Museveni In The Shoes Of LRA Victims

Mar 04, 2004

<b>Onapito Ekomoloit</b><br>HE is getting a lot of erroneous flak from arm chair critics, but he keeps on undeterred. From the safety of Kampala and other places outside the theatre of Joseph Kony’s Lords Resistance Army (LRA) terrorism, it’s fashionable these days to fault President Yoweri Mus

Onapito Ekomoloit
HE is getting a lot of erroneous flak from arm chair critics, but he keeps on undeterred. From the safety of Kampala and other places outside the theatre of Joseph Kony’s Lords Resistance Army (LRA) terrorism, it’s fashionable these days to fault President Yoweri Museveni.
But as the English say, it’s only the wearer who knows where the shoe hurts. When it comes to feeling the suffering Kony has caused to the people of Acholi, Lango and Teso, the president is truly in their shoes.
Like a brave man faced with a lion mauling his family, Museveni has neither broken down in despair nor cut and run, as some cowards like those heading the moribund Democratic Party (DP) recently advised him.
On the contrary, the president has stuck with the suffering people through thin and thin. Presently, he has camped in what one may call “the middle of nowhere” in Okwang sub-county — a spot 95km outside Lira town.
The LRA bandits have been trying to make this enclave of wilderness a safe haven, from where they spring to carry out massacres, such as the recent ones at Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camps at Abia and Ogur.
Earlier in 2002 and in the second half of last year the LRA tried similar schemes of creating safe havens in Gulu and Teso respectively. The president’s personal camping in those areas to frustrate them-often criticized as interfering with army command-paid handsome dividends.
No wonder on his way to Okwang the president received a hero’s welcome from IDP along the way. One only wishes the opinion of these suffering folks about the president’s work was thought by those trashing it.
What matters though to President Museveni, in his own words to an Austrian television journalist recently, is that he is “addicted to slaving for the people.” His journey to Okwang, the availability of a helicopter not withstanding, told it all.
No amount of Kampala tears for the people the LRA has displaced from their homes would have touched them more than what the President did on this journey. His road travel from Soroti amounted to wiping the tears from the eyes of the people. While at Soroti State Lodge, he conferred with several groups of people ranging from local leaders to widows and appreciated first-hand the magnitude of the trauma the LRA left in the wake of its defeat in Teso.
The problems are enormous, both collective and individual. Those claiming that the President is squandering money should tell it to these wretched of the earth. Their personal dilemmas would melt a heart of steel. Here is just one scene: The President is explaining to a group how the Government will have to do something about secondary school fees because ID parents are too impoverished to afford. Suddenly, a widow is almost on her knees, tears welling in her eyes and voice trembling. Her daughter, with a year to go at Makerere University is being dropped for lack of fees.
Whatever the Government plans for parents like her will be too little too late. So she is pleading with the President to do something.
I leave it to you to decide what he should have told her.
When the President hit the road for Lira on February 23, it was midday. His first stop was Amuria township, home to some 37,000 IDP. With their own Arrow Boys and the UPDF having given the LRA a bloody nose, they were somehow home away from home. They could even afford to break into akogo and ajosi dances, inviting the President to join, to which he obliged — you should have seen his strokes!
Four o’clock in the afternoon found him at Obalanga IDP, where the excited area LC3 chairman declared a piece of history had been made. Without fear of contradiction, he said Yoweri Kaguta Museveni had become the first president since Uganda’s independence to reach Obalanga. This was the first place the LRA attacked when it struck Katakwi last July. Aren’t we reminded to count our true friends in time of sorrow?
It was dusking when the presidential convoy snaked out of Orungo IDP, in also in Katakwi, the third the president visited on his way to Lira. And the clock was showing 10.00pm, by the time the convoy swept into Lira Hotel, for a night’s rest.
In all, the president had done some 160 kms, over 10 hours, in a blinding cloud of dust. Nonetheless, it was worth, knowing that some 150,000 IDP must have slept better, having seen and heard from their President, not empty-handed, but with heavy armour for better
protected camps and a committed resettlement kit for them.
Ends

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