30 July 2016

We still need police brutality; oh yes, just for regime survival


The story in town is that Gen Kale Kayihura, the Inspector General of Police, has been summoned to appear before a court of law over issues related to his work.


Don’t fear baby, I hear the guy graduated with a degree of Master of Laws from London School of Economics. Just take it like this: the court is offering Kayihura an opportunity to clear his name. Who would decline such an opportunity? Or perhaps we look at these things differently? Well, sometime back, we wrote this:


“The appointment of Lt Gen Henry Tumukunde, a ‘securitised personality’, as the Minister for Security is curious. He will superintend over the two near-dead civil intelligence services: Internal Security Organisation (ISO) and External Security Organisation (ESO) which are likely to resurrect.


But this expected resurrection would be coming at a time the police is very assertive in the Security and Intelligence Community; so assertive that even the UPDF is seen as playing second best to the police.


So, we are likely to witness a clash between the police and civil intelligence services. The police will be ‘expected’ to retreat to their traditional mandate of preventing and fighting crime.


They (police) will be expected to leave security (in the traditional sense of the word) to the real owners of the word ‘security’. But which police will retreat? IGP Kayihura won’t let go without a fight; neither will Tumukunde cede…


Unfortunately, unlike my beloved Uganda Police Special Branch (which was merely wished away), ISO and ESO cannot be thrown out by an administrative instrument; because they were established under an Act of Parliament.


But my trouble with Tumukunde is that he looks like someone more disposed to act as a service chief than a cabinet minister.


He may want to supervise (manage?) the two services the way Kayihura does his thing. So, we are likely to have the minister for Security physically securing the public from a fight between boda boda riders (like Kayihura always does). And if there were to be any clash between police and the Civil Intel Services, our Tumukunde will have to court the UPDF. You get?” So, could the court thing be the subtle beginning of the process of dressing-down of Kayihura?


***************
Gen Kayihura and other senior police officials are summoned to appear in a court over acts described as police brutality. But the courts are just playing catch up: the public has already indicted, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced Kayihura. Police actions in these matters are always erroneously captioned and framed as police brutalising Kizza Besigye’s supporters.


But the principal identity and characterisation of the brutalised people is ‘Ugandan citizens’. Police is just brutalising citizens. What the media refers to as ‘Besigye supporters’, ‘we’ in the NRM refer to as ‘Besigye goons’; the unwashed wretches of human persons undeserving to…


But make no mistake, Mr Museveni still needs Gen Kayihura and police brutality. Why? It is not easy to find another military general ready to de-regularise him/herself (even involuntarily) in the name of loyalty.


There are of course some people who think Kayihura is only loyal to an individual and not a cause. But that is wrong; Kayihura is loyal to a cause and its leadership: the cause is ‘regime survival’


Without police brutality as an instrument of political mobilisation and demobilisation, the regime would have suffered some strategic ‘reversals’. Brutal policing by police is still better than any policing by the military.


And the civil intelligence services lack the strategic and command structure to do any policing. The law just won’t catch Dr Besigye; because he operates below the red line of the law. That’s why the police use ‘neighbouring rights’: beating up near Besigye.




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