Last week saw the police press the reset button by removing all discernment, to return to the 2021 violence levels in the Ugandan elections. The preceding campaign days were more like the calm before the storm moments. The world watched on in utter disbelief of what had become of all the statesman show that preceded this week’s turn of events where campaigns had been largely peaceful. It’s on those moments where the real ruling party supporters were starting to hold their heads high to remind the population of the ‘peace’ they claimed to have brought.
Yet the security forces reminded us that peace in Uganda is too often traded for violence and coercion, especially if you support the ‘wrong’ side. It makes it very difficult to listen to the right political messages if the headlines are instead awash with violence and atrocities by our security forces. Violence, whether physical or emotional, shatters the very foundations of trust which a government is built upon. It is like a family head who provides food and shelter but withdraws his role and turns violent when he disagrees with his wife.
The children, innocent of the quarrel, are forced to taste the bitterness of that anger, catching stray bullets. Such trauma and wounds can last a lifetime. No one wins when a home breaks down. Just as force has no place in resolving marital discord, it has no place in our nation’s political life. At the height of the Covid-era elections, my family received a distress call from Mityana. My maternal uncle, thrilled to see the NUP party presidential flagbearer Robert Kyagulanyi (Bobi Wine) in his district, forgot the unwritten rule to, ‘never show genuine excitement when the candidate is not from the ruling party.’ The security forces reminded him of this sin by striking his head with batons. His jaw was broken and was rushed to hospital, where they found a clot had formed in his brain from the good beating he received. He was pronounced dead and buried fast to follow Islam traditions.
I was embarrassed to pick up my National Resistance Movement (NRM) registration card, fearing it would hurt my family even more. All the branding, the catchy Tubonga Naawe song, the excitement of being a new voter, vanished in the face of relentless beatings depicted by the media and felt even in my own household. How could I vote for those who had caused death to one of us? This is just one among the many such stories around that much dreaded election.
The NRM government says it so loved Uganda that it had to start a war and win it to come to power to bring freedom of expression and so on. And yet the bible teaches us that love is not rude, love is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. If they really love a peaceful Uganda, why always stimulate violence and then justify it with petty rally incidences only recorded from the Opposition’s side? The truth is that supporting the Opposition in Uganda is a crime. Campaigns are tolerated only to lend legitimacy to the government’s next international loans. We were never prepared for multiparty politics, nor for dissent even within our own parties.
Like a husband rushing into marriage without maturity, our leaders have not learned how to handle disagreement without violence. Or they feigned the lack of knowledge to hide from the truth of exhaustion with their politics and lack of change and thereby stifling dissent. Consider the central region. It contributes the most to the national account yet receives the harshest beatings when it voices anger over corruption and mismanagement. Instead of being given more say at the table, it is silenced through coercion and intimidation, more like taxpayers being treated as real slaves under the mask of democracy.
I keep wondering why police should beat up a shopkeeper for two hours if they deviate from a human made plan, which is prone to errors, and yet, they often close the same roads and disrupt lives and traffic whenever the President’s convoy passes? Uganda has 46 million people. Electing 45,000 leaders should not cause rifts so deep that lives are lost. Are we so unimportant that the 99.9 percent must either be killed, beaten, coerced, intimidated or silenced so the 0.1 percent can collect more taxes? If polls only pass the ‘show of force’ test but fail the legitimacy test, perhaps we should admit we are staging democracy rather that practicing it.
No amount of public relations can justify violence. When you control all the weapons, you already hold ultimate power. You don’t need to starve, kill, or teargas dissent away. Please don’t kill us.