Vincent
Nuwagaba
Faculty of Law,
Mak.
Cell: 0772843552
vnuwagaba@gmail.com
H.
E President Museveni
RE:
Abdication of your duties caked with naked sectarianism
This long letter comes from a human
rights defender who has suffered the wrath of dysfunctional state institutions
but is determined not to die at his knees but his toes. I will not enumerate
how many times I have been arbitrarily arrested, jailed and tortured. Right
now, I am undergoing malicious prosecution and the iconic professor
Oloka-Onyango who you have labeled an agent of disorientation knows the genesis
my ordeal. A university don in the faculty of law has written about the trials
and tribulations of Dr. Kizza Besigye, I guess someone will also write on the
trials and tribulations of Vincent Nuwagaba.
Your Excellency, you are a fountain
of honour. Thus, your office should be run in the most honourable manner,
should be above board and exemplary. I think this is what President Kagame
endeavours to do. Anyway, anyhow, we cannot continue to accept that you run Uganda at your
whims as though it is a family estate even when you are making it difficult for
university professors to sponsor their own children in a university where they
teach. How do you sanction the increment of tuition up to 126 percent and raise
civil servants salaries by a mere 5%. You wrote to me that the opposition has
no alternative now let me claim the opposition’s role. Your government must
adequately fund public educational institutions, pay lecturers well and extend
a subsidy to private universities because the students trained therein are not
private citizens but Ugandan citizens. You must get out of America’s
straightjacket which came in a package of Structural Adjustment Programmes
through the unholy trinity of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and
World Trade Organisation. We must be independent now. If it takes you labeling
me a politician not a human rights defender, so be it.
Personally, I wrote to you complaining
about tuition increment in Makerere
University. The reward I
got was to be sent to the University of understanding. I never gave up. I
brought a petition from a section of students and submitted it to the speaker
of parliament. I submitted a copy of that petition in your office. Now, students on statehouse scholarship at Makerere University
have done exams using chits from the Academic Registrar’s office that
statehouse will pay. This happens in the wake of hiking tuition in public
universities to the tune of 126%. Please read through the petition I personally
delivered in your office at parliament or ask for a copy from me. It is now as
plain as a nose on your face that you have chosen to toe a path that will keep
a few people in power and the majority of us in subjugation. Why can’t other students whose sponsors
commit to pay be allowed to sit exams with a balance? I wrote to you on 13th
August 2009 contesting tuition increment in public universities arguing instead
that government should increase funding to these universities. In my letter I
stated that it is ironical that non priority sectors such as statehouse and the
military always get supplementary funding yet education is not prioritised
choosing instead that the peasants should run the public educational
institutions through unaffordable fees.
I am writing to you to further remind
you that my boldness to tell you my mind led to my being tortured by the police
which you have militarized on 17 August after I had been denied my admission
letter simply because I had opposed your inhuman, undemocratic, fiendish and
invidious practice of sanctioning the increment of fees of up to 126 per cent.
Ultimately I was detained in Wandegeya police cells for two days and later
remanded to Luzira for a period of 15 days on trumped up charges.
You have always duped many of us
especially peasants that you went to the bush to liberate us. Kindly tell
Ugandans how, why, which and how many students get statehouse scholarships?
Where do they come from? I have been told that it is the children of the
veterans and fallen soldiers. If that is true, I demand the criterion followed
to award those scholarships because my dear uncle Lt Muhangi Theophillus RO
3881 died in the military service and I am burdened by his children despite the
fact that I am equally marginalised with good grades. Your Excellency, I
personally applied for a statehouse scholarship when I had been admitted for a
master’s degree because I thought I had a right to benefit from taxpayers’
money. But, why couldn’t I get it?
There is a document in one of the Runyakitara
papers which had the minutes of the alleged meeting that you had where it was
resolved that the Basiita rule for fifty years. In that document it is reported
that it was resolved that Salim Saleh goes back to school and gets a senior six
certificate; that Keinerugaba joins the military and that your ethnic people
join the army, police and key positions of responsibility. By ring-fencing
university education you are surely perfecting that mission. I know this time I
have touched the hottest button but I am ready to die on the frontline using my
brain through the pen and microphone than waging a senseless military battle
which will claim innocent Ugandans. I am ready to be charged with fanning sectarian
sentiments because I condemn your government’s sectarian practices. Good enough
you are immune to prosecution.
I haven’t done all my exams because I
have paid 60 percent of the fees because the money I had for paying was stolen
by your police officers when they came to show me that I am a subject and not a
citizen in my country; many sons and daughters of peasants have dropped out of
the courses they had been admitted for and you continue saying prosperity for
all! This time even the peasants should not listen to your hollow promises.
You may have forgotten the political
science you studied in Tanzania.
Thus, I have a duty to remind you that in the social contract theory, people
surrender some of the responsibilities into the Leviathan, a ruler at that but
they remain with the right to resist an oppressive and repressive leadership.
You are creating apartheid in Uganda and as
citizens we are duty-bound to oppose your character vehemently. I must say that
as a taxpayer, you and the beneficiaries of your corrupt and sectarian oligarchy
depend on us taxpayers but we don’t depend on you. Please respect our money.
You have said before that those who disagree with you should get plots of land
outside Uganda
as if they stay in your Rwakitura land; personally I will not and if you can
put me out of action please do. I don’t know whether your government kills
although I was about to meet my creator from April to July and I made you know
that. But if it does, none of us is immortal. The difference will be that if I
am put out of action I will leave a legacy akin to that of Dr. Martin Luther Jr
King. Please order Major Gen. Kayihura and his boys to keep away from me as all
they get from me is international ridicule. But anyway, Uganda under
Museveni has lost a sense of shame. Otherwise, I would expect resignation after
many have been blacklisted in The Book of
Fame and Shame by ACCU.
Finally, your government must rescind
the fees increment and increase funding to the university.
For God and My country!
Yours,
Vincent
Nuwagaba
Human
rights defender and LLB 1 Student
Contact: +256772 843 552/ +256702 843
552/ +256712 843 552
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