Last week on the 75th Human Rights Day, US embassy in Uganda on its X account, @usmissionuganda, formerly twitter, bragged; “In Uganda and around the region we have seen the brave work of human rights defenders everyday advocating for the most vulnerable, fighting in the courts, and championing the safety and wellbeing of those in need. We support you. As we mark 75 years of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, let us reaffirm our commitment to advancing human rights for all people, in every region of the world.”-AmbPopp.

Nomadic pastoralists christened ‘Balaalo’, originally from the Ankore cattle corridor have been with Uganda for ages especially when rinderpest and tsetse flies ravaged them forcing their herds and forced them to look for new areas to graze.  Then came draught which caused pasture and water shortage which blew them further to Bukedi, Busoga, Teso and Lango in mid-1970s. And then the ranching scheme of the 1960s that was meant to modernize livestock farming irrationally dispossessed many who remained in Ankore.

The US and UK governments recently couldn’t get accurate intelligence on the just concluded Nyege Nyege festival in Uganda. They failed on Saddam Hussen’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in 2001, and it is doubtable they can be relied upon on Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital’s alleged links to Hamas resistance military command centre. Knowing what the world now knows, that the WMD intelligence was “sexed-up”, anything presented by Israel against Hamas and Gaza should be taken with a bucket of salt.

President Yoweri Museveni is taking quite a bit of flak for advising against a request from former Obongi MP Hassan Kaps Fungaroo (FDC) to establish an Idi Amin Institute at Muni University purportedly to study former president’s controversial, if not criminal eight years of terror, bloodshed, disappearances, murders, economic ruin and collapse until his ouster on 11 April 1979 by a combined military force of Tanzanians and Ugandan exiles.