If you haven’t, up to this moment, watched the interview that the President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni had with Alan Kasujja, it’s not fine – drop everything you’re doing and watch it.
The head of state was quizzed on a broad range of issues – some of which, of course, included the treatment of his political opponents.
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His response was, errrm, let’s not exhaust the superlatives yet.
It always seems to me that all challengers of the President, even the most unassuming, have a fault to them– Besigye was locked up for a campaign period on charges of rape which would later be dismissed, he is - to date - accused of being a radical.
Muntu is ‘far too docile’, and an ‘insider’ and now the newest kid on the block.
Bobi Wine, Robert Kyagulanyi Sentamu, besides battling treason charges has been supplanted with the title ‘economic saboteur’.
The bug of name-calling is also ripe with the opposition who accuse him of murder, intolerance, dictatorship, incompetence… so goes the list.
But the crux of this column will be the response of Museveni to why Bobi Wine’s concerts are being blocked.
Bobi Wine, the leader of the People Power movement alleges that he has been stopped, so far, from performing at a record 156 shows.
The allegation is in the number but the substance of it, the stopping of concerts, that we have witnessed on many an occasion.
The police wrote, in denying the last two major concerts, that they lacked adequate capacity to secure the concerts.
We must first forgive the optimist reader for imagining, like Police wrote, that the concerts were being blocked for a lack of manpower to secure them.
There are, on a daily, enough officers at the homes of ministers/state ministers/ side chics [sic] and opposition leaders’ homes to measure up to a small army. So many are they, that some of our dignitaries keep some at their homes, some to travel with and others to find at their offices.
These are, of course ‘the things they like’ but tell them about Women murders or even the rising crime rate in the city.
In principle, no one’s rights should be drawn from them over the political opinion they hold. Unless of course we can edit it out of the constitution. So Bobi Wine, as with many artists, is entitled to hold a political opinion and to hold concerts.
Museveni disagrees with this. His opinion too. He has a right to it.
What he doesn’t have a right to, is use the state machinery to sabotage/block his political opponents.
Museveni argues that Bobi Wine, whilst in the United States last year, urged the investor community there to shun Uganda as an investment destination. This, despite appealing to a political base, is not true. What Bobi Wine and by extension, his lawyer Robert Amsterdam said they’d do was approach investors in Uganda to let them know the investment climate/environment in which their monies are.
It is critical for Museveni’s presidency for investors to troop in their numbers; firstly, because, the entire development agenda has been built around key infrastructure investments that can only be taken advantage of – at a large scale – by multinational/large capital.
Most Ugandans don’t have this kind of capital so they settle, in this cog, for being the cheap labour and for selling their land to develop these enterprises.
A lack of investors translates directly into a crippled economic development agenda.
The heart and root of Bobi Wine’s core base of supporters are rooted in an antithesis to this development agenda.
Where gov’t draws taxpayer cash to construct infrastructure they can’t consume, Bobi’s supporters feel the pinch in poor service delivery.
Where gov’t works to attract Foreign Direct Investment that requires skilled labour, Bobi Wine’s support base sees the money that could have funded vocational schools to give those without a chance at formal education a chance at life.
Where government promises efficiency and functional systems, Bobi’s base sees corruption, incompetence and inefficiency.
It further doesn’t help that his base is beaten and ostracized for pointing these out.
Did I mention that the reason Bobi Wine was in the US in the first place was to get treatment after being tortured at the hands of security services, charged with treason and planted on guns in his hotel room?
We can debate the intolerance of the opposition but it comes with fewer ramifications than that of the state and the problem with that is that the state belongs to all of us while the opposition is a passing political tide which covers a minority.
