Prime
Obed Katureebe, government, the state, and the deep state
Author: Asuman Bisiika. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
And when the state and the government confluent, the president becomes an alternate state
On Wednesday June 29, I had two meetings with elements of the government. The first was with State House officials. The second was in Kamwokya with officials of Rural Electrification Programme (dear reader, it is no longer an authority – as in Rural Electrification Authority).
After the meeting with State House officials, I dashed to Uganda Media Centre where I used to offer my 50-cents worth of sweat a long time ago. I met some old buddies whereupon one of them asked: ‘Where is Obed?’ ‘I do not know?’ I offered.
The short and tall of the story is that Mr Obed Katureebe was arrested by officials from the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) in early May. The Uganda Human Rights Commission should be applauded for reminding the CMI leadership of its responsibility (de jure and de facto) to release Obed. But as I write this, Obed remains in the custodial detention of the CMI.
Mr Obed’s is a case study in the administrative management of the state. A government official picked from his home and ‘divested’ from his young family is bad. The fact that such an act was carried out on the basis of foreign intelligence service is ‘badder’. And that the said Obed has been under the custodial detention of Military Intelligence (not police) is ‘more badder’ (actually bloody).
The trouble with an insider being in trouble with the state is that most of his or her friends keep their distance from the matter. When you are an insider, there are always voices advising that you should not embarrass the system. That one will make an already bad situation worse if he or she challenges the circumstances one finds oneself in. It is always a fringe position to petition superiors of your victim person. In fact it was courageous of Obed’s wife to go public about her husband’s fate.
And then you hear someone say investigations are still ongoing… I have said here and elsewhere that any military cooperation between Uganda and Rwanda is likely to cause injury to the region and to ‘mouthy’ fellows like me.
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Whenever I am in my element, I always say I am a student of government. I have lived all my adult life either inside government, rebellion or in the proximity of those two. So, I would like to be taken serious when I tell my uninterested audiences that the contemporary state is a fusion of the traditional elements of the government, the state and the deep state.
My encounter with the word ‘deep state’ is recent. In fact I thought it denoted the core estates of the government like the Judiciary, Security and Public Works. But I later learnt that the coinage was (after all recent and) about a latent force domiciled in power brokerage.
The civil service (more broadly Public Service) are the Worker Bees (labourers), the political leadership are the government and the president is the state. And when the state and the government confluent, the president becomes an alternate state. The state is in essence the president. So, the guy who said l’Etat est moi (the state is me) was after all very right. All government work is done on the president’s behalf. He is responsible for the vision, policy positions, administrative management actions and general outlook of the state.
And yes, the President should demonstrate that he superintends over all aspects of government by giving guidance on the incongruent situation where an official suffers injury in a poorly investigated case like that of my Obed .
Mr Bisiika is the executive editor of the East African Flagpost. [email protected]
