Gen. Lokech. Will he used the tactics used to fight militias in Somalia against unarmed Ugandan civilians?
Uganda seems to sit on a powder keg—an explosion is imminent.
Last week alone, a number of atrocious acts were committed by the regime in the name of “democratic governance”. A bodyguard of leading Ugandan presidential challenger and Member of Parliament Bobi Wine was killed and two journalists were injured.
This all happened amid violent attacks by Ugandan security forces against followers of Bobi Wine. The singer-cum-revolutionary seeks to upset President Yoweri Museveni in a contest for the presidency on Jan. 14. Museveni has held power since 1986.
Bobi Wine’s party is known as the National Unity Platform (NUP), while Museveni’s party is the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM). A distraught Bobi Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, said his bodyguard died of his injuries after allegedly being run over by a truck belonging to the military police, which the military later denied.
Bobi Wine’s bodyguard, Francis Senteza, was attacked while helping to transport a journalist who’d been injured in a confrontation between police and a group of NUP supporters. Then, there was more tragedy. Journalist Ashraf Kasirye of “Ghetto Media” was shot. Kasirye was rushed to Masaka Referral Hospital where he is currently in critical condition (earlier reports had indicated that he had died). Ghetto Media is one of the outlets that the regime, in a letter to Google, asked the tech giant to block. “Comrade Ashraf Kasirye (Ghetto Media) has been shot. He is in a critical condition. Doctors are doing their best to save his life,” Bobi Wine posted on his socials earlier.
It all started as Bobi Wine was leaving Our Lady of Sorrows Cathedral, Kitovu, in Masaka city, where he had gone to pray. Eyewitnesses say the army and police, including some men in plain clothes, opened fire with live rounds as hundreds of people waited for Bobi Wine outside church.
We knew when newly-appointed Deputy Inspector General of Police Maj. Gen. Paul Lokech took the reins, that Museveni was sending a clear message that many Ugandans must be ready to die if they wish to wrest power from him. Lokech will not disappoint. He is a man with a harrowing past. He allegedly physically attacked a woman senior traffic police officer, ASP Ruth Kyobutungi, on Namugongo Road, Kira Municipality in Wakiso District in May this year. The incident happened near Club Agenda 2000. The major general, who was dressed in mufti or civilian garb, allegedly lost his cool when stopped for an alleged traffic infraction, stormed out of his official car, slapped the senior traffic officer on duty, and allegedly drew out his firearm.
Gen. Lokech was later detained at Kampala Central Police Station. It took the intervention of Kampala Metropolitan police commander Moses Kafeero to resolve the matter as ASP Ruth Kyobutungi had threatened to sue her assailant.
Lokech is known as “lion of Mogadishu” because, in Somalia, he was reputedly known to break skulls and ask questions later. An efficiently ruthless man, Lokech has now been deployed on the police force because we all expect an Armageddon-like battle between the forces of revolution and change versus the reactionary forces seeking to preserve the corrupt status quo. Will the lion feast on Ugandans?
The U.S. provides Uganda with more than $900 million in annual support and several legislators have called for sanctions against seven army officers for human rights abuses leading to the January election.
Meantime, the “aftermathematics” of the elections will point to a demand-pull inflation as demand sails north and supply trips south to reveal prices of goods and services gone through the rafters. While most of us feel the pinch, investors will enjoy a boost if they can charge more for their products as a result of a surge in demand for their goods. In other words, inflation can provide investors with pricing power and increase their profit margins.
The problem here, as the erudite Member of Parliament Nandala Mafabi once observed, is that these investors are 10% of the population. Yet they own 90% of economy. And so the rich are bound to get richer while the poor are further disinherited.
This spells doom, according to a book by Walter Scheidel entitled, “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.” Economic inequality, he writes, has historically only been rectified by one of the “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: warfare, revolution, state collapse and plague.
“For more substantial leveling to occur, the established order needs to be shaken up,” he says. “The greater the shock to the system, the easier it becomes to reduce privilege at the top.”
Demographic transformations will add to this pressure-cooker situation, in light of the youth being 78% of a population which is largely unemployed. The youth are also the ones who desire change most. That said, we can forestall this denouement. What we need is inspiration, from wherever we can get it.
It is only through inspiration that we shall defeat gloom to give room to where we want to be tomorrow. Before that, we can share our lows only as a means to glimpsing our highs from the point at which we shall take off.
Here’s an inspirational low with a good ending:
It’s 2000. Barrack Obama has traveled to the 2000 Democratic National Convention, just a few months after he had lost the Democratic primary to represent Illinois’ first congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives by around 30 percentage points.
“I fly out there on whatever connecting flight that was the cheapest and get to the rent-a-car place and present my credit card and the credit card’s rejected,” Obama remembered. “No more money.”
His hall pass only allowed him to explore the hallways and perimeter of the auditorium. He couldn’t see anything.
“My friend would try to get me into some of the after-parties after the convention and bouncers would be standing there saying, ‘Who’s this guy?’ And ‘He doesn’t have the right credentials.’”
In 2004, Senator Obama’s political career took off on a rocket ship at the Democratic National Convention, when his keynote address made him a household name. The rest, as they say, is history.
The columnist can be reached via [email protected]
