parliamentary seat to Museveni’s wife, who claimed to have been sent by God. 

His political ‘crime’ that made him unwelcome and a top candidate to be isolated and humiliated was his foremost role in breaking ranks with Museveni and being one of the founders of the main Opposition party in 2005, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) for which he served as deputy secretary general. 

After a second attempt to reclaim the Ruhama seat in 2011 came to no avail, Ruzindana seized the high moral ground of hanging his active political boots with his head high.
Ruzindana is one of the many Ugandans deeply concerned about the deteriorating political situation in Uganda and the seemingly unstoppable march to a possible armageddon unless we do something to starve the course. Yet he is one of the very few who can give Mr Museveni a sound and viable plan to save the ruler and preserve the nation. 

This plan must necessarily be about a negotiated end in which Mr Museveni makes critical concessions that will save him from the inevitable implosion that hangs on the horizon. 
Now, regime sycophants and the ruler himself may scoff at this as some infantilism, if not fictional representation, but power has a way of sloshing people to the point of not seeing the obvious writings on the wall. 

As I have argued in this space before, the excitement about next year’s General Election is misplaced, especially for those counting on defeating Museveni (or overwhelming him) at the polls in an election he is pretty much in charge of organising. 
We have to find a way out of the current mess, and that way will not be next year’s general election.

Mr Khisa is assistant professor at North Carolina State University (USA).
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