Dictator Museveni. Photo: Facebook.
[The View From Uganda]
The Dec. 16 election for the a powerful local council seat (LC 5 Chairperson’s seat) in Kayunga District is the latest sign that Gen. Yoweri Museveni’s illegitimate junta will stop at nothing to stay in power.
There were widespread cases of electoral malpractices involving: ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and arrest of National Unity Platform (NUP) polling agents in Bbaale, Kayonza, Kitimbwa, Kangurumira, Nazigo, Kayunga sub-counties and Kayunga town council, Kangulumira, Nazigo subcounty and Nazigo town council. These arrests prevented the polling agents from being at the precincts when the votes were counted.
The heavy deployment of security forces in Kayunga ensured that residents voted while peering down the barrel of a gun pointed at them in an attempt to deprive them of their right to choose the candidate of their choice.
Bobi Wine, the NUP leader whom many believe is the legitimately elected president of Uganda from the Jan. 14 general elections was placed under house arrest to prevent him from campaigning for Harriet Nakwedde, his party’s candidate for the LC5 seat. Dictator Museveni himself campaigned for the ruling National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) candidate Andrew Muwonge.
In another sign of Ugandans repudiating the dictator, Nakwedde won the election by more than 14,000 votes according to the privately-developed vote-counting app, Uvote. Yet, by the time the regime’s corrupt election “commission” announced the results the next day, Muwonge had 31,830 votes to Nakwedde’s 31,308. The commission’s election thieves were so lazy they couldn’t even come up with more credible numbers. The total votes awarded Nakwedde was created by changing the sequence of the last three numerals from Muwonge’s totals; from 830 for the NRM candidate to 308 for the NUP candidate. NUP is believed to have in its possession about 97% of the Declaration of Results forms; it would take a totally corrupt court not to toss out Muwonge’s concocted “victory.”
As the regime election theft unfolded, a police station was attacked in Kiboga district leaving two police officers dead at Nakasozi Police Post. If you do not see the connection of the police officers’ deaths and the violence meted out by Museveni’s security forces against NUP supporters in Kayunga—violence which left Mityana Municipality Member of Parliament Francis Zaake in hospital—I will show you the connection.
After NRM candidate Muwonge was fraudulently declared the winner of the Kayunga LC5 by-election the people of Kayunga rightly protested this daylight robbery. The security forces then swung into action. The Uganda Police revealed that over 81 people, including Members of Parliament, were arrested.
Sseizbwa regional police spokesperson, Hellen Butoto, said: “We picked credible intelligence about groups that were being mobilized to cause violence and disrupt the voting process.”
In reality, credible intelligence would point to none other than the regime’s security forces.
Clearly, Gen. Museveni is building up a case against Buganda region. He will soon declare that there are rebels all over Buganda, beginning with Kayunga and Kiboga. This will give him the justification he needs to put boots on the ground in Buganda in order to spread his own brand of domestic terrorism. We saw how he exterminated people in Acholi region over a 20 year period from 1986 to 2006 as documented in Ebony Butler’s “A Brilliant Genocide.”
The rigging of the January presidential election was so blatant that even Museveni’s puppet master, the U.S. rejected the outcome saying the vote was “neither free nor fair” and imposing targeted sanctions against Ugandan military and civilian officials whose names remain sealed.
Soon after the stolen January elections, for two months, in the Buganda region of Masaka, machete-wielding gangs killed over 30 people, mainly the elderly, in their homes at night. This was punishment to the people of Masaka for not voting for Gen. Museveni. Now Kayunga and other districts in Buganda will be attacked by regime agents and Gen. Museveni will call it opposition “terrorism.”
Gen. Museveni will blame the violence on NUP, in the same manner that he blamed Members of Parliament Muhammad Ssegirinya and Allan Sewanyana, NUP members, for the killings in Masaka.
In this war of attrition, other MPs from Buganda region belonging to NUP, will be arrested for the regime orchestrated violence in the region, such as the killing of the two police officers in Kiboga.
Gen. Museveni is pathologically obsessed with Buganda, the largest Ugandan region representing approximately 27% of Uganda’s population, for he knows how the region can be used as a springboard to his regime’s end. In the January vote the NUP party destroyed Museveni’s NRM in massively winning Parliamentary seats in Buganda.
Museveni believes that to survive he must bring the region to heel. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, a handbook for dictators and tyrants, that if a leader cannot be loved that leader must be feared. Machiavelli added that this fear must be a product of the leader’s cruelty, that way the prince uses terror as an instrument of rule.
Gen. Museveni, Machiavelli’s Prince, found out in the January elections that he is not loved at all when he lost elections despite using all the financial resources of the state in a campaign marked by violence which left scores of innocents dead.
Museveni will now target NUP-leaning Baganda in the same way he persecuted Ugandans in the north who saw early how wicked a man he is.
The rest of us are just waking up to his villainous ways. We shall only survive his junta if we actively and collectively eject this dictator.
In the interim, we must brace ourselves for a very bumpy road ahead.
Columnist Matogo can be reached via [email protected]
