The killer and the musician. Gen. Museveni welcomes AKON. Photo: Twitter.
[My Free Thoughts]
The Senegalese-American entertainer Aliaune Damala Badara Akon Thiam, also popularly known on international scene as AKON, has been recently rubbing shoulders with Uganda’s blood-thirsty dictator Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
During his recent visit to Uganda with kleptocrat Museveni, AKON flew around in military helicopters, visiting national parks, the impenetrable forests for Gorilla tracking, took pictures with several Ugandan women. AKON met several government officials whose track record on human rights violations and swindling of tax payers speak for itself.
AKON is being widely denounced on social media as a sell-out who is helping to whitewash a genocidal regime under a dictator of 35 years, Museveni. The regime is currently carrying out a campaign of abductions, and murders, widely covered by international media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets.
AKON purportedly plans to invest in building a modern business-friendly metropolis called AKON City in Uganda, although skeptics say it’s just a public relations stunt by him and the Museveni regime.
AKON jetted into the country with his third wife, Rozina Negusei, and a party of public relations agents, photographers and bouncers. In addition to meeting the dictator, Museveni, who is in the process of stealing the Jan. 14 election, AKON also met foreign affairs minister Sam Kutesa. In 2018, a Hong Kong official named Patrick Ho was convicted in U.S. federal court of bribing Museveni and Kutesa $1 million as a downpayment for more future bribes, in return for oil and other business concessions in Uganda for a Chinese company. During Ho’s trial Museveni’s and Kutesa’s enlarged photos were displayed in the courtroom as U.S. Exhibits 1510 and 1504 respectively.
Is AKON aware that he’s dealing with con artists at the highest level? Since Ho was arrested by the FBI in 2017 at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, Museveni and Kutesa have not returned to the U.S. and both missed the UN General Assembly in 2018 and 2019, way before the Covid outbreak.
Maybe the polygamist Senegalese-American rapper is aware that he is dealing with a thief and murderer but hopes that he can beat Museveni at his own game and con him. Maybe he’s naive and is unaware. Either they will rip him off or he will steal from them.
Ugandans on social media will continue to denounce AKON as aiding and abetting a blood-thirsty tyrant.
The columnist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija can be reached via [email protected] He’s a victim of abduction and torture by the Museveni regime.
