We don’t yet know the full picture of what transpired in Kasese last weekend. But we know that a most disturbing orgy of killings took place.

I was in transit and away from social media, Sunday and early week, thus I can imagine that I saved myself the gory images effortlessly thrown into our faces online.

The corrosive force of social media may well be the key driver taking us to Armageddon. Basic social mores and minimum standards of public decency are being ripped and dumped with alarming speed at the behest of social media. For those predicting an apocalypse on the horizon, the wagons of social media provide a most portent propelling force with the least cost at the lowest accountability yet with top-notch effectiveness.

I and my wife took a vocation trip to Fort Portal and Kasese in July 2014. Just before we hit the road, there were clashes and killings. When we got there, Kasese town was visibly on tension.

The always-field-based inspector general of police, Kale Kayihura, was in town. Days earlier, the king of the Rwenzururu, Omusinga Wesley Mumbere, addressed the press in full military uniform, in reaction to reports he was to be arrested.

Since he was a trained soldier, he reasoned, he had dressed properly for the arrest. I thought that was a hugely-powerful statement of resolve. Was he daring the state as he has been found at fault in the current breakdown of order? First, a short detour.

On a stopover in Fort Portal, before proceeding to Kasese, we ran into Brigadier Peter Elwelu, at a popular restaurant. Elwelu is easily one of the most competent and experienced commanders of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces.

He cut an unmistakable professional outlook, devoid of the bravado that one sees in some of the folks in positions of power in this dear country. He was overseeing return to normality following days of violence. Good job he must have done that time.

It should be remembered that Brigadier Elwelu contributed to setting the foundation for the UPDF’s positive role in Somalia, never mind that we had no business going there in the first place. It is a sad commentary then that it was Elwelu who, last Sunday, commanded an ill-thought and despicable attack on King Mumbere’s palace, a disproportionate mission that inevitably killed many, yet it was not inevitable.

The legion of regime apologists and courtiers have wasted little time telling the world that daring the state comes with such consequences as witnessed in Kasese. But what is the state and who is the state? The state is the single-most important aggregation and concentration of societal interests, needs, aspirations and resources.

Accordingly, the state belongs to society, to the people whose resources it wields and on whose behalf it acts. It is a little nonsensical, therefore, to suggest that, somehow, the state has certain interests of its own that are totally divorced from society and the people on whose behalf it acts and whose resources it uses.

One of the most important thinkers of modern times, German sociologist Max Weber, noted quite aptly that a state is the human institution that successfully claims monopoly over legitimate use of physical force. There are two key words here: monopoly and legitimate.

No state can claim to function viably if it can’t centralize and monopolise the legitimate use of violence. In other words, the presence of different militias and armed groups, the runaway decentralisation of the use of physical force such that anyone can use force the way he/she wishes, is antithetical to the existence of a modern state.

Historically, establishing a monopoly over force has mostly been attained when competing armed groups interested in managing a specific territory win decisive military victories. In other words, force is used to establish monopoly over the use of force.

Yet, on its own, this is seldom sustainable. We have vividly painful memories in Uganda. The wounds and scars of two decades of war in northern Uganda should dissuade the rulers that the path of brute force and arrogant display of raw power is perilous.

Whatever the personal indiscretions of Mumbere, the crisis in Rwenzori can be seen in similar lenses as in the northern, northeastern and Buganda regions. For three successive elections, 1996, 2001 and 2006, the northern and north-eastern parts of the country continuously voted against General Museveni and the NRM establishment.

Since 1996, the people of Kasese have defiantly voted against Museveni and the NRM, even felling a big historical in former defence minister Crispus Kiyonga.

It’s no coincidence that armed conflict has festered in those parts of the country where there’s pronounced social discontent against the political establishment in Kampala.

One would think that the NRM and our increasingly-beleaguered ruler have taken critical lessons in running state affairs and attaining the right to govern prudently. Obviously, the events of last Sunday suggest they have hardly taken any lessons.

This is a highly-fragile society. And the rulers are bereft of the political wisdom to govern properly. The state that is primed is at any rate quite weak and poorly-constituted.

moses.khisa@gmail.com

The author teaches  political science at Northwestern University/Evanston, Chicago-USA.