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Is there really a foreign threat to Uganda?
Our elections will be peaceful, nobody is going to disrupt us. I have heard people here playing games with foreigners backing them. Well, I wish them luck but I can assure you, we shall not tolerate violence, we shall have peaceful elections,” President Museveni tweeted recently.
However, the million dollar question must be asked: who are these people “playing games with foreigners backing them”?
Are they the ones who gunned down 50 unarmed Ugandans recently? Or are they the security personnel we hear in the small hours of the morning jogging in military formation while “calling cadence” through army song?
Also, are the Rwandans, Chinese or Americans behind those “playing games”?
For one, we know, the Ugandan government also relies on its own foreign collaborators to underwrite the regime’s survival. If it didn’t, America would’ve looked for a more reliable partner to secure its interests in the region.
As an upshot of this, our government has become a comprador entity as trustee of foreign interests.
However, let’s go beyond the obvious. We’ve been to this rodeo before.
Morgan Tsvangirai was accused of toadying to foreign interests by Robert Mugabe as a means to escalating repression and stamping out dissent in Zimbabwe. This is every African dictator’s go-to.
So the State’s bogus invocation of patriotism against foreign interests reminds me of the saying: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
We are not fooled, neither should the State think we are.
It has been argued, by official Kampala, that these shadowy foreign interests seek to reduce Uganda to a Libya.
However, for us to be bludgeoned into a Libya; we would first have to be like Libya. Yet we don’t have the oil reserves to excite the imperialists in the manner Libya’s reserves did. So saying they’ll turn us into another Libya is moot.
We don’t have oil reserves which are the largest in Africa and among the 10 largest globally. Specifically, more than 46.4 billion barrels compared to Uganda’s proven crude oil reserves of 6.5 billion barrels: 2.2 billion barrels of which are recoverable in Buseruka Sub-county, Hoima District.
Our hawkish government officials also claim “the homosexuals” are trying to install Bobi Wine in power. Which, again, is a double-edged sword meant to cut into Bobi’s credibility and save us from the phantom ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah!
I feel that these “intelligence reports” are guided by the sort of disinformation which justified former US president George Bush Jr’s invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
In our context, government is raising the red flag so it can continue to rule us way beyond its sell-by date.
Using “foreign domination” as a bogeyman is old hat. Besides, if a country like America really wanted to invade us, we wouldn’t be able to stop it. To be sure, going toe-to-toe with the Americans is much more difficult than gunning down defenceless civilians.
Sadly, our government may have been overrun by “securocrats”. These are military or police personnel who advocate military and police working in close harness to snuff out internal “threats”.
They are often gung-ho, trigger-happy too.
In other settings, they were infamous for delaying the transition of power from the White minority to Black majority rule in South Africa. Their answer to popular militancy is always militarism.
Behind their belligerence, however, lies fear.
For in South Africa, as in Uganda, they fear their ill-gotten wealth shall be expropriated when change comes.
To allay their fears, our Opposition should let the regime know that there shall be restitution, but not revenge. After all, this is not 1986.
Mr Matogo is the managing editor Fasihi Magazine.
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