Obote never recognised Museveni as a Ugandan
By Suleman Mugula
27th Sept 2010
Last week, I tried to show how Museveni has always fomented hatred between northern and central Uganda. I ended by arguing that the collapse of Milton Obote’s government in 1985 was the turning point in Museveni’s quest for power. This week, I continue from there.
After Obote’s government collapsed, Museveni’s NRA rebels re-grouped and were able to launch fresh attacks against a disorganized and demoralized UNLA. In fact, Museveni only went to the Nairobi peace talks to buy time to attack the UNLA who were already in disarray.
He signed the 1985 peace accord just to hoodwink the Okello regime. Once he grabbed power, he was determined never to allow the north to unite with central Uganda ever again.
To achieve that, he exhumed and gathered as many skeletons as possible in Luwero which he then exhibited to justify his military conquest as well as cement the hatred that he had created between northern and central Uganda. As Col. Ogole said in his interview with Uganda Correspondent, Museveni’s decision to exhume dead people’s skeletons for PR purposes was totally “un-African”.
From 1980 when the UPC leadership expressed doubt about Museveni’s citizenship until he grabbed power 1986, a grudge existed between Museveni and the UPC. Former UPC president Dr. Milton Obote [RIP] in particular, never really recognized Museveni as a bona-fide Ugandan.
In fact, until his death, Obote insisted that Museveni was a Rwandese who had no good plans for Uganda other than exploiting it for his own personal benefit. Obote also believed that Museveni may have had a hand in the 1979 massacre of Muslims in Mbarara as they matched to liberate Uganda from Idi Amin’s dictatorship. [There is no proof of that, Editor]
Whether Museveni had a hand in the Mbarara massacre of Muslims or not, there is no doubt that that incident helped recruit people from that region into Museveni’s close political circle. The Rwandese population in Uganda also joined Museveni’s armed struggle partly as a result of this incident but also as a result of their harassment by the UPC government.
I strongly believe that the strong hatred that Museveni had and still has for northerners may in fact explain why there were a lot of atrocities committed in northern Uganda during the NRA’s mop up operations in that region.
The same hatred may also explain why the people in the north were forcefully herded into inhumane concentration and death camps and left there for many years even when everyone knew that they were dying daily like chickens afflicted by chicken pox.
This is why Kony will never surrender or trust Museveni. Both the Kony and Lakwena wars sprung up as a reaction against the atrocities which were being meted out to the people of northern Uganda. Museveni’s attitude towards those wars may also explain why all negotiations to end the wars in the north have amounted to nothing.
One of the most frustrating things for Museveni is the fact that by and large, the people of northern Uganda have remained resilient and principled in their opposition against him. They have never accepted his tricks. That is why he has so far failed to hoodwink them the way he has done with the central region time and again. In the north, even the illiterate and the poorest have remained firm and proud. They have refused to prostrate before Museveni because of his record and illegitimacy.
Museveni knows this very well but he has been confident of hanging on to power because of the firm grip he had over central Uganda. Sadly for Museveni, central Uganda has virtually slipped out of his hands: the continuous acrimony with the King/kingdom of Buganda; the spontaneous Mabira demonstrations; the land protests; and the Sept 2009 riots all shook Museveni’s confidence in central Uganda. Before he could even gather himself together, the IPC was born!
The formation of the IPC was a bad development for Museveni in a number of ways: First of all, the combination of Besigye, Otunnu and the other IPC leaders from Buganda opened Museveni’s eyes to the realisation that this was not a weak team to compete against.
If Otunnu had remained in the IPC with all the other Baganda leaders, the division that Museveni had created between the north and central would have been wiped out and a United Ugandan Front against Museveni will have been born.
This is why I think Otunnu’s withdrawal from the IPC may have far reaching consequences for UPC as an organisation and Uganda as a nation. If Ugandans are determined to disentangle Uganda from the sharp jaws of a hardened, shrewd, and callous dictator, then they need to tighten their intellectual belts before anything else. END. If it’s Monday, it’s Uganda Correspondent. Never miss out again!
