Mayombo: There is more to the Mwenda, Kalyegira bashing
May 10, 2007
ON Tuesday, May 1, 2007, Brigadier Noble Mayombo died. Mayombo had served Uganda in various capacities. He started by participating in the national liberation struggle. He finished as Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence and Chairman of <i>The New Vision</i> PPCL Board.
By Robert Kabushenga
ON Tuesday, May 1, 2007, Brigadier Noble Mayombo died. Mayombo had served Uganda in various capacities. He started by participating in the national liberation struggle. He finished as Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence and Chairman of The New Vision PPCL Board. On Friday, May 4, there was a national celebration of his life and works during prayers at Kololo Independence Grounds. On Saturday, May 5, he was laid to rest at his home in Kijura, Kabarole.
On Sunday, May 6, Andrew Mwenda and Timothy Kalyegira, two leading opposition writers promptly started dancing on his grave. By Wednesday May 9, Kalyegira was still at it with undiminished fury and glee. The tune of this desecration dance is the usual lies and extremism of certain elements that pass for opposition politicians and commentators. All this, of course, in The Daily Monitor, a mouthpiece of the Forum for Democratic Change.
In African culture, this abomination is common among a social category commonly known as night dancers (abasezi). These are mostly village losers who run around compounds and graveyards cursing and wishing everyone bad luck. The most comical of them go around naked in people’s gardens cursing their crop so that it fails. The more sinister types feed on decomposed human flesh. The extreme form of this behaviour is bewitching (obulogo). This kind of behaviour is driven by malice. Only those with a negativist view of the world around them can do this. This is the outlook that informs the Mwenda-Kalyegira axis of commentary.
What Mwenda and Kalyegira said about Mayombo is typical of a certain opposition dogma, that has become the editorial view of the pro-opposition paper they work for. It is obvious from looking at the columns dedicated to propagating this thinking that they believe that the NRM is essentially a negative force and Museveni is the problem. Anyone associated with NRM can only be an illiterate peasant, a naïve follower or an opportunist. These people argue that NRM cannot produce people like Mayombo, so he can only be an anomaly.
This partly explains the reasoning as articulated by Mwenda/Kalyegira that Mayombo was a nice chap who served a bad system. He was the victim of a manipulative leader of Machiavellian proportions who felt threatened by Mayombo’s brilliance and capacity. They stopped short of saying he killed him though it was implied. The point they are trying to make is that Museveni is so manipulative in his ways and selfish in his intentions, he will use clever and good people to achieve evil designs.
This is a deliberate distortion. Over the years, they have done a good job in their pages of vilifying people, calling them all sorts of names simply because they belong to the NRM. Mayombo was no exception. They used to accuse him of feeding political opponents to snakes, crocodiles and safari ants. In a moment of typical wit Mayombo told them he had no money in the CMI budget to feed crocodiles in times when there were no such opponents for this purpose. More seriously he asked them to show how practical it was to domesticate safari ants for selective use to torture political opponents. A lot of the allegations against him were hogwash but they were repeated by these people as if it was the truth. Now they are using this to argue that he was a key element in a rogue regime. A case of people conducting a smear campaign then using it to argue their case.
Back to the heckling of NRM members. The moment people who are in NRM opt for another political home they are praised by this lot as ‘credible’. If they reconcile with their erstwhile colleagues, the name calling resumes with enhanced venom and hatred. The treatment of Mzee Eriya Kategaya is the perfect example of this mindset.
Mwenda, Kalyegira and others refer to the arrest of Mayombo’s brother Okwiri at the airport to show that he had become violently intolerant of political opponents. It is also presented as evidence of a degenerate character. This story has been told selectively for a purpose. Mwenda cleverly omits to inform the public that the violent handling of his arrest was executed by his (Mwenda’s) own brother, Major Kayanja Muhanga. They conveniently leave out the fact that it was Noble who organised for his brother’s exile in UK, supported him with his family, arranged for Okwiri’s return to Uganda, and continued to support him until he (Mayombo) died. None of those who had led Okwiri into the political mess he ended up in was anywhere near him in his hour of need. Okwiri’s only value to the opposition and their editorial allies is propaganda. But this care for his brother, the Kalyegiras will not tell you because it says something good about Mayombo. For them, there is nothing good about the man. If ever there was, it was lost in his commitment to NRM, loyalty to Museveni and service to the public.
The truth is that Mwenda and Kalyegira suffer from a heavy dose of elitist arrogance and narcissism. They use their subjective view of the world to judge others. Their personal attributes (with all their shortcomings) have become the standard by which the public should perceive other people. This has made them impervious to the fact that there was genuine public outpouring of sympathy and admiration for the man, hence the concerted and consistent effort to damage him, even when he can no longer defend himself. This is cowardly. They cannot reconcile their erroneous perception of him with the fact that his commitment to the cause of the NRM and loyalty to its leader Yoweri Museveni was genuine and total.
A bit about these two individuals. Dialectical reasoning is not something they can engage in meaningfully. If you look critically at what they say, it is very superficial. You will be hard pressed to find depth. No wonder Kalyegira is obsessed with biblical prophesies and racial theories long discredited by science. He is a known apologist for the LRA cause and self confessed admirer of Kony and Otti. Kalyegira’s public outbursts are not new and they have always been personal. Each time he would get fired from a radio station for incompetence, he would fill newspaper pages with articles trashing his former employers. Once this became evident, the more discerning editors simply stopped publishing the rubbish he was peddling as commentary on radio ratings. Now he has turned his malice to individuals in politics with whom he has an axe to grind. He is one of those who vent their hatred on the infamous radiokatwe.com.
Mwenda for his part has turned Museveni-bashing into a personally beneficial trade. He cannot and will not see things any other way but this.
There have been some questions, both in public and private about the sanity of these two. I suggest that we stop insulting people with mental health problems. People with mental health problems have no control over their actions. If and when they recover, they regret the social consequences of their unintended actions. These two are in full control of their faculties and have made a conscious if malicious choice to be bad and negative. Diabolic is perhaps a better description of who they are.
Yet those who pay them have found it very useful to grant them sufficient space to do damage. Ordinarily, people with mental health problems are removed from society and confined or given medication to restrain them from causing problems. In this case, our two friends have carte blanche in the pages of the pro-FDC The Daily Monitor. It can only be because the decision makers in Kenya agree entirely with what they do and say. Nothing else explains why they are unrestrained in their extremism and lies. You will never see or hear from anyone else on such matters.
I have therefore reached the conclusion that the people who commission this kind of expression actually have a different agenda, far from a journalistic one. Their real purpose is to sow discord in the politics of Uganda. If they can make some money in the process, the better. This is why they are making profits vilifying our leaders even in their death. Anyone who is forward-looking must be torn down. Only the anarchical types are given prominence and celebrated in their pages. This serves the purpose of keeping us in unproductive political arguments that take us to a past we have been breaking with.
A past when we were at war with each other and had to seek refuge in their country. A past where we had to depend on imports like bread and toothpaste from their homes just to live decently. That way we continue to play second fiddle, they continue to dominate us.
This negative media campaign has another effect. It creates despondence and undermines our national self-confidence. People who may otherwise want to do business with us stay away because of this alarmism and negativity. In the name of journalistic independence, they have taken to creating the impression that the country is falling apart. They incite anarchy, then when it occurs, present it as evidence of the collapse they prophesied. There is complete fusion of thinking on this issue between Besigye on one part and Mwenda-Kalyegira on another. It is that NRM is collapsing and everything, from the prevalence of moths in Kampala to the drying up of Lake Victoria to hooligan actions in Kampala streets, is evidence of that. This is what passes for political analysis by these characters. And it is published without questioning, as if it were true.
Contrast this with what they do in their newspapers back home. You will never find criticism of this nature against President Mwai Kibaki. His policy announcements are given full front-page treatment. Opposition politicians who are given space are projected as responsible members of the opposition who are looking at alternative ways of taking the country forward. It seems there are two editorial standards for the owners of the opposition-leaning The Daily Monitor.
One that promotes social responsibility in Kenya and another one that advocates anarchy in Uganda. Then we are made to consume it as the actions of people promoting freedom of speech and development of democracy. We are being taken for a ride. No wonder they treat their own departed (like former Kenyan VP Wamalwa Kijana) with respect, while ours are vilified and desecrated.
Let me also say this. Some of the loudest critics are actually doing this for money. A lot of the noise is accountability for brown envelopes received. But it was Mayombo who once told me that you cannot shoot civilians simply because the enemy is hiding among them. We shall not embarrass everybody simply because of an errant few who profess self righteousness during the day and then sell their souls for a couple of thousand dollars at night.
The writer is the Chief Executive Officer of the New Vision Printing and Publishing Company
ON Tuesday, May 1, 2007, Brigadier Noble Mayombo died. Mayombo had served Uganda in various capacities. He started by participating in the national liberation struggle. He finished as Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence and Chairman of The New Vision PPCL Board. On Friday, May 4, there was a national celebration of his life and works during prayers at Kololo Independence Grounds. On Saturday, May 5, he was laid to rest at his home in Kijura, Kabarole.
On Sunday, May 6, Andrew Mwenda and Timothy Kalyegira, two leading opposition writers promptly started dancing on his grave. By Wednesday May 9, Kalyegira was still at it with undiminished fury and glee. The tune of this desecration dance is the usual lies and extremism of certain elements that pass for opposition politicians and commentators. All this, of course, in The Daily Monitor, a mouthpiece of the Forum for Democratic Change.
In African culture, this abomination is common among a social category commonly known as night dancers (abasezi). These are mostly village losers who run around compounds and graveyards cursing and wishing everyone bad luck. The most comical of them go around naked in people’s gardens cursing their crop so that it fails. The more sinister types feed on decomposed human flesh. The extreme form of this behaviour is bewitching (obulogo). This kind of behaviour is driven by malice. Only those with a negativist view of the world around them can do this. This is the outlook that informs the Mwenda-Kalyegira axis of commentary.
What Mwenda and Kalyegira said about Mayombo is typical of a certain opposition dogma, that has become the editorial view of the pro-opposition paper they work for. It is obvious from looking at the columns dedicated to propagating this thinking that they believe that the NRM is essentially a negative force and Museveni is the problem. Anyone associated with NRM can only be an illiterate peasant, a naïve follower or an opportunist. These people argue that NRM cannot produce people like Mayombo, so he can only be an anomaly.
This partly explains the reasoning as articulated by Mwenda/Kalyegira that Mayombo was a nice chap who served a bad system. He was the victim of a manipulative leader of Machiavellian proportions who felt threatened by Mayombo’s brilliance and capacity. They stopped short of saying he killed him though it was implied. The point they are trying to make is that Museveni is so manipulative in his ways and selfish in his intentions, he will use clever and good people to achieve evil designs.
This is a deliberate distortion. Over the years, they have done a good job in their pages of vilifying people, calling them all sorts of names simply because they belong to the NRM. Mayombo was no exception. They used to accuse him of feeding political opponents to snakes, crocodiles and safari ants. In a moment of typical wit Mayombo told them he had no money in the CMI budget to feed crocodiles in times when there were no such opponents for this purpose. More seriously he asked them to show how practical it was to domesticate safari ants for selective use to torture political opponents. A lot of the allegations against him were hogwash but they were repeated by these people as if it was the truth. Now they are using this to argue that he was a key element in a rogue regime. A case of people conducting a smear campaign then using it to argue their case.
Back to the heckling of NRM members. The moment people who are in NRM opt for another political home they are praised by this lot as ‘credible’. If they reconcile with their erstwhile colleagues, the name calling resumes with enhanced venom and hatred. The treatment of Mzee Eriya Kategaya is the perfect example of this mindset.
Mwenda, Kalyegira and others refer to the arrest of Mayombo’s brother Okwiri at the airport to show that he had become violently intolerant of political opponents. It is also presented as evidence of a degenerate character. This story has been told selectively for a purpose. Mwenda cleverly omits to inform the public that the violent handling of his arrest was executed by his (Mwenda’s) own brother, Major Kayanja Muhanga. They conveniently leave out the fact that it was Noble who organised for his brother’s exile in UK, supported him with his family, arranged for Okwiri’s return to Uganda, and continued to support him until he (Mayombo) died. None of those who had led Okwiri into the political mess he ended up in was anywhere near him in his hour of need. Okwiri’s only value to the opposition and their editorial allies is propaganda. But this care for his brother, the Kalyegiras will not tell you because it says something good about Mayombo. For them, there is nothing good about the man. If ever there was, it was lost in his commitment to NRM, loyalty to Museveni and service to the public.
The truth is that Mwenda and Kalyegira suffer from a heavy dose of elitist arrogance and narcissism. They use their subjective view of the world to judge others. Their personal attributes (with all their shortcomings) have become the standard by which the public should perceive other people. This has made them impervious to the fact that there was genuine public outpouring of sympathy and admiration for the man, hence the concerted and consistent effort to damage him, even when he can no longer defend himself. This is cowardly. They cannot reconcile their erroneous perception of him with the fact that his commitment to the cause of the NRM and loyalty to its leader Yoweri Museveni was genuine and total.
A bit about these two individuals. Dialectical reasoning is not something they can engage in meaningfully. If you look critically at what they say, it is very superficial. You will be hard pressed to find depth. No wonder Kalyegira is obsessed with biblical prophesies and racial theories long discredited by science. He is a known apologist for the LRA cause and self confessed admirer of Kony and Otti. Kalyegira’s public outbursts are not new and they have always been personal. Each time he would get fired from a radio station for incompetence, he would fill newspaper pages with articles trashing his former employers. Once this became evident, the more discerning editors simply stopped publishing the rubbish he was peddling as commentary on radio ratings. Now he has turned his malice to individuals in politics with whom he has an axe to grind. He is one of those who vent their hatred on the infamous radiokatwe.com.
Mwenda for his part has turned Museveni-bashing into a personally beneficial trade. He cannot and will not see things any other way but this.
There have been some questions, both in public and private about the sanity of these two. I suggest that we stop insulting people with mental health problems. People with mental health problems have no control over their actions. If and when they recover, they regret the social consequences of their unintended actions. These two are in full control of their faculties and have made a conscious if malicious choice to be bad and negative. Diabolic is perhaps a better description of who they are.
Yet those who pay them have found it very useful to grant them sufficient space to do damage. Ordinarily, people with mental health problems are removed from society and confined or given medication to restrain them from causing problems. In this case, our two friends have carte blanche in the pages of the pro-FDC The Daily Monitor. It can only be because the decision makers in Kenya agree entirely with what they do and say. Nothing else explains why they are unrestrained in their extremism and lies. You will never see or hear from anyone else on such matters.
I have therefore reached the conclusion that the people who commission this kind of expression actually have a different agenda, far from a journalistic one. Their real purpose is to sow discord in the politics of Uganda. If they can make some money in the process, the better. This is why they are making profits vilifying our leaders even in their death. Anyone who is forward-looking must be torn down. Only the anarchical types are given prominence and celebrated in their pages. This serves the purpose of keeping us in unproductive political arguments that take us to a past we have been breaking with.
A past when we were at war with each other and had to seek refuge in their country. A past where we had to depend on imports like bread and toothpaste from their homes just to live decently. That way we continue to play second fiddle, they continue to dominate us.
This negative media campaign has another effect. It creates despondence and undermines our national self-confidence. People who may otherwise want to do business with us stay away because of this alarmism and negativity. In the name of journalistic independence, they have taken to creating the impression that the country is falling apart. They incite anarchy, then when it occurs, present it as evidence of the collapse they prophesied. There is complete fusion of thinking on this issue between Besigye on one part and Mwenda-Kalyegira on another. It is that NRM is collapsing and everything, from the prevalence of moths in Kampala to the drying up of Lake Victoria to hooligan actions in Kampala streets, is evidence of that. This is what passes for political analysis by these characters. And it is published without questioning, as if it were true.
Contrast this with what they do in their newspapers back home. You will never find criticism of this nature against President Mwai Kibaki. His policy announcements are given full front-page treatment. Opposition politicians who are given space are projected as responsible members of the opposition who are looking at alternative ways of taking the country forward. It seems there are two editorial standards for the owners of the opposition-leaning The Daily Monitor.
One that promotes social responsibility in Kenya and another one that advocates anarchy in Uganda. Then we are made to consume it as the actions of people promoting freedom of speech and development of democracy. We are being taken for a ride. No wonder they treat their own departed (like former Kenyan VP Wamalwa Kijana) with respect, while ours are vilified and desecrated.
Let me also say this. Some of the loudest critics are actually doing this for money. A lot of the noise is accountability for brown envelopes received. But it was Mayombo who once told me that you cannot shoot civilians simply because the enemy is hiding among them. We shall not embarrass everybody simply because of an errant few who profess self righteousness during the day and then sell their souls for a couple of thousand dollars at night.
The writer is the Chief Executive Officer of the New Vision Printing and Publishing Company