Uganda’s Petite Dictator Muhoozi, Son of Gen. Museveni Terrified by Red Berets

Gen. Muhoozi

Dictator Gen. Museveni and his son petite dictator Gen. Kainerugaba. Photo: Facebook.

First some global history. 

On October 15, 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in the USA. This was four years after Uganda’s independence and a year before the Argentina-born hero of the Cuban revolution Che Guevara was killed. Both Guevara’s death and Uganda’s birth happened on October 9. 

Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana; his father was a sharecropper and a minister. In college, Newton read Marx, Lenin, and, especially Malcolm X, then studied the revolts of the enslaved Africans Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser. Seale, who was born in Dallas, served four years in the Air Force and worked in a sheet metal plant. 

Together Newton and Seale drafted a 10-point political manifesto (unlike the Uganda’s ruling National Resistance Movement’s bogus 10-point “program”) calling for self-determination of Black communities, full employment, restitution for enslavement, and the release of Black prisoners. The two wore berets, “Because they were used by just about every struggler in the Third World. They’re sort of an international hat for the revolutionary.”

Now let’s move to Uganda where, bizarrely, our very own version of Uday Hussein, Lt. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, accused People Power leader Robert Kyagulanyi, a.k.a. Bobi Wine, of “copying” his red beret. For those who need a refresher in history, Uday was the notorious “petite dictator” of Iraq while his father senior dictator Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti ran the country. Muhoozi is the spoiled son of Ugandan dictator Gen. Yoweri Museveni. 

So petite dictator Gen. Muhoozi claims to have invented the red beret with his uncle Gen. Salim Saleh, dictator Museveni’s brother. We shall return to this lunacy later. First, a look at how the U.S. destroyed the emerging freedom fighters in Black communities. 

As part of a counter-intelligence program known as COINTELPRO, created by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover, a confidential memo said: “The purpose of this counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black Nationalist, hate-type organizations….” Hoover was out to “prevent the rise of a messiah who would unify, and electrify, the militant Black Nationalist movement.” 

Hoover added the Panthers to his list as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This is similar to what Gen. Museveni’s government has done with the People Power Movement which has galvanized the entire country to demand for change. Before and after this year’s presidential elections, hundreds of National Unity Platform (NUP)/People Power followers were kidnapped and detained in Makindye military barracks.

The People Power political movement even unveiled a video recording linking Uganda police in the shooting and sudden death of Dan Kyeyune in Nansana Municipality on February 25, 2020. Gen. Museveni then claimed that NUP was being used as a cover for “imperialist forces” led by gay pride activists in the USA. He thereby implied that defeating NUP was really defeating foreign infiltration. Nonsensical utterances from an African president whose regime is sustained by financing from the U.S., the U.K., and the EU and whose military is trained and armed by the Americans. 

Now we understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he made his famous pronouncement that, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Let’s also recall how the South African racist Apartheid regime once accused the African National Congress (ANC) and other African liberation forces of being infiltrated by foreigners; in their case they claimed it was communists allegedly hell-bent on subverting South Africa’s sovereignty.

In the book “Inside B.O.S.S.” by former South African spy during the Apartheid era Gordon Winter, the author quotes Hendrik Johan van den Bergh, the founder of the Bureau of State Security (B.O.S.S.), on the tactics of B.O.S.S. They included hit squads, torture, assassinations, and smear campaigns against the Apartheid regime’s enemies. Van den Bergh once told a government commission, “I have enough men to commit murder if I tell them to kill. I don’t care who the prey is. These are the type of men I have.”

Shifting the blame away from the odious Apartheid system did not save the regime in the end. 

Here in Uganda, Gen. Museveni’s son, the dauphin, Gen. Muhoozi, thinks the challenge he and his father the senior dictator face are red colored berets and not utter contempt by the masses for 35 years of dictatorship. He is not a student of history and is using his own childish approach to deprive the red beret of its rightful place in the global struggle for freedom.

Petite dictator Muhoozi foolishly believes that the beret is the source of Bobi’s power. It reminds me of a comical episode in the U.S. The 1975 Frank Church Committee, a Senate Select Committee studying U.S. Intelligence operations found that the CIA plotted to plant soluble thallium sulphate inside Castro’s shoes so that his beard would fall off. These wise spies believed without his beard Castro would lose his power and become “the laughing stock of the socialist world.” 

To believe Castro would lose power without his beard recalls the episode of Samson’s hair in the Bible. If Gen. Muhoozi cared to read some history on revolutionary warfare, he would learn what van den Bergh, and other state operatives learned the hard way: Revolutions whose time has come cannot be deferred. 

While Muhoozi is contemplating ways of banning the red beret in Uganda, he should heed these words told to the journalists in 1996 by the late President Milton Obote: “Museveni will fall, and fall badly.”  

The columnist can be reached via [email protected] 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *