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On The Mark
With Alan Tacca |
Three words and the men of war
August 3 - 10, 2003
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A number of people have been asking me to give them the (missing) end to my last article, “Kony’s Spirits And The Pope’s Juju” (Sunday Monitor, July 27). I thought it would be fair to take on board even those who did not inquire. Due to a technical error, the three words rounding off the article were dropped during production. The last paragraph should have read: Who knows, combined with our local men’s charms and that army of bees, Kony may finally be subdued and taught that President Museveni (his own words a few years back) is next to God. Appearing out of its original context, the irony in that paragraph of course is now stale. But Uganda’s powerful men and its endless wars ensure that the country is never short of ironies. I am going to look at three, only because there is no space for a dozen. Mike Mukula’s alarmist antics While trying to shoot down the worries of his people, the minister of State for Health, Hon. Mike Mukula, may be inadvertently sowing even more worries. His objection to media reports on rebel Joseph Kony’s incursions into his native Teso, because such reports cause public alarm, is standard totalitarian logic: let the victims die quietly without waking up the nation. But he has not given sufficient thought to his appearance at Parliament, in army uniform, identifying himself as one of the leaders of the so-called Arrow Group. Pandering to a regime that glorifies the mastery of war, it is possible that Mr Mukula has not just been visited by adolescent fantasies; the thrills and excitement associated with cowboy movies. He may actually be banking on the odd chance that the Commander-in-Chief, or a future archaeologist stumbling upon the newspaper cartoons of our day, might mistake him for a war hero. But if we take him seriously – as he insists we should – then the alarm bell is louder than ever. For, we ask, where are the generals? Where are the commanders and all the foot soldiers? Is the country now in such deep crisis that this rather flamboyant government minister must put aside his fine suits and don battlefield clothes? On its road to professionalism, has our army finally become the kind of institution that a stunt journeyman can freely crash, with his enthusiasm as the only obvious qualification? For Mike Mukula seems to have company – and apparently sometimes being upstaged too. The July 31 Monitor reports that at the funeral of one Hellen Otekat Acham in Soroti last week – which Mukula himself attended in uniform – Kaberamaido MP John Eresu appeared, not only in military fatigues, but in a “mamba” armoured battle vehicle as well! Ostensibly coming straight from a combat operation (Eresu’s claim), one of the most dreaded of the UPDF’S battle cars at a funeral must have allowed Joseph Kony’s bandits in the field a sigh of relief. When Lt. Gen. Moses Ali, Uganda’s first deputy premier and minister for Disaster Preparedness was vowing that the government would relocate (forcefully, if necessary) the thousands of Sudanese refugees from their present sanctuary at Kiryandongo in Bunyoro to Ikafe in Arua District, even deporting the UNHCR country representative in the controversy, you kind of imagined that the government could. Well, it can’t. It seems that there are circumstances in which a beggar cannot drive a refugee at will. In the case of Uganda (according to The East African, July 28 – Aug. 3), the government was depending on European Union donations (at present punitively withheld) to implement the minister’s vow. Sometimes a six-foot-plus general is more handicapped than an ‘arrow boy’. Will Anselm become the youngest rebel? Even if you were looking for government functionaries you could take seriously, the comic agitation around Anselm, 3-year-old son (turning four in September) of 2001 presidential candidate Col. Kiiza Besigye and Mbarara Municipality MP Winnie Byanyima, drags you back to the circus. In his latest encounter with police and immigration officials at the border with Rwanda, Anselm has been characterized as “stubborn” and “defiant”. People have been wondering: is a new rebel in the making? If so, the worry may well be that, at under four years of age, Anselm would probably demolish all the age records set by the youngsters who have wielded AK47s in both Lt. Gen. Yoweri Museveni and Maj. Gen. Joseph Kony’s rebel armies. Which general would be amused by such a prospect? |
© 2003 The Monitor Publications
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