Stacy is nothing but a manipulator and liar

Crispus Kiyonga

I have read another of Mr Tom Stacy’s provocations in the New Vision of January 10.
The last act of intellectual criminality he committed here was several months ago when he hurriedly came to Uganda and unsuspectingly got the Prime Minister, Dr Apollo Nsibambi to commission his latest criminal exploitative writing in form of his book, the Tribe.

We now have no option but to take this man to the intellectual court in his homeland and to consider bringing criminal charges against him in Uganda. He probably suspected this and that is why this time he did not accompany his subject of writing, Charles Mumbere.

Stacy is a community hypnotiser and exploitative liar — probably a pathological one. He is despising our people and inciting them to useless rebellion. He must answer for these commissions. He has made money in treating and writing about our people as less than human.

He is some kind of journalist who made contact with the Bakonzo in the early ‘50s and has since then written extensively about them. He treats my tribe paternalistically and romanticises the fact that our people lived so long without accessing education. He treats us as if we are destined to remain behind modernisation. His writing as exemplified by the article brings out the following instruments of his trade:

Negative psychological manipulation. He and his collaborators maintain a hypnotising, mesmerising, and fascinating manipulation of our people and so he states that Isaya Mukirania died mysteriously in the mountains. He claims that “the success and sacrifice of that struggle is indelibly imprinted on the hearts and minds of the mountain people and remains their inspiration for the future and personification of what it means to be a Mukonzo or a mwamba and lies in the figure of Charles Mumbere”.

Stacy and his colleagues, particularly in Kasese, maintain a strong machinery of telling lies to sustain this manipulation. For example on the visit/arrival of Mumbere they passed the following rumours:

That Mumbere had been seen off by President George Bush of the US and was accompanied by 600 United Nations officials and was met by President Yoweri Museveni who saluted him. And so on December 25, 2004, one of the peasants whohad gone to welcome him at Entebbe airport got disappointed and rang back to their colleagues in Kasese and said, “the man got out of the plane alone with his three bags!”

In order to try to maintain this myth about the man, the vehicle Mumbere travelled into Kasese from the Katunguru Bridge flew both the Ugandan national flag and the so-called Rwenzururu kingdom flag. This of course was criminally encouraged by some MPs hailing from Kasese. I want to believe that the authorities noticed this and are taking action. Otherwise it remains our patriotic duty to bring the elements responsible for this crime to court.

In another village up the mountain, a whole village was ecstatic saying that now Mumbere the king had come, wealth would flow. He was to stay in Bunia, DRC where the UN had given him a mine and would employ all the young men.
I want to tell fellow Ugandans that this manipulation by Stacy is extremely retrogressive, imprisoning to the population itself and has to be fought. I will give my own personal experience in this respect.

In the mid and late ‘80s, Mr. Barnabas Bwambale (now RDC of Masaka) and I used to go round mobilising school children in Kasese district to work hard on their studies and part of the message was, “the Bakonzo were left behind, you must work hard to catch up”.

Later on I discussed this strategy with Bwambale and convinced him it was dangerous as it kept the children feeling and thinking they were not equal to other Ugandans.

This stopped and instead we mounted a strong campaign to improve primary school education.
Our effort met with resounding success. Between 1989 and 1999 Kasese was consistently among the top 10 districts in the country in the PLE.

Clearly, all well-meaning people can see what we the progressive forces in Kasese and Bundibugyo are struggling against. People like Stacy, for selfish ends have decided to wage a destructive war against our people. I have had occasion to discuss these issues with Stacy. I have demonstrated to him the massive transformation the Movement has caused in Kasese but the man continues his war unabated.

Stacy despises our people. in his book he refers to me as having been ‘made strange’ by having gone to the medical school. He alleges that I have forgotten the ways of my people by having studied the whiteman’s medicine.
In his article, which I am now critiquing, he says, “These kings today provide a confidence and an inspiration for the tribal people their kingly office exemplifies. The office of kingship makes the people that much more readily recognisable”

Stacy tells quite a bit of lies in his article just as he does in his books about the Bakonzo.

He says Charles Mumbere carried through his father’s principles, which were Christian, and supportive of the rights of orphans and the young, of women, of the old, and even stood out against tribalism against other ethnic groups. This is far from the truth.

Under the rebel command of Mumbere, the Rwenzururu soldiers killed, looted, raped and kidnapped young and old like. In 1980, during the general elections Mumbere ordered that all non-indigenous people should leave Kasese within a week. The calculation here was that these people were not going to vote UPC. One should have seen the streams of peasants walking the roads with their luggage on their heads to return to Kabarole and Bushenyi districts. The Banyabindi, a small indigenous ethnic group who speak a language similar to Rutoro were expelled by the Rwenzururu soldiers and to-date some of them still live as landless people in Muhokya sub-county in Kasese district. Others migrated to other districts.

In his article, Stacy says Mukiraniya established in the mountains his own independent state. The territory straddled the Ugandan border with Congo. It is true that Both Mukirania and his son Mumbere claimed to have established a state independent of Uganda and the DRC. They even tried to appeal to the OAU for recognition.

Stacy has all along played ball to all this dangerous criminal nonsense. They claim the state got independence on June 30, 1962. They have been in their destructive campaign wishing to observe this so-called holiday in present-day Kasese.

We have exposed and resisted this misguidance of the people and in fact there are stories that some of these elements hope in future to establish an independent state around the Rwenzori mountains covering territory in both the DRC and Uganda.

In his hypnotising and mesmerising instrument, Stacy and his collaborators want to keep whipping these sentiments. In a sophisticated way he is inciting the unsuspecting people in this direction. This must stop. Hear the story about the mine in Bunia. This is calculated either to lure people into rebellion or just to keep up the myth of the independent state.

Tom Stacy has exploited our people. He has made his living by writing about them. His writings are to the unsuspecting population psychologically imprisoning and to his fellow white people, entertaining. And so he earns his bread this way.

The task of patriotic progressives like us is to extend our struggle to such elements. The copy of his book, the Tribe, was given to me by one of his admirers at the London school of economics. I have promised to make a journey to England and hold hearings to expose this intellectual criminality. In the meantime, I am also considering legal action against Stacy.

Lastly, let me make two observations.
Stacy says I am the only MP of the five in Kasese who do not accept the so-called Mumbere Kingdom.

The man is a real contradictory manipulator to the unsuspecting minds. Recall what he says in his article, “---and their cousinly Bamba-whose relationship with the Bakonzo is somewhat comparable to that of the welsh to the English”. He goes on to say, “.....the movement (Rwenzururu) was to take shape as an independent regime involving the Bakonzo in the mountain and the Bamba in the clefts and gullies of the northwest — personification of what it means to be a Mukonzo or a mwamba lies in the figure of Charles Mumbere”.

And so if the movement and subsequently the kingdom belongs to both the Bamba and the Bakonzo, why does he restrict his reference to the Bakonzo MPs only? But for me the issue is not numbers here. What we require here is leadership. I have in many situations been the only one to lead the way. You will recall I was the only MP elected on the UPM ticket in 1980. that did not invalidate the cause for which I stood. On the contrary, our thinking has blossomed in Uganda. I am on record as the only MP who spearheaded the growing of passion fruit and this has assisted many people all over Kasese.

My struggle to revive cotton growing in Kasese is known to everybody. Being the only MP pushing this cause did not stop the fire catching on. I have scored a first in many other situations. That is leadership and I will continue leading the way in this regard. Other people will see the light with time and follow.

Stacy is consistent with the campaign waged by his collaborators and has been making negative insinuations about my origins. And so he says I am from Mpondwe. I was certainly not born in this township.

My ancestral home is in a village called Kibisire in Ihandiro sub-county. It is in this sub-county that Mukirania, Mumbere’s father was buried. All the graves of my grandfathers — a line of over 10 of them, are there today in Kihooko village of Ihandiro. Some of these people making claims are actually recent immigrants (Bafururki) from the DRC.

The writer is MP,
Bukonzo west and
National Political Commissar