By Zacharia Kanyonyozi
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
Dictator Yoweri Museveni has said he will not bow to pressure from official America after the latter recently struck Uganda off The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) over Uganda’s continued human rights violations and, in particular, over the Anti-Homosexuality law.
Dictator Museveni, sounding precisely like Saddam Hussein’s “Chemical Ali”, accuses the Americans of “overestimating” themselves and “undermining” Africans, saying Africa has proved in the past that it can take on and defeat the mighty invaders.
In a statement issued on his X page, Museveni says Ugandans can survive and grow without external support.
“Some of these actors in the western world overestimate themselves and underestimate the freedom fighters of Africa. On account of some of the freedom fighters making mistakes of philosophy, ideology and strategy, some of the foreign actors, erroneously think that African countries cannot move forward without their support,” Dictator Museveni said.
This is such hypocrisy and cant.
Dictator Museveni would not last a single day if America genuinely opposed him. In fact, it is the US government keeping him in power.
To be sure, the Defense Department has ponied out more $280 million on equipment and training for Uganda since 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service.
This figure is exclusive of the more than $18 million in funds for international military education and training and peacekeeping operations scheduled to be dished out this year. Uganda has also been the largest recipient of U.S. funding for the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, which has cost the U.S. over $2.5 billion.
Why? Well, the US State Department calls Uganda a “reliable partner for the United States in promoting stability in the Horn and East/Central Africa and in combating terror.”
Does such empty praise sound familiar?
It should since Dictator Museveni has arcane links to the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that reliable sources say make him a CIA spy.
This is nothing new.
The CIA has always had running dogs in Africa. In Angola, the CIA sponsored rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was head of the Washington-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) movement.
In his heyday, Savimbi, a man with more beard than face, was touted as a key ally against communism by the US and was received as a head of state by President Reagan at the White House in 1986!
Of course when his day of reckoning came, he was killed in a commando raid in the far eastern region of Angola and his blood-soaked body was displayed as a choir of flies flew festively around it.
By this time, America had no more use for him. Dictator Museveni might survive longer since the specter of terrorism looms large. Or maybe it may suddenly end in the manner that we awoke on November 9th, 1989, to find the Berlin Wall collapsing and all the US toadies, such as Mobutu and Savimbi, collapsing within years of the Berlin Wall’s fall.
This is no motte-and-bailey fallacy, which is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the “motte”) and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the “bailey”).
Instead, this is a true dichotomy which points to the fact that every African dictator gets his or her comeuppance. And Dictator Museveni knows this that is why he moves in a 36-car convey with soldiers everywhere like a man under siege.
Clearly, America is not the only one that “overestimates” itself.
Dictator Museveni overestimates himself if he believes he will protect himself from the fate that befell Savimbi et al.
It is only a matter of time before the chickens come home to roost and find Dictator Museveni cowering in the coop.
