The ghost, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, hopes to step into his tyrant father’s shoes. Photo: Facebook.
[My Free Thoughts]
Kakawenza Rukirabashaija
Ugandan dictator Gen. Yoweri Museveni’s misanthropic presidency since 1986 will forever be remembered in our history as a badge of national pain, misfortune and deliberate ruination. That is if we ever step out of these despicable ruins he has created, alive to celebrate some other person’s ascendency to power.
The former Museveni won hearts of many and ascended to the presidency 36 years ago while preaching the end to corruption, extrajudicial murder, torture, maladministration, nepotism, inequality, extravagant spending and among other solvable factors that are responsible for the abyss in which we are plunged as a country. Little did many know that we were coddling a snake and now the real person whose character we barely knew has obviously done worse than the predecessors that he admonished.
Arguably, we can now exonerate his predecessors and bring it to Museveni’s attention that his cause was simply a deceptive song of the hungry with naked desires and sharp teeth to eat like a glutton, but shaped as a liberation struggle.
He has twice offended the constitutional obligation to relinquish power and all the time subdued Ugandans with insufferable violence, terror and pogroms—in order to consolidate power. You will all agree that if it wasn’t violence and abrogation of the constitution, Museveni wouldn’t be president now.
As Yoweri Museveni nears the inevitable moribund stage of life, we can clearly see the simulacrum of him in his curmudgeon son, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who by infection and lack of intellectual acuity and virtues of a leader, could protract and wire-draw the carnage and shambles.
A story is told of a ghost that was chasing a woman in the darkest forest and then the night lost the battle to the day spontaneously; the beams of sun began to illuminate through the forest and the haunted woman breathed a sigh of relief. The ghost which was discombobulated at the spontaneous day break stood over yonder and then said; “You have been able to escape from me tonight but there are more other nights and I will surely get you kekekeke.” You can imagine the facial expression of the hopeful ghost, laughing hysterically.
The point is that, we might escape from Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s presidency but fall into more other pandemonium since his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who has been, for years, molded and groomed to carry on with the barbarism—is warming up like the proverbial ghost waiting for another night to attack.
My philosophy for life comes from storytelling and it is through such expression that I see the antidote of impunity. I have got enough punishment at the hands of Yoweri Museveni and his son Muhoozi because of using literature as a means of social protest to expose impunity but I will not stop until we enjoy the fruits of freedom in the pearl of Africa—Uganda.
The joy of freedom will elude us if we fold our hands in despair, like spectators, while the ghost, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, lurks around like a vulture or voracious hyena, to scavenge from the ruins of his father’s dead presidency.
Every Ugandan including the rich like Patrick Bitature and Robert Kabushenga and what have you, are presently scrimping to eke out a living and pay bills and or debts. The appalling poverty is scattered everywhere and everyone is debt ridden including the government that we look up to, to extricate us out of the impoverishment in which we are enmeshed.
Sadly, the substantial impoverishment is caused by the same government we look up to.
Muhoozi Kainerugaba has been an enabler of the ruins of Gen. Museveni’s presidency and a glorifier of the same. His aspirations apparently to take over from his father are not to do anything differently but to prolong his father’s kleptocratic gerontocracy. Ugandans must be aware and say no to such kind of madness that is growing feathers.
Ugandan novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija is a Scholar on Writers in Exile Program of PEN-Zentrum Deutschland.
He is the author of The Greedy Barbarian, a novel which explores themes of high-level corruption in a fictional country, and Banana Republic: Where Writing Is Treasonous, an account of the torture he was subjected to while in detention in Uganda in 2020. In 2021, he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for an International Writer of Courage–he was again tortured that year.
Full profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakwenza_Rukirabashaija
