There are moments in human history when the oppressed have found reason to help their oppressors, not in oppressing them further, but in strategizing towards their collective
survival.
So, the Nigerian songbird, Asa, would remind a jailor that they too, like the prisoners inside the cell, were prisoners who also needed to be freed. In truth, all oppressors need help, ironically, sadly, from their victims.
Perhaps it is about time to help our men and women in the so-called intelligence and security services: the proverbial deep state. Dear deep state, if being in the ‘deep state’ means controlling state institutions, and selfish access to national coffers and other resources, then the threat to this control and access is not Col Kizza Besigye or some scrawny chaps strutting around as the opposition.
The enemy is within. It is Museveni himself. Not for some crimes he has committed – these are so many – but for his inability to control his body clock. We all wish he could. While we continue to wish our beloved president good health, and many years of life and happiness, we ought to have an urgent sense of foreboding: that one day, without announcement, he will fail to wake up from his sleep. Not that he would have overslept. No. He will be gone.
This is likely to happen while this man is still the president. Sadly, after almost 40 years in power, Museveni has crafted himself as the only institution able to keep this country together.
THOU SHALT NOT DIE
It remains mindboggling that even at his octogenarian age, even with the experience of recent loss of close contemporaries (Kategaya, Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile, Keith Muhakanizi, Tumwine, Pecos Kutesa, and several others), Museveni has refused to prepare for his exit. Even when he jokes about “going to heaven soon,” he has found no reason to prepare the country for this moment.
One is left wondering whether this man is convinced Uganda will fold and close without him and is thus doing us a favour to enjoy while he still lasts, thus stretching his longevity or the man trusts his (traditional) medicine men so much that they have guaranteed him an immediate reincarnation after his demise, returning with full memory of a 40-year-old dude.
If I were part of the deep state – and I suppose most deep state chaps are younger – this deluded, immortalising attitude would worry me more than anything else. What is truer is that currently at 81 years of age–as we have been told–death or demobilising illness has never been closer than before.
I am no witch, dear reader. But having lost my father at 80 only recently, I know that advanced age comes with a thousand complications and multiple inexplicable illnesses. One does not have to be involved in any accidents for their bodies to wobble, collapse or break.
If there is anything to learn from American President Joe Biden, it is that even the best serviced industrial products certainly reach their expiry. The body parts disintegrate irreparably, and without warning. Dear reader, I write this with neither rancour nor bitterness.
But, rather, nervousness and anxiety. With the examples cited above, which include my own father, I have no doubt that as daylight follows night darkness, one random day, with neither preparation nor announcement, our man will be demobilized.
Sadly, as country, we aren’t having this conversation enough. Possibly because our purportedly secularised, capitalistic worldview has taken accumulation of more goods as some guarantor of immortality. To this end, instead of discussing our last days – and our legacies – we have exclusively focused on accumulate – often by dispossession, and or utter ruin to the environment.
BASHIR, BARRE, GADDAFI
Again, I hope I am wrong, but our Yoweri Museveni is not Cameroon’s Paul Biya neither is he Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. But even if he were, we ought to be ready for the moments of his demise.
To this end, I take my inspiration from Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, Somalia’s Siad Barre’s and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Having held onto their countries for a long time and having become the only institutions of stability, when downfall and death visited them, they died with their entire countries. Whatever little they had built was left in ruins.
Look, I do not see current vice president Jessica Alupo claiming her constitutional right to be the next president. The commander of the armed forces, Museveni’s son Muhoozi Kainerugaba, might gamble with securitizing the entire affair hoping to use the militarily to claim centre stage.
But there would be more issues inside the now deceased man’s palace: How will the “man of ideology” comrade brother Odrek Rwabwogo, who has also positioned himself strategically, react? Sit back and watch?! How will the man from Teso, allegedly with “small legs” Gen Peter Elwelu and his peers react? Is the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) the united professional army without Yoweri Museveni?
These things give me sleepless nights on end. Once news of Museveni’s passing actually hits the streets, I worry that there will be an explosion of anger on Kampala’s streets. In the absence of established authority — because ‘immortal’ Museveni has refused to give us one —there is potential for purge nights, especially in the central region where Museveni’s sectarian legacy and mess remains more visible.
As happened in Kenya during the 2008 election violence, our dangerously subdued sectarian sentiments will be the units for violent mobilisation. This happened in Somalia and is presently happening in Sudan.
When I peer into this rather nightmarish future, I see vultures from the United States, and Europe (CIA, Glencore Plc., Dan Gertler International, European banks) plunging on Uganda with weapons, cash and chemicals to speed up slaughter as they enable their access to resources – which by this time will be free of charge.
Like bwana Museveni, they will seek to magnify our otherwise small differences (mostly, ethnic and religious) but to entangle the country in further turmoil – and turmoil which is always good for free resources.
If folks in the deep state aren’t drawing these scenarios and simulations, we ought to draw them for them. To this end, the enemy of their beautiful lives (and our wretched ones) cannot be Col Kizza Besigye. The enemy is within, it lives inside Yoweri Museveni’s body clock.
yusufkajura@gmail.com
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.
But Dr., Dr. Yusuf, unless you are being cynical; there is no such a thing as “… beloved president”: A someone who for 39 years and counting has caused so much suffering, deaths and the destruction of so many properties and moreover robbed many of current Ugandans’ youths of their irreplaceable future.
In other words, there is nothing wrong with telling the whole truth, nothing but the truth; by letting some someone who had and still is causing harm and suffering, know that he is being hated to the born marrow, for the grievous harm he caused!
E.g., having been shabbily treated and locked up a hundred times since1999; how does Dr. Besigye and his immediate family members, receive your reference to our 80-year old “Problem of Africa”, being a “… beloved president …”?
Otherwise, as the ancient philosopher Epicurus observed it that: the one who causes fear is also not free from fear!
In other words, our “Problem of Africa” Gen Tibuhaburwa is probably the most frightened of what you are predicting herein.
Before he passed on (5th December 2013), Ugandans and the rest of Africans must also be reminded of what Nelson Mandela (RIP) commented about the “tragic failure of leadership” by Robert Mugabe.
Although he was falling apart before the eyes of whole wide world, Mugabe could not let go of power, until his deputy had to shove him the Zimbabweans State House.
In other words, Mugabe almost went into his grave with Zimbabwe. And that is exactly Gen Tibuhaburwa’s obssession: to go with Uganda into his “shallow grave”
Sick people!
When a calf in the Kraal starting behaving like a bull, then you know the bull is not doing well. Let’s see what 2025 has for Uganda. Have faith in Ugandans or the Spirit that gave birth to Uganda, will rise again.