Speak Out : Silence Breeds Insecurity!!

The mood of fear has once again reasserted itself in Ugandan society. When I wrote the long article last month explaining the fact --- and it is a fact --- that the 1994 Rwandan genocide was masterminded by the RPF, and not by the Habyarimana government, I got many SMS from frightened people either saying "We are praying for you" or "Thanks for your brave article, but these boys (the RPF, that is) are dangerous. They will come for you." Most of the feedback coming in this week in response to the articles on Maj. Gen. James Kazini's murder bears that tone. It is either "Please don't quote me", "My prayers are with you" or "Are you safe?" It is interesting that the public, both in Uganda and in Rwanda, view the "new breed" of African leaders like Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni in that light. They don't warn that Kagame or Museveni will out-reason or out-think a person who challenges them, but rather, they express their fears that these two democratically elected leaders will murder. Where does this general impression of them come from, that to challenge these two men will or can lead to certain death? What does the public know about them that it is too afraid to say? This, in itself, is a clue to the true history of the NRA and the RPF and their leaders. Before I can reply to those questions, I would like to turn the question back to you in the general public: "Are you safe, yourselves?" Why do people have this belief that, somehow, by keeping quiet and being afraid of the state, they are any more safe than the loud mouths who openly take Museveni on? When the Kampala lawyer Robinah Kiyingi was murdered (not by her husband), how many of us had ever heard of her? She probably had never bothered to vote in her entire life and was very much the civil society type. That did not prevent her being cruelly gunned down by You-Know-Who. This belief that one is safe by keeping one's mouth shut, never challenging the state, never speaking out against the abuse of office and the murders, is one of the false beliefs that most people have. Journalist Andrew Mwenda, earlier this year, published in his Independent magazine a cover story titled "First Family rule in Uganda." That Friday, a boiling hot and angry Museveni, in a meeting with his family at State House, vowed that he was going to arrest Mwenda. It has been several months now and Mwenda has still not been arrested. On the occasion that Mwenda was arrested in 2005, he came out of jail after a week and life went on, and still goes on. In Oct. 2006, Andrew Mwenda and I had a shoot-out with Museveni's son-in-law Odrek Mugisha Rwabwogo, when Rwabwogo wrote an article in the Daily Monitor angrily hitting back at Mwenda for his Aug. 31, 2006 article in the Sunday Monitor titled "Is the First Family Fleecing Uganda?" I joined in that exchange of fire and said I agreed with Mwenda that this family is, indeed, fleecing Uganda. I got a phone call from the then Daily Monitor Managing Director Conrad Nkutu who told me that my rejoinder to Mwenda, after Rwabwogo had attacked us, had caused "upheaval" at State House and State House was threatening to sue the Daily Monitor. We have never been sued and the Daily Monitor was not shut down. Nkutu told us at a meeting at the Daily Monitor of how he would get phone calls threatening to kidnap his children from their school, because of the courageous stand he was taking as the newspaper's chief executive. Those children were never kidnapped. The day my rejoinder was published, a Daily Monitor journalist Simon Kasyate was coming from the Sheraton Kampala Hotel when he met Museveni's son, Major Muhoozi Kainerugaba driving a pickup truck and coming from State House. Kainerugaba looked at Kasyate and in exasperation exclaimed: "Simon!" Kasyate, who is sympathetic to the First Family and who sensed that Kainerugaba wanted action taken against me, explained that these were the views of nut cases like me at the Daily Monitor. Later, Museveni was airborne and flying to China when he got a call from his daughter Patience Rwabwogo, upset at the way I had humiliated her husband Odrek by telling Daily Monitor readers that for all his corporate and privileged image, shame on him for he does not pay his employees at his media agency TERP. Patience Rwabwogo, accustomed to the First Family having their way in everything, must still be wondering why her father was unable to respond to her demand for the Daily Monitor to be closed because of my article. Answer to Patience Rwabwogo: your father may be great, but he is not God and the fact that he is not God makes all the difference in the world. Incidentally, when I visited the Independent magazine in June, Andrew Mwenda told us of how Museveni now spends much of his time surrounded by fortune tellers, soothsayers, and medicine men. These people, Mwenda said, are taking Museveni through rituals, chantings, and other activities. Mwenda said that while in the past, these rituals were done secretly, today they are done in full view of Museveni's PGB bodyguards. He is made to crawl on the ground, a soothsayer sits on his lap, and so on. It sounds like a scene from a Nigerian movie, but this is happening right here, right now, at State House. You can imagine the amount of fear that Museveni lives with. He knows. He knows what is coming. The Seer I often write and talk about says that Kagame also asks his aides to consult for information on the future and the unknown. So, just as we are all afraid of our leaders, they too are terrified of the unknown. Meanwhile, as our civic society continues to believe that silence will secure their lives, thousands of innocent civilians, most of whom had never voted in their lives and had nothing whatsoever to do with politics, perished in gruesome massacres masterminded by Yoweri Museveni in Luwero, Teso, and Acholi in Uganda, and by Paul Kagame in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994 in Congo from 1996 to 1999. If the argument that one is safe or safer by keeping quiet, how come these innocent and helpless civilians died and yet I have never been arrested? I notice that nobody writes to contest the facts or claims in these reports. Most readers seem to know that we are dealing with mass murderers for heads of state. That they generally do not contest. All they do is urge caution, express their fears for my life, or say their prayers are with me. So, to reply to this Frequently Asked Question "Are you safe?", yes I am safe. As I wrote on Wednesday and as I wrote many times in my former Saturday column in the Daily Monitor, the people we are most afraid of, mainly Yoweri Museveni, his brother Caleb Akandwanaho, and Museveni's wife Janet Museveni actually live in incredible fear. They live haunted, nightmarish lives. Fear stalks them daily, in whatever they do and wherever they go. This you should know, completely, as Idi Amin used to say. If you watched the wedding on live TV in Aug. 1999 of Buganda's Kabaka Ronald Mutebi and Sylvia Nagginda, you might have noticed something unusual. The bride delayed in her arrival at St. Paul's Cathedral Namirembe and so hundreds of dignitaries and other invited guests waited, among whom were President Museveni and the First Lady Janet Museveni. At some point, as they sat, waiting, a soldier of the Presidential Guard Brigade (PGB) walked over to Museveni with a message which he delivered in a whisper to his ear. As soon as the soldier got near Museveni, the president almost fell off his chair and onto the ground, before he glanced behind him and realized it was one of his own guards. That is how much fear stalks Uganda's head of state, that even when he is seated in the quiet pews of a church, next to his wife, his instincts are always to fear. During last month's 47th Independence Day anniversary celebrations at Kololo Airstrip in Kampala, as Museveni was inspecting the military guard of honour, at one point, at 11:40a.m., the ceremonial police Landrover came to a stop. Museveni seemed uncertain about why it had stopped and clearly visible and written all over his face, at that moment at 11:40a.m., live on national television, was the look of great fear. Museveni lives in extreme fear, this you should know, completely. That is why he has one of the largest personal bodyguards of any leader in the world. I wrote in a news story on Nov. 11 in the Uganda Record that after the murder of Lt. Col. Jet Mwebaze, the hand behind the murder, Salim Saleh, was haunted almost to the point of mental breakdown by nightmares and what he said was the spirit of Mwebaze tormenting him. He tried to get a soothsayer or medium to perform some rituals at the graveside of Mwebaze in Nakaseke, to appease this spirit that was tormenting him. A man who visited Saleh's home near Entebbe in 2008 said he saw Saleh seated all alone, by the lakeside, deep in thought, appearing to be troubled. These are tormented, haunted, deeply frightened people, bordering on insanity. I would like to ask my own Frequently Asked Question to the tens of thousands of Ugandans and other people who read this website: "Why are you so afraid of your leaders?" Official statistics show that the vast majority of people in Uganda are Christians, both traditional Anglican and Roman Catholic as well as the new Evangelical or "born again" churches, and Muslims. If then we are a nation full of people who follow the great historic faiths of Christianity and Islam, the faiths, along with Judaism, that Islam refers to as the "people of the book", the people of the faiths that descended from the patriarch Abraham, if we claim to be followers of the one true and eternal God, why do we live in such fear? The Evangelical Christians take it one step further and insist that theirs is not simply ritualistic, church-going religion like that of the Anglicans and Catholics, but a powerful experience of a personal relationship with the Messiah Christ Jesus in which they are infused with the Holy Spirit. These Evangelical churches have sprung up all over Uganda since 1984 when Kampala Pentecostal Church was founded. "Born again" Christians are to be found in almost every segment of Ugandan society, from the media to the civil service, the armed forces, the diplomatic services, education, the corporate world, entertainment, and business. Many, including Janet Museveni and her daughter Patience Rwabwogo, Gen. Elly Tumwine, and others are prominent at the national political level. So, with all these "balokole" in high and low places, why do we not feel their impact as the nation sinks deeper into a spiral of corruption, abuse of public office and public funds, and these political murders such as that of Maj. Gen. James Kazini on Tuesday Nov. 10? Why are the "born again" Christians so afraid to speak out as all these dark events are taking place? Why is Uganda's effective head of state a military officer called "General Fear"? And why is the superstitious person, an irrational person, one who visited a Seer rather than tune in to the BBC for news analysis, the one that seems to be unafraid of Museveni? While many Ugandans went about their daily business, chasing after money, "further studies", shopping, watching English Premiership football matches, and going to church religiously, I decided that I had to investigate the evil that has cast a shadow of death over the Great Lakes region. The fact that so many people, with MBAs from prestigious business schools in the western world, with PhDs, with military cadet training, with a good family upbringing, regular churchgoers, members of civil society and academia, despite all their academic qualifications, secure financial balance sheets, respectable social status, frequent-flier privilege, and solid property can still live their lives in daily fear of the Museveni types, means then that money, elite education, connections, financial security and all the other trappings of a modern, successful, middle class life are not sufficient. We need something more. Something deeper. A deeper, much, much deeper understanding of God, life, time, and truth that your standard KPC, All Saints Cathedral, Miracle Centre Cathedral, or Christ the King Church seem unable to provide. If there is any investment we must all make or try to make, it is not in our RAV 4s or plots of land, or the so-called "further studies" that leave us as ignorant upon our return from London or New York as we went there, or in electronic consumer goods, if there is any investment worth our time and money, it surely must be in information. We must get to know. We must find out what is going on, both in the area of political developments, but also in the high spiritual realm. That higher understanding of the spiritual basis of life is the true Universal Primary Education that will start us along the path to freedom. We need to get back to the Garden of Eden and to the Tree of the knowledge of good an evil. We must understand the nature of evil, its power, its limitations, and where it will all end. I had to investigate the nature of this evil itself, where it comes from, the spiritual forces behind it, is any, and what countermeasures can be taken against it. So, do I fear? Yes I “fear”...for Museveni.[hahahahahha] This article is attributed to Mr.Timothy Kalyegira whose contribution to putting our national pressing issues in the lime light can’t be under estimated.