Uganda is a country that never fails to produce a national story that occupies the citizenry and media for days on end.
Last week, the national newsmaker was Prof Lawrence Muganga, Vice Chancellor of Victoria University in Kampala.
The story, now known to most people, is that he was nominated by President Museveni to be the next Minister of State for Internal Affairs.
All seemed straightforward until he appeared before the parliamentary vetting committee, during which the deliberations took a twist when the question was asked if he had a Rwandan passport, had ever owned one, or was a Rwandan citizen.
This threw his nomination into a crisis, and this crisis spilt over onto social media, where it played out as any number of issues, ranging from a witch-hunt of Banyarwanda, malicious sabotage of Muganga’s chances by the Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa, the double standards of letting other nominees off the hook, such as UN Permanent Representative Adonia Ayebare, Shartsi Musherure, and Calvin Echodu with dual US citizenship, to discussions of Muganga having too many contradictions in his story to be trusted, and so on.
In one version, Muganga said he was born in Butalejja in eastern Uganda, while in another version he said he was born in Mukono.
In one version, he had never owned a Rwandan passport, while in yet another version, he admitted on a Kampala radio station last Saturday, June 6, that he once had a Rwandan passport.
During the week, he visited his parents’ graves in Mukono to pay homage and assert his Ugandan citizenship as authentic, with the graveside drama captured and dutifully posted onto social media.
Ugandan Banyarwanda and some Rwandans in Rwanda seized on the upheaval to lecture the public on Africa’s porous pre-colonial borders, why we need an East African federation, and to remind the State of how difficult it has recently been for Banyarwanda to get passports and National IDs.
Some of this posturing was undoubtedly a way to raise the stakes and guilt-trip President Museveni to bow to pressure, as is his tendency, and push through Muganga’s nomination and appointment.
When Monday, June 8, came for the swearing-in of the new Cabinet, Muganga and the three other nominees were not mentioned or sworn in.
For the many Banyarwanda who had spun this as ethnic profiling, this took the wind out of their sails and forced minds back to the question of dual citizenship and the law.
In all this, we must be reminded that Muganga was arrested in September 2021 by operatives of the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence on suspicion of espionage against Uganda.
Nearly five years later, he is listed as a nominee for the job of Minister of State for Internal Affairs. This is not just any other ministry.
Was that 2021 arrest made in error? By the time the vice chancellor of a university is arrested, that can’t be something that is done without thought to the public fallout and negative image for the government.
Ordinarily, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or the Interior ministry in many other countries, is the parent ministry of the police, immigration department, prisons, and some branches of the intelligence services.
Anybody who was suspected of espionage enough to be very publicly arrested and driven off, handcuffed, by security operatives, has passed the threshold of a security threat.
At the very least, this is not a person to be nominated for a government ministry, least of all the Interior ministry.
So, what’s going on?
In my view, there can be only two explanations.
The first is that Muganga was, all along, an agent of the Uganda government, deployed to a foreign country or to engage with citizens or security agencies of a foreign country under the cover of working for them.
In this role, he would report his findings back to Kampala.
But then, if he was a double agent working undercover for Uganda, why was he arrested?
Well, one could argue that the counterintelligence of the foreign country started to get suspicious of him, his covert communications meetings, and started investigating him.
Not to blow his cover, Ugandan intelligence came up with a plan to make it appear as though it suspected him of being a spy for a foreign country, arrest him in a most public way, and by that, cause the foreign country’s counterintelligence to conclude that he was not a Ugandan spy.
The second view is that Muganga was indeed involved in instances of espionage, and the CMI monitored him and rightfully arrested him.
But if so, once again, the question: How did he get nominated as a Minister of State?
The only explanation is that a foreign country or some foreign countries have so infiltrated the Ugandan State at the highest level that they are able to covertly influence who gets listed for nomination to a Cabinet or ministerial position.
However, if this is not so, we return to the previous angle, which is that Muganga might have blown the whistle on a foreign country’s spying on Uganda and for this, he is now trusted both by Ugandan security and President Museveni, and his reward was to be a Minister of State for Internal Affairs.