The debate, now settled in Parliament, with Mityana Municipality MP Francis Zzake, lying flat, back on the floor, after abrawl, to mainstream the Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) back to the Agriculture ministry has once again exposed a vanquished political opposition hanging to a straw.
Uganda’s opposition groups and leaders especially since NRM’s advent in 1986, have sought to build their collective careers, on naked and untenable lies particularly against President Yoweri Museveni. It’s sad, but probably an indictment on NRM’s failure to deepen a progressive ideology and politics. It’s truly absurd, that these lies are being picked up with gusto by young rising politicians in DP, UPC, FDC, and NUP, mostly under forty years, successful yet spew and circulate venom on social media unabated.
It all started four decades ago 1983 when then President, Milton Obote, facing heat from Museveni’s armed rebellion, labelled him a Rwandese refugee, who had taken undue advantages of Uganda’s hospitality.
The old political elites especially from DP, then accused Museveni of being a Marxist-Communist who intended to abolish private property, and even women would be shared, a hollow scare to Ugandans not to support him. DP tongue-waggers have spent the last 38 years haranguing, without any proof, NRM’s political education in Kyankwazi as communist indoctrination.
During the Constituent Assembly that debated and promulgated the 1995 Constitution, remnants of DP and UPC conjured up new lies, among them that Museveni intended to ‘steal’ land in Buganda, Lango, Teso and Acholi, a lie the collective opposition continue to circulate with varying degrees of hyperbole to score cheap political points, without any sense of shame..
UPC and DP surrogates led by Paulo Kawanga Ssemwogere, Cecilia Atim Ogwal, Yafesi Okullo-Epak, John Ssebaana Kizito now dead, and Ben Wacha, Daniel Omara Atubo, Damiano Lubega and others raved those lies to gain votes in the 1996 elections. They also accused Museveni of having ‘sold’ the entire Lake Victoria although to-date haven’t disclosed the alleged buyers.
During the 2001 general election, a super liar, Aggrey Siryoyi Awori, a presidential candidate, and his official agent Jacob Oulanyah, lied to Ugandans that the DRC government under Joseph Desire Kabila had captured 114 UPDF soldier’s as Prisoners of War (PoW) but couldn’t prove when challenged. A verification through the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found no merits in the claims, but Awori didn’t recount and eventually went to his grave with the falsehoods.
Dr Olaara Otuunu, brand new from two decades in exile said publicly without shame that Museveni had ‘sold’ Lake Kyoga. It was his shallow attempt to woo voters in Lango, but was rejected because he was part of the Acholi military-cum-civilian junta that overthrew UPC II government on 27 July 1985 in their internal ethnic warfare for an aborted supremacy. The open lies told by Kizza Besigye, an NRM turncoat, and many of his now erstwhile sidekicks in the Reform Agenda and FDC, since 1999-2001 to-date, pursuing a yet unfulfilled ambition to be president of Uganda, are too many to list here. But we are comforted that majority Ugandan voters haven’t bought into many of his lies which, appear to blunt his political aggressiveness.
Mengo establishment, a foremost recipient of President Museveni’s mega handouts that ought to be his ally, is running false storylines of receiving cold shoulders instead. Mengo exhibits ungratefulness even after Museveni, Amidist opposition in most parts of Uganda, reinstated its cultural institution, privileges, leadership and expansive estates that Obote dismantled in 1966, destroyed and confiscated what remained, as Kabaka Edward Muteesa fled into exile in Britain, where he died a lonely man in 1969.
As a footnote, fickle John Ken Lukyamuzi the Man, perennial Secretary General of the Conservative Party (CP) accused Museveni of selling off Mabira forest until his political end came on its own.
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