OPINION

By Amb. Henry Mayega

Last week, President Yoweri Museveni ordered my OB and namesake, Brigadier Henry Isoke, the supremo of State House’s Anti-Corruption team to “probe the vote rigging” that occasioned the Bukedeya local council byelections.

That unprecedented transposition by the fountain of honour followed reports about the irregularities that marred those polls. He condemned some government officials who he said participated in the tumult, adding that he didn’t want the country to slip into the past enigmatic electoral malpractices.

Behaving like America’s anti-progress Ku Klux Klan, Kizza Besigye — that colossus with clay feet, and others from the same political pedigree, cluelessly jumped into the fray and condemned the President and his proactive action.

Their intellectual and mental dishonesty in this regard should be acquitted because it is purposed to divert public attention from the civil wars that are engulfing, full throttle, the recessing opposition.

First, this President, unlike his predecessors, has ensured the renaissance of peace, security and stability in Uganda hence restoring the country into the international files of honour; this is typified by the world’s approbation of Uganda’s proactive interventions and furtherance of peace in Somalia, South Sudan, the DRC and the CAR because justifying the adage that “you can’t give what you don’t have”.

Whereas his predecessors unleashed legions of exiles into the region and beyond, this President, equipped with a robust and internationally acclaimed refugee policy, opened our national borders to emigrés from elsewhere.

The post-independence period before 1986 was punctuated with intermittent coups and take-overs which impeded electoral cycles thereby plunging us deeper into the ignominies of insecurity, loss of life, property and human displacement.

Secondly, as a dividend arising out of that unceasing stability, Uganda has, since 1996, had a string of regular and predictable elections in which Besigye and ilk have participated and badly lost to Uganda’s best president, Yoweri Museveni, since independence in 1962.

Some of those elections have been unavailingly challenged by Besigye and company in the courts of law on account of “rigging” — a legal recourse that could not happen in the pre-1986 times.

History is recording Yoweri Museveni’s stewardship of Uganda as the most splendid in the post-independence intervening times. His contemporary political opponents worry that he is exhausting all that is humanly achievable and inevitably rendering them permanently irrelevant.

Thirdly, elections were insubstantial and nugatory before 1986 because they were marred by glaring irregularities, which is why this President and his compatriots stormed the bush after the 1980 general elections to eventually correct the wrongs of gerrymandering and rigging.

By ordering an inquest into the Bukedea electoral debacle, in an unprecedented move that none of his predecessors did, shows how different this President is from the rest of the pack who have inhabited

Uganda’s political canvass since independence in 1962. Ugandans should recall that between 1979 and 1980, an epochal and earth-shaking period for the country, we shuffled heads of state five times: from Idi Amin to Yusufu Lule, Godfrey Binaisa, Paul Muwanga to Milton Obote; that was quite a turnover that came at a cataclysmic cost to our nationhood; that period bore the hallmarks of state collapse when order was sacrificed at the altar of expediency. Never again should our country navigate such insecurities that were responsible for bogging down national progress.

Fourthly, to fully understand how this President dwarfs the post-independence leadership pack stature-wise, let us make a cursory scrutiny of those before him: Ceremonial President Edward Mutesa lacked the stature of a national figure given his narrow confines within the central region and so he couldn’t galvanise or cobble together the different nationalities to work towards the common good and nationhood.

His cohabitation with Milton Obote collapsed like a house of cards at the flick of a child’s finger in 1966. Milton Obote lacked the metal in himself to effectively handle the military in both the 1960s and early 1980s — he, twice, fell in 1971 due to western-led intrusive machinations and in 1985 due to treachery and filth tribalism within the ranks of his own armies.

Idi Amin’s most diabolic and brutal regime of the 1970s butchered Ugandans through his pogroms; he ruled through decrees — there was no legislature to speak of.

He was sent packing in April 1979. Both Yusufu Lule and Godfrey Binaisa were particularly ineffectual given the fissiparous nature of the UNLF regime; each held the presidency barely for a year.

The Okello-Okello military junta was particularly short lived to speak of. The advent of this administration honourees in 1986 breathed new life into the conduct of public affairs by decisively repudiating the country’s staggering pariahdom that had indicted us for far too long.

The writer is the Consul General of Uganda Consulate General, Dubai, UAE