By Zacharia Kanyonyozi
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
Donald Trump and Joe Biden fielded questions on a wide range of election issues in a televised CNN presidential debate in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, last week.
It was the first presidential debate in this election cycle. And, by wide consensus, Biden’s showing was a stutter-step.
The president seemed out of his depth, even against a non-debater like The Donald.
This is reminiscent of the 2012 presidential election.
Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the team behind the book ‘Game Change,’ chronicled the 2012 presidential election in their 2013 book, Double Down.
They show us how last week’s debate has shades of the 2012 debate matchup between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
By all accounts, Obama lost the first presidential debate against Romney almost as badly as Biden did against Trump.
Here’s what the book ‘Double Down’ states:
“Obama was nowhere in the vicinity of panic. ‘You ever known me to lose two in a row?’ he said to friends to calm their nerves.
The president’s advisers were barely more rattled. Yes, Denver had been atrocious. Yes, it had been unnerving. But Obama was still ahead of Romney, the sky hadn’t fallen, and they would fix what went wrong in time for the town-hall debate at Hofstra. Their message to the nervous Nellies in their party was: Keep calm and carry on.”
The Obama team seemed at a loss as to what they would do to remedy a bad situation that was getting worse. Obama was uncharacteristically inarticulate and tetchy.
His passion was on the wane and his excuses were piling up: he seemed to be cold product.
It would appear to most that Biden is today in similar straits.
However, this is a good sign. For this is a test.
It is not only a test to Biden. It is a test to the USA’s democracy.
That’s because it shows both their feet of clay and how these feet may still have a democratic leg to stand on, if they are willing to try again.
Could Uganda withstand such a test?
Dictator Museveni, as former president Milton Obote once said on the Ugandan radio talk show ‘Andrew Mwenda Live’, is not a debater.
This is why his many opponents have been jailed for having dissenting views. Others killed and others tortured.
Satirist and award-winning writer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija has evidence of this torture etched permanently into his body.
“The scars are not painful, but they trigger trauma whenever I am in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. So I decided to turn off the light when I shower to avoid seeing them,” says the satirical writer, who was in July last year given the Václav Havel award for creative dissent.
“It is true that some people were tortured. I have not confirmed on that one (Kakwenza), but I have confirmed some other cases, and I took it up,” Dictator Museveni said in 2022.
Adding, “You see, part of the problems of Africa is capacity building, we are building armies and security forces. These sometimes come with traditional ideas from the village or they get imported ideas from the former colonialists.”
As you can see from his train of thought, Dictator Museveni is out of his depths in explaining the evil his Junta wrought.
What’s saddening is that Uganda needs debaters more than the USA does. That’s because our institutions are absent and in the USA they actually work.
So we need enlightened leaders at the top who can help redress this lacuna with the rational thought that characterizes good debate.
Accordingly, by having Dictator Museveni (who the fuddy-duddy Biden would destroy in debate) at the helm; we risk Uganda being sent back to the Dark Ages.
