Prime
Mob ‘justice’ is no solution
Author: Phillip Matogo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Shooting persons dead from atop the pillions of motorbikes is a modern-day mob calling card. The 1991 gangster movie, New Jack City, starring Wesley Snipes as Nino Brown, featured a scene where Mafia kingpin Don Armeteo is killed in a drive-by shooting by Nino Brown’s Cash Money Brothers gang.
It was recently reported that two armed assailants were last Sunday evening lynched by an angry mob after shooting dead a Buganda clan head.
The incident happened in Lungujja, Rubaga Division in Kampala when Ndiga clan head, Dan Bbosa, was shot dead by gunmen moving on a motorcycle as he entered his home. The assailants fired bullets at Bbosa’s Toyota Land Cruiser vehicle, killing him instantly.
There have been several other cold cases of prominent and not so prominent persons being “rubbed out” Mafia-style.
Shooting persons dead from atop the pillions of motorbikes is a modern-day mob calling card. The 1991 gangster movie, New Jack City, starring Wesley Snipes as Nino Brown, featured a scene where Mafia kingpin Don Armeteo is killed in a drive-by shooting by Nino Brown’s Cash Money Brothers gang.
Not to trivialise evil, but that scene in that film might as well have been lifted from a police incidence report on any number of Kampala shootings.
The difference is that the shootings in Uganda are stoking the revolutionary fire and ire of the masses.
If the mob is now deciding what will happen to armed assailants, the mob will not keep a magisterial distance from those it suspects of being behind these killings.
As time goes by, with no official reports on who is killing our prominent sons and daughters, the mob will dubiously decree the State culpably negligent.
This will politicise the mob, as during the French Revolution. Back then, in 1789, the French mob, with cries of ‘Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!’ stormed the singularly humourless French prison known as the Bastille, as a prelude to ultimately displacing the French upper classes.
The French Revolution had thus began and lasted for over six years, with unimaginable violence. This might happen here since our mobs (and government) do not know much French.
Gallows humour aside, this new element of mobs killing seemingly politically motivated assailants represents the diminution of the rule of law in Uganda.
With impunity running through our political system, justice becomes a rare commodity indeed. However, whenever there is a dearth of anything; the demand for it skyrockets.
This leads to inflation as, in this instance, the moral economy of the country becomes too dear to be afforded and this is when the price of freedom equates to a pound of flesh.
Revanchism, the politics of vengeance, will then take hold and the red in our national flag will be a crimson tide. That said, we can and must avert bloodshed.
This will happen when there is justice meted out to those who have been killing our people. So we need to see reports on who is really responsible.
Two, the findings on who is responsible must be routed to a truth commission inquiring into the crimes and misappropriations (of a political bent) perpetrated since 1979.
This truth commission would do well to work through committees: the Amnesty Committee; the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee.
Three, as a laundry list of what has gone wrong is aired and addressed; we can look at each other honestly.
Not as in the book Animal Farm where, at the end, the farmer Pilkington and other humans eat dinner with the pigs at the farmhouse and nobody can tell pigs and humans apart.
Rather, we shall prosecutorially pick each other apart to find some common ground in somewhat uncommon fashion.
Truth should be our guide and justice, our reward.
We have all fallen short, some more than others, but we must all rise above our shortcomings to be able to achieve collective dominion over a shared future.
Mr Philip Matogo is a professional copywriter
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