Author: Gawaya Tegulle. PHOTO/NMG
When a slave sees a fellow slave being buried in a shallow grave, he should know that the same will happen to him when his turn comes.
That is why the arrest and intended prosecution of former executive director of the Kampala Capital City Authority Dorothy Kisaka (a truly wonderful soul) and some of her team should send a chill down the spines of all regime loyalists: y’all are perfectly dispensable. You can take that to the bank!
Y’all are candidates for the garbage dump, the day you are deemed a liability to the regime! Y’all are scapegoats-in-waiting and at the right time, you will be discarded without a care in the world - Uganda’s rulers don’t really give a hoot about you.Even a first-year law student, woken from her sleep in the middle of the night, will be able to submit (argue) eloquently – and correctly – in less than 15 minutes and without opening her eyes, why any criminal proceedings against Kisaka and Co will come to nothing.But she’d be kind of offside, because the proceedings against Kisaka and Co are political, rather than criminal.
This is what my very amiable law lecturer that lawyers fondly call “PMM” would have termed as “proceedings of shame”. My humble view is that they are intended to thoroughly embarrass and smear the suspects or intended-accused persons. That has the effect of cleansing the regime, making it look sparkling and sanitary.
This is what, in times of disaster, despotic, anti-people regimes do, to save face. Analyse the bigger picture. Kiteezi has been tottering on the cliff edge of disaster for decades, long before Kisaka and Co took charge of Kampala. And all this while this country has had a big, white elephant, sumptuously called “Ministry of Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees”. It has not one, but two ministers and a full bureaucracy under them. What exactly do we pay them for? A core part of their mandate is to detect and prevent disaster.
But so much has gone wrong on their watch.Where were they, when the Kiteezi disaster was preparing to happen, moreover literally under their noses? Will they also be held culpable in this Kiteezi aftermath? There are two ministers overseeing Kampala – will they be taken to the dock too? How about the Resident City Commissioner (RCC) and the Deputy in charge of Kawempe Division – will they answer charges too? Let’s rewind the clock and calendar a little to July 2022, when the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (UN OCHA) confirmed 2,465 Karimojong dead.
Cause: people simply starved to death. UN OCHA reported that neither the Ministry of Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees nor the Ministry for Karamoja Affairs (both under the Office of the Prime Minister, and with two ministers each), inter alia, had “evidence of early and sustained engagement in addressing the deepening crisis...” Hunger doesn’t kill in two or three weeks; nope – make it like two months.
How many people were arrested or fired in the wake of two and a half thousand Karimojong dying? None at all. So, tell me, what makes Kiteezi, where only between 35 to 100 people died, so different from Karamoja, that all of a sudden, Kisaka and Co should face the courts of law?
Unless the State is willing to prosecute the entire spectrum of responsibility centres in this saga, proceedings against Kisaka and Co should be dismissed as nothing more than selective prosecution, legal showboating and political scapegoating and a good lawyer will know what to do in these circumstances.
Karamoja and Kiteezi-like debacles are what happens when a country has rulers, instead of leaders; when you have a cartel whose only goal is to stay in power and enrich itself at public expense.
This is what happens when you draw up a Cabinet list and the only intention is to reward cadres loyal to the regime and through them, to maintain firm control over their constituencies or make inroads therein, rather than actually deliver services to the common man.
This is what happens when public interest has been sacrificed at the altar of private interest. Move over, Kisaka and Co; the real disaster in all this is the ministry responsible for disaster preparedness – it is a complete waste of public funds.
