President Museveni has used his Thursday address while making his post-budget reading remarks at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds to reiterate his personal resolve to “promptly and decisively smash” contemporary Uganda’s young leaders who have been established to be involved in grand corruption, making it clear that failing to act will amount to betraying the 800,000 peasants who died during his 5 year NRA bush war against impunity and untouchables (he called the nantagambwako) who reigned during the past regimes.
After highlighting the ways in which the Ugandan economy is headed for very good days, Gen Museveni turned to address corruption which he said was now a very big problem which has to decisively and promptly be confronted as a way of ensuring that the benefits of the economic growth are enjoyed and shared out in an inclusive way catering for the needs of every Ugandan as opposed to allowing a few political elites to benefit.
The President, who had painfully listened to poverty-stricken veterans of his war share their daily experiences of struggling to meet life’s basics last Sunday as he presided over heroes day celebrations at Mpenja in Gomba (that village has a mass grave into which 250 NRA fighters were buried), said it was unacceptable for people who sacrificed so much to languish in abject poverty when young leaders he has entrusted with key government positions are drowning in illicitly gotten wealth and extreme luxury.
He didn’t give specifics of who he exactly was talking about but his eloquently delivered remarks were construed to be a reference to the ongoing CID corruption investigations which have resulted into at least three MPs getting remanded in Luzira after being charged with willful involvement into corruption-related misconduct.
The President said that he was pained that all his earlier efforts to talk to such young leaders to abandon corruption dealings (as if he was a Pastor) had gone unheeded and here he now was demanding to know what these young leaders take themselves to be while deluding themselves that they can successfully engage in provocative behaviour and continue defiantly standing up to the mighty NRA. He made it clear that ending vices like murder, rape and corruption is part of the reason why he and other Fronasa colleagues waged war against past regimes in which the public didn’t have any trust or confidence largely because of the fact that many government officials engaged in these same vices and went unpunished.
He elaborated that intolerance towards these very vices is the reason why NRA was able to upstage obscurantists like Andrew Kayira’s rebel UFM army even in Buganda where its leaders appealed to ethnicity in the hope of alienating NRA from the population. Museveni reminisced how NRA’s ability to walk the talk when two of it’s soldiers (Zabron & another) were summarily tried and publicly executed via firing squad after they used their guns to murder and kill innocent residents, made his rebel army to stand out and convince the population that it was better than the rest.
Museveni said the decision to publicly execute the two soldiers was a hard one for the NRA High Command, which he chaired, to make because these were very good fighters. But in the end, the execution had to be carried out in order to enable NRA demonstrate its zero tolerance to indiscipline. He likened the ongoing grand corruption to the abomination Zabron & another committed by shooting dead innocent civilians even though they (soldiers) had been intoxicated under the influence of alcohol.
The President elaborated that doing the right thing, which was executing the two soldiers, enabled NRA to deepen its support among peasants in Luwero as they started accepting them as honest actors who meant what they said. The 1982 incident happened in Semuto Sub County’s Mulule village and the President said the NRA story would have ended differently, most likely in failure, if the incident hadn’t been used to demonstrate decisiveness against clear wrongdoing similar to corruption conduct over which the three MPs have had to be caged at Luzira. Museveni stressed that his rebel NRA risked losing all the support from peasants if an attempt had been made to cover up for the two soldiers who clearly had breached the rebel army’s code of ethical conduct.
He added that by engaging in corruption and impunity, as if nothing would ever be done against them, the young leaders he complained about had equally crossed the red line and stretched his patience to breaking point. Museveni said he had been patient including making out time to counsel and talk to the young leaders but they unfortunately continued engaging in corruption acts and now is the time to smash all of them and obliterate their syndicate once and for all.
