Arrest of Former of President Museveni crony turned opposition politician and Uganda presidential candidate General Tumukunde is a case of Terrorizing Political Competitors with long Jail Terms
Somalilandsun: On or about 12th March 2020, General Henry Tumukunde of Uganda was charged with treason. Treason is a capital offence in Uganda, it’s a crime that attracts a long Jail term. Tumukunde was arrested after declaring that he will also contest for presidency in the next coming general elections. Yes, it is true as per the media excerpts, Tumukunde was very emotional and somewhat populist in his politically sensational language used when he was making the declaration speech, an act so cosmetic and ineffectually dangerous to national security of Uganda, but now it has taken him to court to answer treason charges.
The gist of all these quick successions of comedy and tragedy is nothing else other than a political ploy hatched by an incompetent Machiavellian egoist to make Tumukunde wuss out and puss about into self-demeaning position for competition in Uganda’s Presidential election.
Tumukunde’s misfortunes are enough light to those of us dreaming to cross a shifting bridge towards making democracy safe for African politics, to have no other course but to face the gibla then bow and pray by wishing that may Tumukunde and all other politicians intending to participate in electoral politics of Uganda have best of luck.
However, I am emotionally frustrated with how the ‘system’ of politics in East Africa has evolved into a monster of coronavirus stature that is now eating away the flesh that once formed our good culture of political pluralism, liberal thought culture and democratic space that had once accommodated listening to the voice of otherness in politics. I don’t know how we shall condemn this monster, this monster that is slowly but shrewdly justifying and socializing the evil vice into our social- spaces by making the majority of us to accept that democracy can also be protected by terrorizing competitors with long jail terms. No, in fact it is just bad manners to create far-fetched capital charges for a person because she is a political competitor. I only have one chiliastic word in Kiswahili against this monster-ishindwe!
We are so misfortunate that General Henry Tumukunde is not the only one now wallowing in the gaping yawns of the East African political inhumanity, he is just one among other victims of our East African society that is now some helluva of patrimonial bourgeoisie fangs poisoning politics to make it unfit for the powerless. Going by example, Kenya of today does not depend on the electorates to get a new President. Those Kenyan elections you often see being held in public is just a smoke screen to throw you off the sleuth. What happens is that the system of cartels in Nairobi pre-determines the person that will be the next President one year before the election day. Saddening enough, social projection has it that the Nairobi cartels prefer Kenya’s Presidency to revolve between or among four aristocratic families. Thus, my brother and my sister, stay informed that politics about the executive in Kenya is not the realm of those without tradition of good money and brutal power in their families.
Obviously, what happens to a new entrant into the race for presidential elections will be nothing less than horrendous muffling with terror of charges for capital offences at the bourgeoisie and cartel controlled courts. Just like the chain reaction theory we learned in our childhood, this culture of selfish politics also chain reacts by working as the breeding ground for brutalities that have our self-less brothers and sisters in the likes of Bobi Wine and Stellar Nyanzi of Uganda, Peter Biar Ajak of Southern Sudan, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza and Diane Shima Rwigara of Rwanda, to be serially condemned to prisons for no any other reason apart from saying that, ‘hello there, I come from East Africa, and hence I deserve good leadership’.
It is Britain that gave birth to the political East Africa, and If at all Harold Laski, the British Author of Grammar of Politics, would be alive today he would helplessly get condemned to gin-deep shame by the East African practitioners of parliamentary politics now swamped into un-wavering perpetration of the gestapo-like terror of long term prison sentences against their competitors when especially they justify their un-democratic deeds by always arguing that they are doing so to protect good governance, democracy and state sovereignty in their countries.
Laski the father of British parliamentary democracy, which East Africa inherited, knows not any other form of democracy other than that democracy which is characterized by un-fettered rule of reason providing space for difference in opinion and competition for any political office. Laski explained very well how electoral democracy must work in in his seminal work of scholarship on democracy in the Parliamentary Democracy in England. However, Laski was not one-sided in his out-look, he was so pragmatic to be able to predict the dangers of democracy in his subsequent book Dangers of Being a Gentleman and then again sometimes later in another book, the Dangers of Sovereignty. In the last two books Laski faulted democracy for giving the economically mighty uncontrolled powers to rule the poor without limit. I hope I am not transferring the spirit of swotting to you, my dear reader, but who knows, maybe we the people of the East African region have been held hostage by the snobbish trappings in our daily bourgeoisie struggle to become public gentle ladies and gentlemen while at the same time we pretend not to see how our blind worship of then openly self-defeating sovereignty has made us defenseless before the thrasonical wiles of ruthless dictators. vivam.
By-Alexander Opicho
From- Lodwar, Kenya
Mail-opichoalexander@gmail.com
