Dr Abed Bwanika campaigns in Masaka District where residents contributed money to facilitate his campaigns. PHOTO BY MARTINS E. SSEKWEYAMA
Ten years ago, the darkness of man’s heart played out in Kampala, the poisonous fruits of politics of the gun claimed lives of two men and unto our country’s gloomiest episodes we added a page.
Capt Ramathan Magara, trigger happy and fanatic, around this time in 2006, at the peak of presidential campaigns drove into a crowd a car decorated with President Museveni’s posters.
Naturally, a stone had been thrown into a bee hive. Chaos erupted and gun fire rocked when he pulled the trigger on Dr Kizza Besigye’s supporters who sought to rein in him. He was since convicted of manslaughter and handed a 15-year jail term.
A few years from today, Magara will be out of the coolers. However, the families of Gideon Makabayi and Vincent Kauma will for eternity bear the anguish of his actions—their only crime being followers of a candidate the militia did not support.
One could, therefore, feel the pain boiling in Dr Besigye this week as he paid tribute to Kauma and consoled his family. His grave, as with the typical ordinary Ugandan, is unmarked. It is a mass of brown, alluvial soil, a wooden symbol of the Holy Cross and shrubs. Not even an epitaph is scribbled anywhere.
‘Died right in front of my eyes’
Dr Besigye, staring at Kauma’s grave with eyes laden with emotion, bulging with tears restrained, took to memory lane: “Kauma died right in front of my eyes. His death is etched on my memory.
There are many people like him who have died in the struggle to liberate our country from tyranny. We are committed to making sure that their death is not in vain.”
But why dwell on this particular incident of the campaign this week? Precisely because the blood of Ugandans like Kauma cannot and should not be let dry in vein. It must, at least in our minds, remain a fresh reminder that elective politics of bloodshed has no place in 21st Century Uganda.
At his rally in Mpigi, Dr Besigye threw a rough estimate of 500,000 as the number of Ugandans whose lives the war, liberation struggle as its protagonists portray it, from 1981-1986, claimed.
Men like Kauma whom the FDC candidate saluted in death, a decade later, are a powerful symbolic reminder that our politics is built on skeletons of men and women, many of them innocent and we can only do them a favour by playing politics of sanity, tolerance and humility, espousing the point Chief of Defence Forces, Gen Katumba Wamala, made at the launch of Tarehe Sita celebrations , “Uganda is bigger than individuals,” the same point immediate former president of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan emphasised in his speech conceding defeat to Muhammadu Buhari.
That again was a point reinforced by Kauma’s family to Dr Besigye. No amount of compensation would heal the sores in their hearts and blisters of anguish in their minds.
The best Besigye can do if he wins the February 18 vote, at least to the family, is desist from the temptation of letting power control him
Still in Mpigi, acting district police commander Ronald Mugalula on Tuesday evening survived lynching.
He was only doing his job as a law enforcement officer when he asked Besigye, who had kept voters waiting from 2pm at Mpigi Trading Centre to halt his rally at 6:45pm. In typical defiance mode, Besigye told him off, albeit calmly.
On that day, the DPC was alone at the rally, taking charge of law and order in a crowd of more than 3,000 people.
His juniors were deployed at a nearby health centre and school where the retired colonel was anticipated to pull off his everyday public relations stunts. That DPC could have died at the hands of a mob if Besigye’s police escorts didn’t intervene.
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