“Duncan is in his grave,” William Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well; treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, can touch him further.”
One could be forgiven for thinking Shakespeare was writing about former President Milton Obote, who now lies quietly in his humble grave in Akokoro.
Why?
Forty years ago this week, then Lieutenant Walter Ochora of the Uganda National Liberation Army spoke on Radio Uganda and made a dramatic appeal: “Our brother Yoweri Museveni, please come out of the bush and join us in fighting Obote’s tribalism. We shall leave no stone unturned.”
That broadcast marked the final collapse of Obote’s political career, which had begun in 1958 when he entered the British Legislative Council.
For five years before that moment, Museveni had told Ugandans and the world that Obote was a tribalist, a mass murderer, and a leader who had rigged the 1980 general election. Obote, for his part, dismissed Museveni and his National Resistance Army fighters as “bandits”.
Drawing from his grounding in economics, history, English language and literature at Makerere University, Obote reminded the country what a bandit meant: a robber or outlaw belonging to a gang, typically operating in an isolated or lawless area.
History, however, was not on Obote’s side. The so-called bandits won, largely because of the Baganda, who offered land in the Luweero Triangle, food, and even their children to support Museveni’s war. It was revenge for 1966, when Obote tried to dismantle their ancient kingdom.
The law of unintended consequences is unforgiving.
Today, former comrades-in-arms united against Obote are literally at each other’s throats.
Dr Kizza Besigye, who once saved the lives of many NRA fighters as a physician, is now fighting for his own life in Luzira prison. His wife, Dr Winnie Byanyima, herself a former NRA fighter, has spoken to local and international media, accusing President Museveni, his son General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, and the Director of Public Prosecutions of lawlessness, wickedness, and viciousness.
She is demanding her husband’s immediate release, without spelling out what follows if that demand is ignored.
Bazilio and Tito Okello, who collaborated in Obote’s overthrow before embarking on a disastrous resistance in the Acholi region, left innocent Acholi civilians to pay the price for that misadventure, a cost still borne today.
Meanwhile, Bobi Wine, leader of a predominantly Baganda political movement, has gone into hiding, accusing Museveni and his son of plotting to kill him. He is openly hinting at another liberation war.
Obote is not gloating that his former enemies are now at war with one another. Instead, one imagines him borrowing again from Shakespeare, this time from Henry V:
“The blood weeps from my heart when I do shape, in forms imaginary, th’ unguided days and rotten times that you shall look upon, when I am sleeping with my ancestors.”
I join my late relative Obote in weeping from my heart as I watch young female graduates trapped in such dehumanising poverty that they are forced to sell their bodies to survive, while our politicians rattle sabres and rehearse old wars.
Uganda has won many liberation wars.
It is losing its people.