Train up a Museveni

‘‘Train up a Monster, and it shall surely depart from your ways –

But no matter what, it will always call you Father …’’

Proverbs 22:6 – The Uganda Bible.

On a home-bound taxi the other day, a fairly young man, born well into the advent of the NRM’s sanguinary, blood-soaked and death-drenched ascendance to the mantle of state power in Uganda – and in that moment perhaps gripped in a pang of conversational euphoria, blurted out –

‘‘Besigye will be no better than Museveni. They are both intolerant men with violent histories and equally violent futures!’’

The taxi, one of the hundreds of shaky public-transport capsules metropolitan Kampala’s denizens have to contend with daily, swerved suddenly and sharply to avoid a gaping crater on the tarmac – sending its passengers, driver included, tumbling into half-open windows, cold car-body panels, and worse – the warmer bodies of fellow passengers who weren’t shy to express their ingratitude for the unsolicited intimacies.

It is perhaps after this discomfiting jolt that the long-disused gears of my mind juddered into life – their cogs and sprockets locking into each other with the laborious effort of an erstwhile neglected and corroded prosthetic limb.

Modern Uganda’s history has been tumultuous – there is a scarcely contested consensus of opinion, on this unpalatable truth.

After nearly seven decades of British overlordship, our first decade of self-rule alone, witnessed two violent revisions in the political status quo of our young republic.

The damsel of history was anxious to move ahead, and escape her bleak tower of captivity – and the shining Nilote princes – Dr. Obote first, then General Amin a mere sixty moons later, were only too glad to oblige her.

Because our past has been inherently violent, and our most pressing ‘‘national’’ questions responded-to in only that language – it becomes almost dutiful for any observer of events to accept that our future too, by necessity, must be violent.

Of course the scales of these violences will differ – in the same way that the dynamics of the Buganda Question, the Obote Question, the Luwero Question and/or the Northern Question have been varied – thus will the configurations of violence called for in our near and distant futures, differ.

Before I am accused of sanguinary sociopathy and war-mongering, let me underscore this point –

While the multiple episodes of unrest and civil conflict our banana republic has lived through historically, are unfortunate and should have been avoided, they could not have been avoided:

They were a necessary prerequisite for Ugandan society at that stage of social and political evolution, to metamorphose.

The aftermaths of each of these successive stages of metamorphosis may have indeed been normatively worse than the phase that came immediately before – but what we cannot reject, is their intrinsic necessity.

Obote, quite notoriously and with characteristic nonchalance, in justifying his Prime-ministerial order to attack what he called the bastion of Ugandan feudalism embodied in the Buganda Kabakaship, remarked –

‘‘The midwife of an old society pregnant with a new one, is force …’’

Whether or not Obote the man, lived to regret those words on his deathbed is a matter best left to conjecture, but one cannot ignore the usefulness of this seemingly violent decision in keeping Uganda a unitary state.

Without Dr. Obote’s decisive violent intervention in Sir Freddie’s Lubiri, the strong and well-organized central province of Buganda would have successfully ceded from the rest of the country – possibly at the cost of millions of lives – and Uganda as we know it today would be a thing of the immaterial past.

We cannot, also, discount the fact that it is this violence of 1966 which precipitated the coup of 1971 that eventually ousted President Obote himself.

Violence begets violence – that is known.

However, would we be right in saying that Obote should have held back in 1966, and refrained from invading the Kabaka’s palace?

Given the fragile nature of our independence at the time, would it have been beneficial for the country as a whole for Buganda to declare her separation?

Fast forward to 2016 – Brigadier Elweru, on the orders of his Commander in Chief, storms the palace of a King in the Rwenzori mountains to avert a similar threat of ‘‘tribal’’ secession.

Do we have to wait another five years for Museveni’s chickens to come home to roost, as Obote’s did?

Shall Elweru be karma’s chosen vehicle, as of old?

Or is this fickle karma flexible enough, to alter her game-plan in light of changing dynamics?

Only time, and those she spares, will tell.

***

To leave history alone, since history is indeed best left alone – and return to this present discussion of Besigye and Kaguta’s alikeness, as suggested by this youthful passenger in the taxi –

Is it true that the two men are one and the same?

That they are spawned of the same ilk?

Perhaps.

And this is a worry that many politically-sensitive young people harbor.

They are afraid that voting for Kizza Besigye shall only amount to changing what one fatigue-clad thug famously referred to as ‘‘guards’’, over three decades ago.

However, I find this worry a little too unnecessary – even ahistorically ambitious.

Short of an angel from God’s own paradise, the next head of this country, whomever they are – will not and cannot perform miracles.

We cannot get too far ahead of ourselves in this regard.

There is even a possibility that a few years into a post-Museveni presidency, Ugandans are likely to look back nostalgically upon the bygone days of the NRM and wish upon a cattle-keeper’s star that Mr. Yoweri would rise from his grave (or whatever jail he’ll be languishing in) and return to the driving-seat.

This uncertainty about the future, this doubt over Besigye’s credibility and capacity to form and lead a government that is noticeably better than Museveni’s, warts and all, is what has kept a broad majority of Ugandan citizens meekly supportive of the incumbent, or altogether apathetical toward involvement in politics.

But this is why such fears are unwarranted –

Think back to the eve of Uganda’s independence on 8^th October, 1962 – the British, with their fine manners and evening tea and cricket and rugby, are packing their corduroy bags and returning to the ‘‘old country’’.

Left behind in their place, is a provisional government of tribal elites with mutual suspicion and deep hostilities held against one another.

The ordinary ‘Ugandan’ in Gulu or Kabale or Mukono is not quite sure how these new black rulers will improve his fate – will they be better, or worse than the departing British?

What should this native do, then?

Ought s/he postpone his decision to vote for the UPC or DP in the first Uganda-wide election, and ask instead for stronger assurances before he can ‘‘withdraw’’ his support from the British?

Or does s/he – all uncertainty about the future notwithstanding – conclude in his simple heart and unsophisticated mind, that the worst and vilest of black leaders will always, on his score sheet, rank leagues above the gentlest, mildest and most tolerant of British colonial governors.

For no matter how cruel and vicious Idi Amin’s murderous regime may have been – it was still better than Sir Andrew Cohen’s benevolent and ‘‘progressive’’ governorship – because it was ours.

By us. For us. Of us.

Shortly after the fall of Amin’s government in ’79 – the intervening months before an election was held in 1980 were among the most bloody in the country’s history.

Far bloodier were they even, than the Field Marshall’s eight-year bloodbath.

However, it should not come as a surprise that in interviewing residents of several Kampala suburbs shortly after Amin’s flight to exile, one British journalist was taken aback by the nostalgic wishes of these residents for Amin to return to power –

‘‘At least under Amin, only the soldiers killed us. Now, anybody kills everybody.’’

Turns out that even bloodshed and violence can have preferable versions.

***

This is the unsimple dilemma that modern Uganda seems to be confronted with.

Do we let go of Mr. Museveni’s certain violence (the devil we know, as some have opined) – and in its place embrace Colonel Besigye’s uncertain peace?

Or do we hang on, postpone our decision, and wait for a third option to arise?

Perhaps the best way of answering this query, is to pose another couple –

Should the overthrow of General Amin in ’79 have been further delayed or deferred, while the Ugandan exiles debated and sipped whisky on the steps of Nyerere’s Dar-es-Salaam statehouse patio; as they threshed out the ‘‘ finer details’’ of who would fill the imminent power vacuum likely to be left by Amin’s ouster?

Two – ought the natives of the then Uganda protectorate have waited longer before lowering the Union Jack at the stroke of that ninth midnight in October ’62?

Because it is that decision that led to 1966, and 1971, and 1979 and 1986.

Would our country’s fate have turned out better, had those two flags not crossed paths at half-mast on that memorable night?

Independence was our monster, our Frankenstein, our Kiziike.

Anybody who sincerely, introspectively and candidly answers those two proceeding questions, will have their answer to the first.

When a man’s monster rises up in the night and devours him, does he, in remorse, say to himself – I regret that I sired this thing.

Or does he, unapologetically, declare instead – Look, I lived and died. But I lived first.

While I am not a votary of Judeo-Christianity; perhaps one of the most compelling arguments I’ve heard advanced in its defense was mooted by the Indian-American right-wing intellectual and apologist, Dinesh D’Souza, who likened religious agnosticism to the perpetual postponement of the decision to marry a fiancée because one was inherently uncertain of her loyalties and the future fortunes of the union.

At some point, Dinesh argues – a man has simply got to make a decision and live with its ramifications the best way he can.

Otherwise, life would be led in ceaseless abeyance.

***

‘‘They have sown votes, and have reaped bullets; they have walked themselves to work, and profit nothing: and ye shall be ashamed of your fruits, because of the fierce anger of the herdsman.’’

Jeremiah 12:13 – The Uganda Bible.