Is Uganda moving from proletariat to militariat?

I guess you may have heard of the story (actually the act and fact) of the military patrolling the city. Since I no longer live in the city, I learnt about this fact through Daily Monitor.
Of course, the story, typical of covering of event currency and occurrence, made it look like an innocent story. Dear reader, this was not an innocent story: That the military has replaced the police in civil policing is a fundamental transition of the revolution. Scholars may even equate this to the January 26, 1986.
But we are Ugandans; at least I am. There must be a meaning behind the material meaning of the military presence on the streets. Has the security configuration been re-aligned in such a way that the military has taken over civil policing? If that be the case, what does it mean that the military has taken over the role (and roll) of civil policing?
A few weeks ago, I warned Ugandans to brace themselves for worse because the MI (Military Intelligence) had sort of taken over the traditional roles of CID and (the now defunct) Special Branch of the Uganda Police Force. Should Ugandans fear? Or how should Ugandans respond to this new phenomenon?
Is this one of state’s response to Gen Kale Kayihura’s departure from the police general headquarters? If so, the question to ask then is: To what extent did the said Gen Kayihura (as an individual) influence or impact the national security of the country?
As things stand now, one would be hard-put to tell how the state responds to crime, security and politics. We all have heard of the terms ‘joint operations’, ‘sister security agency’, have we not? In real terms, these words are thrown around to justify the military’s involvement in civil policing.
And our experience is that whenever (and wherever) the military is involved in arrests, there is a high likelihood that prosecution will fail to secure a conviction in courts of law.
The so-called sister security agencies tend to securitise what would have been a clear case of crime. And in the process, cloud the judgement of the prosecution to proceed on a clearly formal state attorney path.
I have written elsewhere thus: ‘The security industry is made of the Uganda Police Force (Police), the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF), the International security Organisation (ISO) and the External Security Organisation (ESO).
The primary function of the police is to keep law and order. The civil security agencies (ISO and ESO) are responsible for the collection of intelligence that frontline actors like the police, UPDF (and diplomats) would leverage into operational engagements.
Whereas civil security agencies may have better capabilities, the police remains the principal arresting agency of the State (please note that arrest is a purely administrative function with laid down procedures).
Under Gen Kayihura, the Uganda Police Force was obsessed with military jargon and verbiage. But ideally, the police deals with ‘information’ while security agencies and the military deal with ‘intelligence’. The Police’s mode of information sourcing, collection and use is different from that of the security agencies because the principal end user of the ‘information’ collected by the police is the courts of law.
So, you may ask yourself, when the military is on patrol in the city… do they also carry the powers to arrest? If they arrested you, where would they take you? To police custody for onward prosecution, or in some dark dungeon tagged safe house managed by MI?
To what extent will the Uganda Police Force be sidelined; even in their traditional role of civil policing? Are we moving from the proletariat of the people to the militariat of the state?

Mr Bisiika is the executive editor of East African Flagpost.