By Zacharia Kanyonyozi
The 19th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit is being held in Kampala, the 18th one was held in Azerbaijan.
The summit, which has been on from 15th to 20th January 2024 at Speke Resort Munyonyo, has been variously baptized as being short for NAMukwaya, NAMulindwa etc.
In America, NAM is generally known as being short for Vietnam. Or, simply put, America’s near-Waterloo where, according to the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files, there were 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War.
Neologism and wordplay aside, NAM has largely passed over Ugandan’s heads.
Not only were exhibition stalls for small-change local entrepreneurs being sold at thousands of dollars at Munyonyo, some estimates say stalls were going at $2000, Dictator Museveni arrived looking like he was on the verge of a stroke.
His wife, the Lady Macbeth-esque Janet Museveni, was holding him so much that you would initially think they were being romantic.
However, there is nothing romantic about Dictator Museveni’s authoritarian and fascist political system seeking to glorify the state and suppress individual rights.
In a comic turn of events, one NAM delegate beat security at the Kampala Serena Hotel in order to sample the exotic allure between the thighs of Ugandan ladies.
Sneaking out of his hotel room in the evening, he returned at dawn looking like he had been hit by a storm.
The soldiers assigned to watch over him like avenging angels were arrested for a dereliction of duty, as opposed to the NAM delegate’s booty duty.
Also, the leaders of NAM countries, upon arrival for the summit of the 120-member bloc, refused to be tested for COVID-19. It is believed that they did not want to leave their DNA in Uganda.
As you might be aware, “there are currently 2 ways to test for COVID-19 – a diagnostic test and an antibody test. In a diagnostic test, samples of cells and fluids from the nose or throat are often collected using a nasal swab, before the samples are processed by a machine which detects the virus’s genetic material.”
On the subject of military deployments in the city, we noticed that every road intersection, t-section, junction or roundabout within a 15-kilometer radius from Munyonyo, which is 9 kilometers away from Kampala Metropolitan, has soldiers deployed.
There were two soldiers and three police personnel deployed adjacent to the Rwanda embassy and about six at the British embassy, both embassies are in Kamwokya, a National Unity Platform party stronghold.
We must recall that the role of road intersections always remains the same: they are designed to facilitate the safe and efficient transfer of people between intersecting roads. So deploying there reduces mobility in the event of urban warfare.
Israeli architect and urban warfare scholar Eyal Weizman once said, “To control a city is to control the means of circulation through a city. To be able to move through it, to be able to get to everywhere you want to go, you need to keep the arteries open, or to make new arteries, by either planning or destruction or the interaction of both.”
We see then that the idea of such deployments was to control the means of circulation within the city.
As you know, the forces of change are everywhere in Kampala. To cut them off from each other was what the Museveni Junta was doing by such deployments.
Dictator Museveni, we might add, is such a control freak that any amounts of soldiers above a squad (which contains 7 to 14 soldiers and is led by a sergeant) are deployed personally by him.
This all to avoid what former vice president of Uganda Paulo Frobisher Muwanga Seddugge Muyanja would describe as “uncoordinated troop movements.”
