Dear Mr President, in the first paragraph of your recent missive to the West, particularly the US and UK, you alluded to the fact that it is an unusual practice for African leaders to talk about other countries’ internal affairs.
Although I agree with you to some extent, you need to be reminded that African leaders are birds of a feather, who oppress their citizens the same way; therefore, none of them cancriticize the other.
Additionally, I wondered whether you had the moral authority to talk about this matter. First, our past experience with Rwanda, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is well-known to us and the whole world.
The only difference between us and Western countries is that as their aggression is intended to largely benefit their respective countries and citizens, ours only helps to entrench the individuals involved and/or autocratic regimes.
For example, when we went to DRC purportedly to hunt rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), we were convicted for plundering its wealth, resulting into a debt that shall be paid by our grand and great grandchildren, yet the loot was done by a few individuals and for self-aggrandizement.
Second, in spite of the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency had cleared Iraq on alleged weapons of mass destruction, it is on record that when the US and its allies attacked Sadam Hussein, you were one of the few African presidents who supported this aggression and, therefore, Sadam’s fall.
Don’t forget that these same people are the ones who created Sadam in the 1980s to neutralize Iran. Incidentally, some of us still recall that this aggression was done before even the US and its allies secured a resolution from the United Nations.
If some of us had all this information at the time, could one be right to conclude that our president is either rushed into taking decisions based on un-researched information or some of your decisions are based on pecuniary reasons?
The other contradiction is that you supported the US’s aggression against Afghanistan, reasoning that Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda were terrorists.
Of course this aggression and the fight against terrorism of any form is justifiable, but in this particular case, unless you were completely unaware of the fact that your so-called colleagues, particularly the US, are the ones who created Osama, your support would sound more legitimate only if you had condemned them first.
You also rightly said that your same colleagues are the ones who created the ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which has now spread in the whole Middle East and which has resulted into the influx of refugees in the Western world. It is also right that this could be one of the major reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the US election, and why the UK voted for Brexit.
I partly agree with you on one issue, but the main lesson here would be about the fact that unlike Africa, and Uganda in particular, where elections are held to hoodwink the world that there is democracy, the citizens in the Western world not only freely express their dissatisfaction using the power of the vote, but their leaders do respect the outcome too. This is fundamental aspect that I suspect you deliberately skipped.
Lastly, you asserted that if African leaders were focussed and united, they would be in position to solve their own problems without seeking intervention from the West and other foreign countries.
You augmented your point that during colonial times, more especially during racism in southern Africa, presidents such as Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and the like could use their countries as frontline states to fight Apartheid and liberate the countries affected.
Correct, but even Idi Amin, who was regarded then as one of the worst dictators in Africa by yourself and your colleagues from the West, never primitively accumulated wealth using state coffers. In other words, all his negatives and positives were influenced by the love for his country as opposed to self.
The curse today is that the focus of our current presidents in Africa is about retaining power at whatever cost, acquiring wealth for themselves, family members and cronies who come as paupers and leave state power when they are among the richest in those countries.
This is the very reason why those who were being referred to as the new breed of African leaders by the same West have now turned into a curse in their own countries and, in some cases, their citizens have been forced to prefer to be colonized once again.
The author is the spokesperson of the People’s Progressive Party.