Museveni was at Fort Leavenworth, about 30 miles away from where I live in Kansas, yesterday to celebrate his son’s graduation from the Command and General Staff College.
It’s a small world.
If either the Monitor or the New Vision covered the story, it hasn’t made it online, though an earlier article calls Major Muhoozi Kainerugaba a possible “head of state in the near future.”
I leave town for ONE WEEK, and Joseph Kony has to go and announce a new offensive.
Timothy Kalyegira, one of Uganda’s most controversial journalists, has long set off my “crazy” radar. He’s a vocal denier of the thousands of political murders perpetrated during Idi Amin’s reign, for one. Even more strange: he’s claimed for almost two years that he has access to a “seer” who predicts the future of African politics.
In today’s Monitor he has an article titled Why I no longer fear President Museveni, in which he somehow manages to equate skepticism at the power of his fortune-telling friend to belief in Museveni’s omnipotence and to declare that this “seer” has guaranteed him protection from censorship and arrest, all at once. Enjoy:
When I first wrote about the seer in July 2006, I was roundly criticised by my colleague Andrew Mwenda who recommended I check into a mental clinic, a view shared by Canadian journalist Murray Oliver of Canadian Television News and a fellow panellist on the then Andrew Mwenda Live show on Kfm.
The idea that there are greater powers than President Museveni in the universe over which he has no control is something most well educated people do not take seriously.
On December 16, 2007, a friend I had gone with to visit the seer asked what she thought was a troubled question. She asked the seer about me and how safe I was writing and on radio uttering all these sensitive things. Was I not in danger from the state, she asked?
Replied the seer, looking in my direction but avoiding eye contact: “That one? [me] They will not manage him!”
Which then leads me to a question once asked by Mwenda; how come we all write about Museveni, attack him and his policies, as you do, and you do it even more mercilessly, but you never get arrested, summoned to CID or police to record a statement, and in general seem to be immune to Museveni’s oppressive state machinery?Good question. Over the slightest comment or news stories, news reporters, editors, and opposition politicians are whisked off to the police, many of them have been arrested and spent time in jail. But there is one person who somehow escapes all this. Why indeed?
The reasons are plain, as narrated above.
Today’s Monitor reported that medical workers and Makerere University professors are planning to strike, claiming the government has not paid them wages — a combined Ush40 billion for members of both groups. It would not be the first time either group has gone on strike:
The chairman of Uganda Medical Workers Union Dr Sam Lyomoki told health workers at Mulago Hospital on Friday that the two-month ultimatum they had given to government was expiring and thereafter they will strike.
Bonus news: Ugandan People’s Defense Force soldiers are withdrawing their savings from the UPDF-sponsored Wazelendo Savings and Credit Co-operative Society. The soldiers cite the institution’s failure to send regular statements updating them on the status of their accounts as the reason for the withdrawal.
Edit: As of Monday, Mwenda is out of jail on bond, but he is supposed to report to police on Tuesday.
Reuters reported Saturday that Andrew Mwenda, one of Uganda’s — if not Africa’s — most tenacious journalists, has been arrested along with two colleagues, Odobo Bichachi John Njoroge. The Daily Monitor is saying a photographer, Joseph Kiggundu, has also been taken.
Mwenda’s paper, the Independent, has an account of the arrest and the raid that followed it:
At [Mwenda’s] house, the police confiscated his lap-top, flash disks, 43 CDs full of information – both official and private, a manuscript of a book he has co-authored with Prof. Roger Tangri on Elite Corruption and Politics in Uganda. After that, Mwenda was driven to the offices of The Independent.
…
Then the search starts from the editors’ offices but not before some ugly scenes. Herbert Labejja, the magazine’s office assistant, demands one of the men to clean his shoes before he enters the office. In response, the operative who had earlier pushed his away past Musede sprang, collared him and shook him around accusing him of being big-headed as Labejja struggled to free himself.
But it was only the beginning; a few minutes later the two are locked in another exchange as the officer dragged Labejja out of the washroom, informing his colleague that he (Labejja) was hiding a gun there.
In the office, Bichachi’s continuous pleas to establish what seditious material the group was looking for went unanswered as they turned the lockers, poured documents, ransacked drawers and anywhere they suspected the seditious material was kept.
Outside, the besieged journalists and other employees were busy on their phones, mostly messaging, even as they went about trying to figure out what the raid this time was about until the phones were confiscated and they were barred from leaving the inner open space, not even to use the washrooms.
A Facebook group has been set up to keep people informed on the efforts to have him released.
Also, among the ten things Tumwijuke wants to know:
4. Why Andrew Mwenda is arrested and it makes international headlines and yet when 13 journalists in radio stations around the country were (between January and March this year) arrested for doing their jobs, publicly threatened by politicians and sacked for speaking the truth it barely made the news briefs in the local media.