Back to Americans and the lessons in hypocrisy.

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.

Providing Members of Parliament (MPs) with advise on being wise when picking a fight, will be construed an unwelcome interference, or as Speaker Anita Annet Among likes to say, ‘poking your noses’ in other peoples’ private affairs because you ‘think you know it all’. On 23 January 2023, 348 of 356 MPs present, resoundingly passed a bogus censure resolution against state minister Persis Namuganza over a matter that occurred outside parliament in the futile hope that President Yoweri Museveni would sack her, yet they haven’t learnt eating humble pies. 

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.

Threats by US government to terminate the entry of Uganda’s goods under African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) currently still mostly low value and negligible over recycled, old and mostly unverified stories of human rights and homosexuality abuses is laced with impudence against which Uganda and indeed Africa need to stand firm.

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.

For those who follow Uganda opposition politics there appears to be a rhythm of history being repeated both in and outside parliament that doesn’t take much intelligence to know how it may all end probably in disarray, disintegration and dreary tears as what’s unfolding in the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), split into Najjanankumbi and Katonga factions much like FORD-Kenya-Ford-Asiili many years ago now. What passes for a National Unity Platform (NUP) is walking the steps FDC has walked two decades now.

Palestine has been burning for two weeks now under Israel’s brutal and indiscriminate military tanks, artillery, airpower, and ground troops, which if had been done by another country, not US and European staunch ally, would qualify for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, yet the world remains ambivalent. Ostensibly, this latest episode is retaliation to Hamas abhorrent raid on a social festival that left hundreds dead including many taken hostage which left the bravado state awfully terrified, humiliated and angry. 

It took fifteen repeat voting and 216 votes for Kevin McCarthy to become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in March 2023. And also took 216 votes in a stunning single ballot last week as the first Speaker in their history to be ousted, more-over instigated by elements from his Republican Party. In the UK, the fall of three Prime Ministers in a row, Theresa May, Boris Johnson a.k.a. the Convict, and Liz Truss derisively nicknamed ‘Lettuce’ over the last seven years should all be lessons on leadership humility.  

Sixty-one years this week, Uganda appeared in a brief fanfare from British colonial rule under the 1962 federal constitution with an imbalanced power structure between the central government and the so-called federal states, in effect feudal pseudo monarchs. Some historians writing with hindsight, say it was perhaps inevitable that chaos and breakdown ensued almost immediately.