Vincent Nuwagaba
In the wake of the A4C campaign, Your Excellence addressed a press conference at your country home Rwakitura. In the press conference which I viewed on TV a Daily Monitor journalist Tabu Butagira asked you whether there would be any possibility of talking with the opposition for purposes of ensuring post-election harmony. Immediately, Your Excellence said if it is about power sharing, you cannot because you won with a land slide and that you have a clear majority in parliament. This brings me to the paranoia about the A4C - what your spin doctors peddled i.e. that the opposition wanted to oust the “elected government”. And what appeared initially to be dismissed as a rumour was corroborated by Mao’s interview in the Observer. Norbert Mao’s revelation showed that he is not a person eaten up by intrigue. So, he said it. If nonviolent civil defiance aimed at change of an insensitive regime that has proved impossible to remove using elections, let the regime charge him with treason and the whole world knows about it.
I wrote in 2008 that what political scientists have called “Democracy Made in Africa” of power sharing is a threat to real democracy. I stated that I don’t expect either Besigye or Mao to enter a power-sharing agreement with you in case the 2011 election was flawed. Although I haven’t heard Besigye pronounce himself on power sharing, I am convinced that he may not be interested in sharing power with you. As for Mao, he made it clear on the CCEDU organised programme, Face the Citizens that sharing power with a dictator is like sharing a blanket with a hunch pack. Accordingly, Mr. President, rest assured that neither Besigye nor Mao not even Otunnu are ready for a power-sharing deal with you. On the contrary, it is the masses who “voted you” that need to share power with you. And here is how you share power with Ugandans: ensure social justice and promote Ugandans’ welfare like you swore to do on 12th May.
Mr. President, while you and some other admirers of yours including Uganda’s senior journalist Andrew Mwenda have often contended that you “won this election clean and square”, the facts prove otherwise. In the mid of the campaigns, Parliament passed a supplementary budget of more than 600 billion shillings. Soon after that, the then finance minister revealed that government was broke. You may not succeed in convincing many people that that money was not used by your party in the campaigns. There are also reports that several government and donor sources suggest you President Museveni and your ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party may have spent US$ 400 million. That’s close to 1trilion shillings!
Of course, there wasn’t an independent umpire too. I am not a mathematician but I understand that a wrong formula necessarily yields a wrong answer. Thus, a partisan; lopsided and handpicked Electoral Commission couldn’t deliver free and fair election results. What you sow is what you reap (Galatians 6:7).
That said, whether or not you won genuinely is irrelevant. Ugandans gave you a licence to become their trustee not to abuse the trusteeship by misplacing the country’s priorities. The 1.8 trillion ($740m) you misappropriated from the treasury to buy fighter jets at a time when “real enemy” is the opposition is enough to solve the problem of graduate unemployment. It is more than enough to equip health centres with drugs and equipment; it would sponsor over 10,000 students in universities for more than ten years. Accordingly, you need to deliver what Professor Rotberg calls political goods. We don’t feed on economic growth figures and per capita income figures because they don’t reflect the situation on the ground. Ugandans have now understood that they are citizens not subjects. For God and my country!
vnuwagaba@gmail.com
Mr. Nuwagaba is a human rights defender
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