Museveni, Basajja are Uganda’s worst enemies
By Chantal Kembabazi
3rd Oct 2011: When I wrote my last article [Shut up: Besigye warned you about ‘pakalast’] on 12th September, a well known, and it must be said, loud-mouthed NRM diehard sent me a long email explaining Museveni’s “great revolutionary accomplishments”.
One of them, he said, was that, “…the President has been tough on corruption and is about to defeat it”. Sometimes, it’s best to let such people rot in the hell of their own delusions, safe in the knowledge that it will only be a matter of time before they chock and die in their own sycophantic vomit.
And that is exactly what happened last week. Without the slightest prompting from me, the NRM’s ‘great’ entrepreneur Hassan Basajjabalaba, he of the many ‘smelly multi-billion market deals’, dropped the bombshell before the Public Accounts Committee and implicated his boss Museveni in the controversial 142billion market deal.
With more than 25 years of presiding over unprecedented ethno-centric corruption under his belt, I have no doubt and no regret in my mind, in concluding that ‘Museveni is corruption and corruption is Museveni’. I have also concluded that as far as our fight against corruption is concerned, Museveni and Basajjabalaba are Uganda’s worst enemies.
No one, absolutely no one on this planet can convince me that Museveni isn’t a ‘prime suspect’ in Basajjabalaba’s many smelly deals. In fact, much as I would love to, I find it impossible to rule out the possibility that Basajjabalaba may be a mere front vehicle acting ‘for and on behalf’ of Museveni the ‘back seat driver’.
This makes Museveni’s half-hearted ‘public war’ against corruption totally hollow, a grotesque insult to Ugandans in my view! After all, Hassan Basajjabalaba revealed to the entire world that he and Museveni had privately met several times to discuss his multi-billion market deals and that Museveni had order the then Finance Minister Sydia Bbumba to, and I quote, “…expedite compensation due to Basajjabalaba”.
How can it then be, that the same Museveni, even after “sealing the dodgy deal” with Basajjabalaba, emerges with a most obnoxious and condescending statement in which he describes Basajjabalaba’s 142billion claim as “ridiculous and unacceptable”.
In a letter to former Finance Minister Syda Bbumba, in which he called for an investigation, Mr Museveni said he had received information that some officials in the finance ministry were swindling government money through questionable loan agreements and settling “unacceptable” claims.
The only logical conclusion I, or indeed anyone can draw from Museveni’s ‘public relations condemnation’ of Basajjabalaba’s 142billion claim is that it was designed to portray him as a man who has the requisite political will to fight corruption and yet the naked truth and reality is that he has zero political will to fight corruption.
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