The Ugandan public and other watchers of Uganda are now dumbfounded. There is simply no commentary weighty enough to adequately explain the direction that events are taking in Uganda.
First reported by the Red Pepper the previous week and (unbelievably), picked up by the Sunday Vision March 9, 2008, was the story of how a daughter of Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa had been awarded the contract to handle Uganda's national petroleum reserves.
Is this the new height of nepotism to which we are now rising, having already broken all records in corruption, many are wondering?
These are not chance events. What we are seeing in Uganda is nothing but the culmination of a philosophy that was put into shape by Yoweri Museveni when he started what he calls his "struggle against dictatorship" in Uganda in the early 1970s- the law of rule rather than the rule of law.
The mistake we all made was to think that the original ideology of the NRM was Marxism-Leninism and that, somehow, after 1986 they embraced free enterprise Capitalism. The truth is; the ideology was something hideous called Nihilism.
The abuse of power, the abnormal level of corruption, wholly without precedent in Uganda's pre- and post-independence history, the resort to remorseless brutality in dealing with one's enemies and the complete discarding of morality except where it serves the purpose of flattering the gullible and naïve population, is the definition of the NRM. That is the central NRA political belief system.
This political philosophy, termed "nihilism", is the most virulent and cynical form there is. As defined by the 1986 edition of Webster's New World Dictionary, nihilism is "the doctrine that existing social, political, and economic institutions must be completely destroyed in order to make way for new institutions."
In further defining this dark philosophy, Webster says nihilism is a "violent revolutionary movement" that advocates "revolutionary reform and [attempts] to carry it out through the use of some terrorism and assassination."
The evidence has been there all along, only that we seem unable to make the connections. Typical of we lowly, naïve, uncritical Africans, we don't read enough, know enough, analyse enough, grasp enough, and so we are always prey for easy manipulation.
Outrageous statements by senior NRA and NRM officials have been made from the very beginning. They are almost too numerous to list.
Why are Baganda and other Ugandans taken aback by the statement in parliament earlier this week by General David Tinyefuza regarding the land claimed by Buganda? Are we this simple, we forget within a matter of years? Was it not Tinyefuza that commanded the brutal NRA operations in Acholi and Lango in 1991 as Minister of State for Defence?
Appearing before the Uganda Human Rights Commission in August 1987, the then head of the Army Political School at Entebbe, Kajabagu Ka-Rusoke said: "The people [of Uganda] are the peasants, farmers, workers, and a few intellectuals. The rest are ‘biological substances.'" He added: "We don't count those who oppose us as people." So horrified was one of the commissioners, John Nagenda, that he burst out, "Stop!... It is absurd that such a person with this thinking is training the country's soldiers."
What Nagenda was unable to see then and now was that Ka-Rusoke was reflecting the thinking of the NRA.
Want to understand the square miles of land owned by certain army generals and the case of the president's in-laws getting the deal for the petroleum reserves?
Listen to President Museveni's own son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, then aged 22, delivering a paper titled, "The basis of conflict" on December 30, 1996, at Kabale Senior Secondary School. "We shall never have lasting peace unless the state and government come under the control of those who have a bigger stake in it; that is, those who have accumulated a lot of property." This story was published by the Daily Monitor a few days later.
As millions of deceived Ugandans were still celebrating the new NRM regime, The Citizen newspaper, affiliated to the Democratic Party, in an editorial on October 17, 1986 commented: "Among the most ‘important' news items this week was the revelation that there were mass graves in northern Uganda of some ‘chaps' whom ‘we' had massacred."
On June 27, 1991, a Swedish newspaper, Svenskadagbladet, had this story on Uganda: "Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, is covered with terror...One can be arrested any time and disappear or end up into Lubiri barracks or Nakasero or Basiima House to the specialists of torture." But still, Uganda and the world remained under the illusion of a glorious new era under the NRM.
This dark combination- the ability to do so much and at the same time get away with so much and leave millions of people still unable to see through the deception- is the single most frightening achievement of Museveni's NRM regime.
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