President Yoweri Museveni addressing the country at State House. He
addresses “fellow countrymen” (sorry women), “especially Bazukkulu”
(grandchildren), doubling down on his recent favourite, but
controversial, reference to restless Ugandan youth. PHOTO | AFP
On December 20, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni issued a statement on the security situation “ahead of the festive season.”
On
the face of it, it is one of most innocuous and pedestrian statements
Museveni has ever put out. He reported even on some chicken thieves who
were driven off from a farm, as a sign of achievement.
However,
it is that which makes it one of the most pregnant statements of his
presidency. He addresses “fellow countrymen” (sorry women), “especially
Bazukkulu” (grandchildren), doubling down on his recent favourite, but
controversial, reference to restless Ugandan youth.
He
touts his programme to install cameras around the country as a weapon
against crime, but doesn’t cite any success that the electronic
surveillance in Kampala has scored in the past few months.
All
the successes he cites are from what he calls the “old” method of
“people's vigilance,” working with the security services to thwart
criminals.
This is important, because “people’s
vigilance” and popular participation were the whole basis of the bush
war by Museveni’s National Resistance Army/Movement in the early 1980s,
and were cited as the reason they were superior to all other Ugandan
rebel groups before and since.
Since the 2016 election,
there has grown a general recognition within sections of the NRM, and
the president, that the political authority derived from popular
participation and people’s vigilance has all but vanished, hence the
desperate search for a new source of legitimacy – an electronic one.
Cameras
are part of that electronic political package, as are dams, and
infrastructure. This electronic and infrastructure package is supposed
to be the inheritance that Museveni is bequeathing to his grandchildren
(Bazukkulu). These grandchildren, though, are proving to be ungrateful
brats, who are besotted by a hip-hop musician-turned-Member of
Parliament, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine.
But first
things first. When Museveni characterises Uganda’s army of unemployed
and disaffected youth as grandchildren, he is not lazy or being
patronising. It’s clever, because children usually just accept their
inheritance, and don’t dictate what it will be.
And
grandchildren have even less standing to insist on what they can get. As
a son or daughter, you cannot really demand that your parents should
bequeath you a massive villa, instead of a small apartment. As a
grandchild, you will be more happy that your grandfather left you his
favourite comb, not his farm.
For the festive season, Museveni’s government chose to renew its battles with Bobi Wine.
A
week after chasing him around the eastern industrial city of Jinja and
blocking his planned concert there, the government announced it would
not permit his Boxing Day show at his Busaabala “One Love Beach.” In
November, after his Kyarenga Concert was banned from the Namboole
Stadium, he took it to Busaabala, and had what some billed as the
largest paying crowd in Uganda’s history.
Seems
outrageous, right? Perhaps not. Given how Museveni views young people,
perhaps he actually sees Bobi Wine as a thief who is stealing his
children and grandchildren.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3
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