Tag Archives: Yoweri Museveni

President Yoweri Museveni: please hire me! 3

Gay - Political, Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , ,

Yoweri Museveni needs a special adviser on homosexuality: ME!

Yoweri Museveni needs a special adviser on [homo]sexuality: me!!!

I have finally found the job I would like to do in Uganda.

Specifically, I want to be hired by Uganda’s president, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, as his spokesperson on homosexual affairs.

Okay, perhaps that would be too narrow a remit. Can he maybe hire me as his special adviser on matters relating to sex and sexuality? If you bear with me, you will see why this is such an excellent idea.

Mr. President:

I am ready to be your public relations manager, your consultant, your special adviser, your go-to person whenever  human rights activists  from the USA or wherever come to nag  when you are resting at your country home in Rwakitura, or when you wish to  clip the ears of a stubborn member of Parliament or wayward Speaker of the House.

What’s brought this on?

Simple. Who better to hire than a gay man whose fabled objectivity keeps friends and foes on their toes in trepidation that he might call them out?

Secondly, Mr. President, you need simple lessons in sexual public relations. Of course you are right when you argue that [in a manner of speaking] if you were to kiss your wife in public you would lose an election. That would be a very Ugandan reaction.

Mr. President, in me you are preaching to the converted on the issue of exhibitionism. Yours truly has lived on four continents and attended more gay pride parades than some people have had hot dinners. But I have nonetheless remained unimpressed by public displays of affection, preferring instead the Ugandan demure, roundabout, way.

Yes, this means that I frown on gay pride parades, hanging by the chandeliers or engaging in lesbian cat fights in public bars, men having backseat sex in public car parks, “cottaging” (having sex in public toilets) and any form of militancy that seeks to push the sexual envelope with lurid, simulated, sexual displays. That is ‘cut and paste’ stuff’ that might look good in San Francisco’s Castro District. In Uganda, it should be taken home and kept there.

Western people exhibit sexual acts in public which we don’t do here,” … Africans do even punish heterosexuals who [publicly] expose their sexual acts.” (Museveni)

Yes, Mr. President, we should keep our gay sexual peccadilloes in our gay bars (even if we don’t seem to have any), at our private gatherings, in our bedrooms. But it would help if you would say this not only when you are addressing American pressure groups, but Ugandans too. Activists must indeed respect the confidentiality of sex in our traditions and culture, but so should Martin Ssempa and his ilk who fail to respect our traditional expectation of sexual confidentiality when they try to incite the masses with pornographic shows on the pulpit.

We just need to make sure that our repressed attitudes towards sex are not used as an excuse to deny gay Ugandans equal access to the medical care they need – as is now the case.

As for your perennial refrain of there being  “… no discrimination, no killings, no marginalization, no luring of young people using money into homosexual acts,” you are right. Well, almost totally right.

Ready to join Special Adviser (Special Duties), Nasser Sebaggala

I am ready to join Special Adviser (Special Duties), Nasser Sebaggala plus 100+ others

The problem is that you say there is no discrimination and then stay deafeningly silent when your Minister of Ethics barges like a bull in a China stores into gay and lesbian gatherings in hotels in Entebbe and elsewhere . How can that be looked at as anything other than discriminatory when it is fairly plain that the activists have a right to assemble just like any other Ugandan?

Also, why is there such a time lag between the silly, ignorant pronouncements from your ministers and members of Parliament that young people are being recruited into homosexuality and your repudiation of these foolish claims? Hire me to monitor and alert you to such paranoia so that it is addressed by [what would be] our office promptly.

Please, Mr. President … hire me. You can reach me on supakoja@yahoo.com. I am available for discussions (interviews if you like but I am really so good you would be missing a critical opportunity not to jump at my offer)  any time, at your convenience of course. I recognize that there is a time element to this so I hope you will respond to my excellent idea quickly, certainly before the next delegation of human rights activists from the USA, Britain or Canada come calling which we all know they will.

I not only promise to help you clean up Uganda’s battered reputation as the worst place in the world to be gay; an utterly outrageous claim when viewed against places such as the United Arab Emirates Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Iran, rural Georgia and North Dakota, (USA), I will also help you figure out ways of taking the  politics of mendacity, exaggeration, obfuscation, double speak, opportunism and hysteria out of the debate.

I agree that you have fundamentally changed your position and are not an enemy of the gay community despite what some on our side rashly claim. But you could surely do with a consultant to fine-tune your ‘gay’ message and infuse it with much needed consistency.

Hire me.

Please.

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The Bahati Anti Homosexuality Bill: The Stage Is Set 4

Gay - Political, Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

We are finally approaching the denouement to the saga that the Bahati Anti Homosexuality Bill (AHB) has been since 2009. The players are lined up and we must finally see the end to this drama.

The Major Players around Uganda's AHB

The Major Players around Uganda’s AHB

Here is an attempt to summarize what is at stake:

President Yoweri Museveni:

In 2010, following pressure from Hillary Clinton and other Western diplomats, Museveni put his authority on the line and ordered his

Doesn't want the bill: Yoweri Museveni

Doesn’t want the bill: Yoweri Museveni

National Resistance Movement (NRM) members of Parliament (MPs) to drop the bill because it was a matter of ‘foreign policy‘ that was not theirs to resolve. The MPs resentfully capitulated and the bill failed to get out of committee. It lay comatose for nearly three years until Canada’s John Baird resuscitated it with his withering attack on Rebecca Kadaga last October. Museveni must be  irritated that he has to deal with this bill again, especially with the attendant implications for his authority and foreign policy (read foreign Aid) if it is debated and passed.

Museveni has no interest in the AHB, doesn’t want it debated at all, but will now work more quietly to kill it because he can’t employ the public, paternalistic, tactics he used in 2010.

The Parliament of Uganda:

Uganda’s Parliament is overwhelmingly NRM. This 9th Parliament has proved to be more prone to straining at the leash against the executive,  because it has more young(er) MPs who are impatient to assert their authority as Parliamentarians. The problem for them is that too many NRM MPs are still beholden to the president for their seats (a lot of voters really vote NRM because of Museveni, rather than the MP) so they haven’t got enough guts to stand their ground when the president clips them behind the ear, passes them a few sweeteners or threatens them with political annihilation should they not fall into line.  You sense that more of them are increasingly ready to try and use the AHB to give Museveni a bloody nose and so you will see them attempt to debate and pass it.

Rebecca Kadaga

Her authority on the line: Rebecca Kadaga

Her authority on the line: Rebecca Kadaga

Kadaga nailed her colors to the AHB in an ill-advised attempt to bolster her presidential ambitions. At a stroke, she compromised her office which is supposed to be neutral and she also put herself directly in the cross-hairs of President Museveni who cannot have taken too kindly to her thinly veiled shot across the bows at his administration.

He stared her down when she led her Parliamentary troops up the hill because of the death in unclear circumstances of a young Parliamentarian, Selina Nebanda. Museveni insisted that there was no need to recall Parliament over that controversy and, despite her earlier blustering that Parliament would be recalled, Kadaga led her troops back down.

Already wounded by the skirmish with Yoweri Museveni over Selina Nebanda’s death, Kadaga’s authority will be damaged irreparably if the AHB  never makes it to the floor of Parliament. She will thus do whatever she can to at least have the bill debated on the floor. She must be looking for every avenue to save herself further political humiliation, having promised and failed to deliver the AHB as a 2012 Christmas present.

The Evangelical/right  vs the Liberal/Left foreign legion:

It is true that the bill was conceived with the support of American evangelicals such as Scott Lively. But they hadn’t reckoned with the

Private Courts Inc justifies their actions which led to the closure of Victoria University

Private Courts Inc justifies their actions which put 200 Ugandan students and their lecturers out on the streets

fierce backlash from Liberal/Left leaning organizations who took up the mantle and have, since the AHB was introduced in 2009, done whatever they can to guide the message as well as the tactics against their right-wing foes in America and the government authorities in Uganda.

To these two enemies, the AHB is but a mere Trojan Horse for their left/right  ideological battle for hearts and minds. Uganda is but one of the battlefields on which they will fight to the death. Others are Cameroon, Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana and so on. The American evangelicals started the battle in Uganda but have since lost ground due to their domestic flock getting cold feet at the idea that they could be responsible for the judicial killing of citizens in foreign places. They also don’t have the stomach to withstand the ferocity of the liberals’ response especially given that the American political climate has clearly turned against right-wing extremism as shown by Barack Obama’s resounding trouncing of the Republicans in successive elections.

The East African has an example of the left’s unrepentantly agenda-driven, personal, ruthless, egotistic, condescending, colonial, take-no-prisoners attitude that they bring to the internecine ideological battle. In that instance, one individual from a company calling itself Private Courts Inc.  pressured Victoria University to close, without bothering to consult the LGBTI community in Uganda, thereby putting the future of 200 students and their lecturers s in jeopardy, and creating the wrong impression that the LGBTI community in Uganda didn’t care what happened to anyone else as long as their agenda was put on a pedestal.

In fact the LGBTI in Uganda, some of whom have friends at the university, found out who the prime mover had been when The East African’s article was published, weeks after the fact. The Private Courts Inc. personnel who wrote the haranguing e-mail to Victoria University last visited Uganda in 2011 but she doesn’t hesitate to lecture anyone and everyone she doesn’t agree with as though she is the Alpha and Omega of the poor, helpless, downtrodden black gay boys and girls in Uganda that she must save from a fireball of hate and bigotry. She clings to a patronizing and racist attitude she would never use had she been dealing with any African-American community in the United States. But, hey, she is a self-appointed white savior from San Francisco who knows better than all the backward black African people in a “tiny country” so her superiority makes her best suited to decide what is good for them.

It is clearly not only the evangelicals using the AHB for their own egoistic reasons.

Uganda’s LGBTI Community:

Just a pawn in the ideological war: David Bahati

Just a pawn in the ideological war: David Bahati

Last, and least, is the LGBTI community in Uganda. Even though they are the people who will bear the brunt of the effects of the AHB, events  have evolved over the last 4 years in such a way as to make the gay community but a parenthesis in the various power and ideological battles the bill has spawned.

The fact that the West is funding all the LGBTI activities in Uganda makes the people on the ground but mere marionettes. Yes, that means that Martin Ssempa and David Bahati are as much a tool of the American evangelicals as the Ugandan LGBTI community are of the left/liberal camps in the West.

It is a noble fight that the LGBTI activists are fighting in Uganda but it is also, sadly, true that very little of what is going on in Uganda’ corridors of power, in San Francisco’s Private Courts Inc.  or at Scott Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries is driven by the realities of the gay population on the ground who are but mere pawns in much bigger, and sometimes tangential,  political games.

The activists must, of course, keep lobbying Parliament (I think the message and tone need to be adjusted but that is another discussion) and keep engaging with anyone they can on the AHB. The alternative would be to give up; infinitely worse given how much they have already put into the fight.

When all is said and done, the Anti Homosexuality Bill’s fate can only be decided once and for all if A) President Museveni finds a way of getting it thrown out of Parliament for good, B) Uganda’s Parliament comes to its senses and rejects it out on their own volition or  C) it is debated and passed and it goes to court for a final, legal, ruling on its constitutionality.

If Parliament stands its ground, Yoweri Museveni’s options are limited. In that happenstance, the solution to this protracted battle will be for Parliament to pass the bill, and the courts take it up, thereby finally taking the opportunistic politics out of play.

 

UPDATE/CORRECTION: After I posted this, it has been brought to my attention that the Private Courts person, Melanie Nathan, who wrote the e-mail to Victoria University has actually never been to Uganda.

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Health/Wellness needs to drive the human rights campaign 7

Gay - Human Rights, Gay Social • Tags: , , , , , ,

Frank McMullan has posted a fierce riposte to my article decrying what I see as gross exaggerations regarding the homosexuality debate in Uganda.

I  feel it might be beneficial to move the discussion forward by explaining further (or again?) why I am frustrated with the nature of the debate being conducted around Uganda’s gay situation.

My general thrust is simple: human rights are critical and those who fight for them need our support and thanks. What seems to me to be happening in Uganda is that the foreign friends of our gay community have decided that they are going to fight this battle on their own terms. Some of their condescending tactics include treating us (Ugandan gay men and women) as though we are helpless, hapless basket cases who cannot come up with any strategies and so all the strategies must be determined by them  in New York City or talking shops in Quebec. How else can you explain the attack by Canada’s foreign minister against Speaker of the House, Rebecca Kadaga, last October, an attack that caught gays in Uganda totally by surprise?

So, when we tell the activists abroad that we feel things should be done differently, they simply brush our opinions away and go with their own decisions.

To be fair, our representatives in Uganda haven’t been terribly forthcoming in seeking out the views of the grassroots [Farug has taken some steps to change in this regard over the past 12 months]. Yet the overwhelming sentiments on the ground are that the struggle is about what three or four people in Uganda plus their handlers in London, Washington, DC and Europe decide.

No wonder that many of us look on with awe as activists, some of them carrying fictitious members lists,  fly all over the world, return to Uganda only long enough to throw yet another expensive boozy junket and then fly out again to … yet more talking shops on yet another continent.

How do these activists know what message to take to all these places if, as is certainly the case, they hardly ever consult with the grassroots? we wonder. To that end, some of the activists in Uganda have been compromised by the endless foreign trips whose purpose to us remains at best nebulous. But our boys and girls are so poor and desperate that these trips seem like manna from heaven. They are thus a source of a lot of envy and jealousy in our community and, dare one say it, they make the gallivanting activists so powerful as nothing funded by foreign donors (everything is funded by foreign donors)  is approved or done without their nod.

The foreign liberal and right-wing media corp who report on Uganda usually have an agenda that often has nothing to do with the poor gay boy in Kawaala, a Kampala suburb. Yet, as we all know, the truth is usually far less interesting than we would wish. When they air what is usually arrant hyperbole (often endorsed by people on the ground who also have their own personal reasons for embellishing their circumstances), the Americans, Swedes and Brits etc. get all excited … but the heterosexual Ugandans who have nothing against us also get irritated at what they see as lies, lies, lies.

We might be getting a lot of sympathy from people watching exaggerated reports in the comfort of their living rooms in London, Lisbon and Los Angeles. But we are also needlessly making enemies of our fellow Ugandans, the people we walk the streets with, because the stuff being peddled out there, often with the tacit blessing of those who lead us, is manifestly incorrect.

I have, for instance, railed against the nonsense Scott Mills’ documentary (May 2011) peddled. He spent perhaps two weeks in Uganda and called it the worst place to be gay in the world – to deafening silence from our leadership. Really? Worse than Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates?  Worse than the parts of Northern Nigeria practicing Shariah law? Worse than North Dakota or parts of rural Georgia? Seriously?

I think our representatives, too, cannot really deviate from the message their sponsors want to hear because … it would be to bite the hand that feeds them. He who pays the piper calls the tune and the piper wants sensational stories from Uganda because that is what generates dollars and Euros. There is,however,  only a number of stories even a “terrible” country like Uganda can produce so … the alternative is to either embellish or look on as outright fabrications are peddled by whoever has an agenda to pursue.

So, contrary to what a commentator on my previous post patronizingly suggested when she offered that  James Onen (the radio personality) can’t understand what is going on in Russia., Onen is right: this battle long ceased to be about the truth.

If it were about the truth and what the gay boys and girls in Uganda really want, the focus would be on forcing the government of Uganda to make HIV/Aids in the gay community a priority since the fact that we are already dying from diseases due to official neglect is as verifiable as it is indisputable. And what would be a better way to push the government to concede that gays in Uganda must be protected than to give them equal access to medical attention as well as specialized HIV care?

This is not happening because the focus in the West is on a bill that hasn’t been debated, hasn’t killed anyone yet, likely will not change the situation on the ground since, once passed, the law will be impossible  to enforce.  But it should really be on sick homosexual Ugandans who can’t trust the clinics available to them to keep their confidences,  provide them with simple things such as lubricant or treat their sexually transmitted diseases without turning up their noses at them.

Any Ugandan gay man or woman will readily tell you about gay people they know of who have succumbed to HIV/Aids due to neglect and/or stigma which prevented them from seeking medical attention in time. I have blogged about a friend of mine, Raymond Kiwanuka, who was taken in that fashion. He wasn’t the first, and he certainly hasn’t been the last. Raymond suffered without support long before Bahati introduced his [Nazi] bill.

What I am arguing is that the HIV/Aids crisis in the gay community needs to be used as the vehicle to fight against discrimination and the Bahati Bill. Why? Because thus far, the ‘human rights’ “we are here, we are queer” message has remained nebulous, and its intentions unclear. So, it needs to be dressed up in clothes that both gay and straight Ugandans can identify with – the human element of health/wellness which is tangible to most Ugandans.

My friends, most of whom know I am gay and don’t care, often ask what I think are justifiable questions: what rights do Ugandan gays want? To march in the streets? To have parades in public parks? To hold seminars in hotels? To have sex in public? To discuss gay sex on radio and television? To take over mainstream bars and hang by the rafters? To have sex in private, something they are already doing? What?

Unless we put a human element to what we want, and I am totally convinced HIV/Aids/Health-Wellness is the perfect vehicle for this message, my friends can justifiably assume that we think we are more special than the millions of Ugandan women and children who have died over the years due to pregnancy and childbirth complications, but who don’t have friends in Stockholm or New York City, and have thus never had an advocate such as Hillary Clinton making threatening phone calls on their behalf  to President Yoweri Museveni.

With that in mind, it might make for exciting water cooler discussions in America and Europe to claim that there is a violent anti-gay movement in Uganda. The evidence on the ground proves otherwise and that sort of exaggeration merely alienates our fellow Ugandans.

It’s time , I think, to retool our message to embrace the really pressing health/wellness issues affecting the gay Ugandans in the slums of Bwayise and Najjanankumbi. It might not be as jazzy, sexy, catchy or lucrative as the “we are here, we are queer” message, but I would bet cold, hard cash that is what the grassroots want.

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Rebecca Kadaga trapped between a rock and hard place! 7

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Speaker of the House: Rebecca Kadaga

Not a lot of people know or realize it just yet but Uganda’s Speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga is in political trouble.

Needled by a meddlesome do-gooder, Canada’s John Baird, over the death of a gay activist in 2011, Kadaga lashed out at him, shrilly lecturing him that Uganda is not a Canadian colony or protectorate. That went down extremely well in Uganda and, in hindsight, John Baird likely regrets the ill-considered way he confronted Kadaga.

It would have been alright if that had been the end of the matter.

Upon her return to Uganda, however, events spiraled out of Kadaga’s control when, upon landing at Entebbe Airport, she found the rabidly homophobic David Bahati, Martin Ssempa and James Elspeth Nsaba Buturo waiting to greet her as though she were a Ugandan Joan of Arc. It all went to her head and she forgot that as a Parliamentary Speaker she cannot be seen to be taking sides on political issues. She pompously announced that she would make sure that the anti-gay bill passed, the country wanted it, and so on and so forth. With every high-minded pronouncement, Kadaga was digging herself into a deeper hole. Now she is in a mess she likely wouldn’t be in if she hadn’t shot her mouth off like a Kalashnikov.

How so?

Kadaga really does want to be president of Uganda. If you doubt this, check out this telling New Vision interview she gave recently on the subject. Her reticence, some might argue ‘downright refusal’ to rule herself out of the presidential running, speaks huge volumes.

But the elections are still 4 years away and sane minds are justifiably asking themselves if it was/is wise for Kadaga to reveal her political cards so soon.

Country First … about time, too, after 26 years!

Remember that Kadaga has been at loggerheads with the Prime Minister, Amama Mbabazi, who is the president’s right hand man mostly over what she sees as their mal-administration and scant attention to the countriy’s most pressing priorities such as health, education and infrastructural development. In effect, she has been at odds with the president himself and, indeed, the president has had to intervene more than twice to separate the two when the internecine fighting spilled over into the press.

We all know that Kadaga thinks her government isn’t putting the ‘country first’ as evidenced by the telling caption she has on her Facebook page. That maxim strikes a chord with most Ugandans who are fed up with the wanton thieving, kleptocratic, selfish, bombastic but hollow leadership that characterizes every facet of Museveni’s 26-year-old government. So, Kadaga is on safe ground when she calls for the country to be put first …

At last, here is a politician from the ruling party calling out her own government albeit in veiled tones.

But Mbabazi and Museveni are not going to go away simply by Kadaga craftily using Facebook captions to dig at their incompetence and impunity. They have been around long enough to know that elections are not won 4 years in advance and so they can afford to wait for Kadaga to make mistakes.

She seems to have made one with the Bahati bill because whether it passes or not, Kadaga cannot come out the other side smelling of roses.

If the Bahati Bill doesn’t pass by Christmas, she will look foolish after her near-hysterical hullabaloo about it and the bizarre bed fellows she allowed her office to be associated with in the name of passing it. Right now, everyone is looking at the calendar, waiting to see if Kadaga can deliver the Christmas gift she promised Martin Ssempa, the convicted felon, and his motley crew of conniving pastors.

If the bill passes by Christmas, then Kadaga has to live by her claim that Uganda can do without foreign aid if the donors follow through with their pledge to withdraw their financial support to the country. Remember that the gay lobby is now the most powerful single minority entity in Uganda and, rightly or wrongly, has forced Museveni to his knees several times. So, when donors threaten to plug the faucets on account of the Bahati [Nazi] bill, it is no idle threat to Museveni.

Kadaga wrong on this, too: Donor money is critical to Uganda

Already, even before the bill has been debated on the floor of Parliament, the headlines are awash with the dire consequences for Uganda’s economy that the suspension of donor funds due to the massive theft of over $60m from the Office of the Prime Minister might wreak. Now, imagine if even more donors follow through and withdraw aid money on account of a morality bill designed to target about 500,000 of the country’s gay population. Kadaga will have to explain how that is in the interest of the 33,500,000 Ugandans the cuts to their aid will hit.

Ugandan newspaper headlines: Withdrawal of donor money will hurt Uganda – badly

There is also another, more sensitive, reason why Kadaga will eventually lose political capital if the bill passes. Already in her 50s, she is not married, and has no biological children. Uganda’s female population already outnumbers men and most of them are mothers of course. Even if it might seem attractive at this point, very few Ugandan mothers will look kindly at a female politician, who has never had a child of her own, passing legislation that might end up getting their children killed or jailed. In Luganda we have a saying that aptly describes the situation: ensi egula mirambo; ngowuwo si gwebasse (it is easy to be indifferent towards death – if no one you know is being killed). Mothers will bay for Kadaga’s ice-cold blood if, as should surely be the case, their gay children are rounded up and killed or jailed because of nothing other than their being gay.

Finally, Kadaga’s throwaway claim that the country wants the Bahati Bill is based on a fanciful premise and, oddly for a politician, an impolitic reading of the situation on the ground. Martin Ssempa, David Bahati, James Nsaba Buturo and their ilk want the bill – mostly because they stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars from extreme right-wing (mostly American) religious organizations who are fighting in Africa the morality war they have already lost in the United States. All told, the Ugandans who stand to gain directly from the passing of the bill stands at around … a paltry 100 souls!

Uganda really can’t do without foreign Aid!

But Uganda is a country with 34million people and  they aren’t  interested in who is sleeping with who in the privacy of their homes. If they were, our neighbors know where we live and you would have seen mass lynchings of gay men and women all over the country. None of that is happening because Ugandans are quite simply not that kind of people.

Yes, you will hear how 95% of Ugandan are opposed to homosexuality but it is also safe to argue that this figure doesn’t take into account the majority of Ugandans who don’t understand what they are opining about or who give knee-jerk responses that they can’t explain 5 minutes later. No, Ugandans don’t care one way or the other if gays live in their midst and it is opportunistic pastors and some people from the pro-gay side who make a living perpetrating the falsehood, who have painted the clearly wrong picture that Uganda is homophobic. It isn’t.

So, a bill that only myopic politicians and cynical pastors want is being touted as the panacea for Uganda’s moral decadence and Kadaga has ill-advisedly signed on to the silliness which, if made law,  will never pass the basic litmus test of legality or enforceability. On the more pessimistic side, Kadaga’s die is already cast and she will now forever be seen as the Speaker who took sides in a scheme that sought to suck the life out of the Ugandan economy just to please a handful of bigoted pastors.

It’s not the kind of legacy she wants to run on in 2015-16 but … to quote again from Macbeth … she is now “stepped in so far that should [she] wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

President Yoweri Museveni and his prime minister, Amama Mbabazi, have Rebecca Kadaga exactly where they want her; on the political ropes.

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Time for Uganda’s major players to pronounce themselves on the Bahati Bill 10

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Want death/jail for homosexuals: Rebecca Kadaga and Cecilia Ogwal

We already know that Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni doesn’t like the Bahati anti-gay bill because he has said so publicly. Yes, it was wrung out of him by a persistent foreign press but Museveni is on record about his views which are that homosexuality is not new in Africa and, more pertinently, that he doesn’t want anything to do with this bill. His motivation for rejecting the bill is debatable of course – but that’s not our concern right now.

Don’t favor the bill: Kizza Besigye, Erias Lukwago, Yoweri Museveni

One of Yoweri Museveni’s long term advisers, John Nnagenda, is also on record condemning the bill because he, rightly, realizes that it is a bill against love.

We also know that the outgoing leader of the opposition, Forum for Democratic Changes’s (FDC) Kiiza Besigye would have decriminalized homosexuality if he had had the chance because he is on record saying so a month before the last elections which he lost to Yoweri Museveni.

Speaker of the House, Rebecca Kadaga, recently let herself be railroaded by personal political ambition into the anti-gay camp when she was ambushed by Canadian Foreign Minister, John Baird. She engaged in an undiplomatic spat with Baird which was not her creation, but which nonetheless ill-advisedly drove her into the cynical embrace of failed Ugandan politicians and criminal convicts.

Mike Mukula seems to see ‘jail time’ as an improvement on the bill

Right now she is,  to quote from Macbeth,  “stepped in so far that should [she] wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Dokolo woman MP, Cecilia Ogwal needed no needling to go off like a fire cracker against homosexuality recently – something she had every right to do, and which put her sentiments on record.

A few years ago, around 2009, current mayor of Kampala, then member of

Always dapper: Mike Mukula (NRM’s Chairman in Uganda’s East)

Parliament for Kampala, Erias Lukwago went on record and explained that he thought the law was unnecessary but it was politically too risky not to support it. I for one read that to mean that he doesn’t support the bill.

But what are the rest of Uganda’s major politicians thinking about Parliament’s drive to criminalize ‘love?’

What does Uganda Federal Alliance’s (UFA) Beti Kamya think of the bill? Kamya has in the past waxed indignant about the sovereignty of Uganda’s Parliament but it’s not clear that she has ever clearly stated what she thinks about the merits/demerits of the bill itself.

Views on the bill unknown: Beti Kamya & Muhoozi Kainerugaba

FDC”s  presidential aspirants, Mugisha Muntu and Nandala Mafabi? I have asked Nandala Mafabi on his Twitter account about his views but am yet to see any response.

The Democratic Party’s (DP’) Betty Namboze? The National Resistance Movement’s (NRM)’s Mike Mukula, Janet Museveni? The army’s Muhozi Kainerugaba (also son to Yoweri Museveni)? He is not a politician but his name keeps on popping up as a potential president. He is also the de facto head of Uganda’s intelligence services so it stands to reason that his views on this bill are pertinent as, presumably, it will be part of his remit to collect ‘buggery’ data without which it will surely be impossible to prosecute homosexuals.

John Nagenda: This is a bill “against love”

Mike Mukula touts himself on his Twitter account as a 2016 presidential aspirant. Mukula seems to be suggesting that the bill will be more acceptable if the death penalty is removed and replaced with jail time. I have asked him why ‘loving’ should be penalized with jail time and I hope he will respond.

Museveni’s wife, Janet, hasn’t indicated so openly what her future political ambitions are but she is mentioned now and then as a possible shoo-in for 2016 should her husband, lo behold, give up the leadership mantle.

What are all these honorable and notable people’s views on the Bahati anti-gay bill? It is surely time for them to tell Uganda and the world what they think.

Why now?

Presidential aspirant: Mugisha Muntu

Simple. It is very likely that the bill will be passed by Uganda’s 9th Parliament. While no one should question the legitimacy of Uganda’s Parliament to debate even a heinous bill such as this one, it is important that politicians of whatever hue let their people know where they stand on it.

Beti Kamya and Muhoozi Kainerugaba, for instance, are not Parliamentarians. Yet they are leaders of sizable constituencies in Uganda, and so their views on a matter that seeks to criminalize homosexuals, their parents, doctors, priests and counselors should be made public.

So:

should gay Ugandans be jailed for 14 years simply for being who who they are? Should they instead be executed? Should parents, friends, counselors, priests, doctors snitch on whoever they find out is gay or risk a 3-year jail term? Should there be a separate law at all to target homosexuals in a way that heterosexuals are not targeted for crimes that either sexual persuasion can commit?

These are the questions our leaders need to answer once and for all.

We wait …  with bated breath …

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The case for Kadaga 2016 4

Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Provocative profile: Rebecca Kadaga

Fact: Yoweri Museveni’s 26-year-old government is so spent, so riddled with corruption, so obviously incapable of delivering the most basic services to the masses, so irretrievably dysfunctional that only a change at the helm will bring about any change.

Fact: Unless the challenger to Museveni’s rule comes from within the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM), no one from the opposition parties can  unseat Yoweri Museveni because the odds are stacked too high against them even if they had a coherent message.

Fact: The people of Uganda are so tired of their government but are wary of throwing it out because the opposition, due to factors best discussed on another occasion, offers little in the way of viable alternatives.

So, what’s the solution then?

A hitherto untainted but credible candidate from within the ruling National Resistance Movement itself.

That’s where Rebecca Kadaga comes in.

Highly educated and feisty, Speaker of the House Kadaga has found the perfect platform to run for the highest office in the land. She was given the nod by the current Museveni administration in the hope that it would be business as usual, with Parliament merely rubber-stamping everything Museveni sent them. Museveni immediately regretted having offered his support. Kadaga and Museveni’s Prime Minister, Amama Mbabazi, have clashed openly and so ferociously that the president has had to intervene to separate them a couple of times.

Populist: Kadaga knows how to play to the gallery (here with Olympic gold medal winner, Kiprotich)

She has already shown that as Speaker of the 9th Parliament she isn’t the fawning poodle her predecessor was. At this point, she is the most visible and outspoken NRM personality there is after Museveni so she has a lot going for her. All she needs now is to deliver a really significant parliamentary blow to Museveni and she will really ride high.

She may have been given such an opportunity by the clash she had with Canada’s Foreign Minister, John Baird, and we might as well see Kadaga pushing for and achieving the passage of the anti-gay bill that had lain dormant until John Baird helped revive its embers.

Once the NRM get used to it that Museveni is vulnerable, Kadaga’s candidature will begin to look really credible. Then you will see the most almighty battle to try to get rid of her – which should lend her even more credibility. Remember Museveni and his crony, Mbabazi, have tried twice already to pull her down a peg and both efforts backfired when she their machinations became public  and Kadaga won the public’s sympathy. She is quite astute in the way she denies this and that and then asks pointed questions in forums where she will be quoted liberally.

Demonstrably incompetent – Museveni’s crony, Amama Mbabazi

She has locked horns with Museveni over how much say Parliament should have in the passing of the budget. She has already drawn her line in the sand and we are now waiting to see if Museveni will blink.

Only the other week Kadaga held up the swearing-in of a new cabinet because one of the nominated ministers, IdahNantaba, had questionable morals. Rumors abounded that Nantaba was Museveni’s mistress. Kadaga walked away from the skirmish and Museveni got his woman, but with Parliamentary procedures circumvented. The point had been made, however, and no one will now look at Nantaba as anything other than another Museveni skirt.

The evidence is in all the papers that the man some had touted as a possible successor to Museveni, Amama Mbabazi, can’t run a bank, or his own ministry where more than $60 million of donor money was embezzled on his watch. So how can he run a country? He is damaged goods and he now serves one purpose – to parrot whatever Museveni orders him to. Vice President Edward Ssekandi is a laughing-stock all over the country because it is widely accepted that he needed help to steal his parliamentary election in February 2011 (he couldn’t even pull it off on his own). Even if he was presentable enough, Ssekandi is an old style, crooked-deals-in-a-smoky-room administrator who has no scruples or principles as his unsuccessful interference in KCCA’s demolition of an illegal structure in Kampala showed.

Yes, yes. Museveni’s son, Muhoozi is being touted as a possible shoo-in. So is his Museveni’s wife, Janet. While those two can’t be written off given Uganda’s putrid dish politics, they lack the political credibility, and so would have to be imposed. It’s inconceivable that Muhoozi, a totally unknown quantity whose meteoric rise through the military ranks can only have been engineered by his father, could go out on the hustings, campaign for office and win.

Janet Museveni believes that prayers will solve all Uganda’s problems – something that is patently ridiculous, and which most Ugandans understand to be so. She thus also lacks credibility. Besides, she has been at her husband’s side over the 26 years the country has meandered from one corruption scandal to the other, 26 years that have not seen  a single public school, hospital, road built or repaired to an acceptable standard. How come the prayers she so believes in haven’t worked?

Kadaga hangs with the high and low: with Parliamentarians and village women (second R)

On almost every issue that gets a politician elected in Uganda, Kadaga is saying what the majority want to hear. Her political antennae are serving her very well indeed. Yes, even on the LBGTI issue which is the latest political hot potato Kadaga has had to deal with, she has passed the test with aplomb. The activist LGBTI side will not like how she has reacted but she deftly played the political card Canada’s John Baird handed her. She wouldn’t have been a politician worth her salt had she reacted any other way. Baird’s boo-boo will hopefully be a salient lesson to the human rights agitators out there who tend to forget that they are in a war that must always take into account the political realities of the recipient countries.

Kadaga’s chances for 2016 look very bright indeed and, you know what, whether or not the Bahati Nazi anti-gay bill passes on her watch, this gay man likes her … a lot.

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Uganda at 50; people or things?

Social Commentary, Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , , , ,

Like porn actors, Ugandan politicians make too much exaggerated noise so its’ best to watch them with the sound turned off (Richard Mann/Mary Okurut/Castro Supreme)

Though the title might suggest that this is going to be a political polemic, it really isn’t going to be like that at all. For one, though I know I am, ahem, a genius political analyst, politics usually bores me quickly because once I figure out what the undercurrents are, I get mighty chafed at anyone who might try to spin it to their advantage.

To me politics is sort of like watching a porn movie – fascinating for about three minutes and then you find yourself fast-forwarding to the end when you realize that it is exactly the same stuff you saw the other day, albeit with different actors. Because politics in the real world politics can’t be fast-forwarded, I simply choose to tune out the din and focus on more wholesome pursuits.

As a gay man trying to eke out a life in Uganda 50 years after she was granted independence from Britain, what does it all mean to me?

Women protest police brutality: In 50 years Uganda hasn’t had an orderly transfer of power

Strange as it might sound to some, I don’t feel put upon by this government because I am gay, far from it. My sex life and sexuality are private matters and thus the idea that I have to live in a kind of secretive way where being gay is concerned suits me down to the ground. We are all mostly a product of our upbringing and I thus have no problem with matters of sex and sexuality being as murky as they are in Uganda.

Too many Ugandan politicians are so old and tired you can’t pay them to stay awake through anything

That’s why I have explained in the past that I don’t subscribe to gay pride parades, discussions of sex and sexuality on radio … that sort of [very Western] thing. That we don’t have the kind of sexual openness (some might say permissiveness) in Uganda that you see in San Francisco doesn’t bother me one bit. Open shows of affection, street love fests, sexuality parades etc are neither desirable nor useful in our African settings in my view.

I recall my first tentative steps into the gay world, when I walked out of my home and went to look for other gay men in Notting Hill, London. It was like a walk to the execution but, more than 20 years later, I wouldn’t exchange that experience for anything. It made me who I am today because I knew then beyond a reasonable doubt that if I could find the determination to go through with that terrifying ordeal to find other men who felt the way I did, it was indeed what I wanted to be. I have never looked back since. Every gay man and woman should experience running that gauntlet as they try to find themselves. Nothing, other than fire, can baptize you into the gay world better, I don’t think.

A tale of contrasts: the president’s $48m luxury jet vs. medical provision in Northern Uganda

That’s partly why I regret that Uganda has no gay bar to speak of. That should really be the next challenge for the gay community in this country. The bar cannot be on rented premises because that will be easily shut down by putting pressure on the landlord. If it is, however, on land that is owned by a gay man or woman, that would call for a battle royal reminiscent of the Stonewall Riots in 1969  if the authorities tried to frustrate it. That is the kind of fight I would be willing to engage in – one brought to otherwise peaceful same-gender loving men and women who are minding their own business. Then it would be time to take to the streets and airwaves in vociferous protest, if necessary in full undress.

Hospital bed where you might rest if you fly out on the presidential jet to give birth in Germany vs Uganda’s maternity ward at Mulago Hospital

Away from my relatively inconsequential life, I am perturbed that my Ugandan brethren have put up with the current government for the last 26 years. Okay, I get it that you can be married in a giddy euphoria to someone who turns out to be an ogre. But why would you stay married if you know what a good marriage should be like and it is clear yours doesn’t even come close? Fear of being lonely? Or is it the Stockholm syndrome where you resign yourself to your fate and even find solace in liking your captor?

Given the state of Uganda’s public schools, hospitals and roads, how could the cabal that runs this country be welcomed anywhere without being pelted with eggs and flour? Well, of course eggs and flour are too expensive for the average Ugandan so that might be a possible explanation.

Uganda’s schools: guess how many politicians send their children to government schools such as the one on the left!

Still, are Ugandans really so docile that they will continue to tolerate the wanton corruption running from the top ministers, civil servants and technocrats through every facet of daily life? When are we going to demand that our leaders stop thinking about only themselves?

Ugandans are dying, will continue to die, in preventable road accidents at staggering levels. Mary Karooro Okurut is on record exhorting the country to pray that evil spirits be exorcised from accident black spots

50 years after Uganda gained independence, it seems far more focus has been paid to erecting swanky buildings in the middle of Kampala (many of them secretly owned by Uganda’s rulers) than on providing quality public education, healthcare and practical measures to insure against needless loss of life. 50 years on, Uganda’s leaders seem content to lead the country in a direction that places emphasis on  ‘things,’ while ignoring human life and dignity.

One woman dies every minute during pregnancy or child-birth [in Uganda]

Call that what you will … in my book that is a state of affairs that leaves me with a lot of trepidation about the future.

Jennifer Musisi: fundamental change or cynical politicking? 1

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Indomitable: Jennifer Musisi

Uganda has a woman leader whose character and style of leadership (male or female) nobody has seen in a generation. She is the Executive Director of Kampala Capital City Authority and she is called Jennifer Semakula Musisi.

Appointed to be director of Kampala City by President Museveni, Musisi has taken on military generals and bigwigs claiming to be friends with the president and his brother, Salim Saleh, to the utter consternation and bewilderment of the entire country that had long resigned itself to their impunity.

How can she be so steely in the face of army generals, the president’s children, big name albeit shady “investors” who are being backed by the president’s kith and kin? The citizens of Kampala, and indeed the entire country, are shaking their heads in wonderment, and you sense that they don’t yet know what to make of it.

Yoweri Museveni: his Kampala game plan remains unclear

Has a president who has presided over the destruction of the country’s moral and ethical values finally found the resolve to reverse the gangrene? Or is this just mere politicking, with Jennifer Musisi being used by the president as a pawn in his scheme to gain the votes of Kampala City in 2016?

To understand why Jennifer Musisi’s take-no-prisoners approach to running Kampala city has astonished everyone, the following [edited] quotation from a friend (who returned to Uganda to live about 3 years ago) about the type of place Uganda is might help:

You have not met the average Ugandan! No one that lives in Europe or USA has met the average Ugandan. It has taken me 3 yrs to meet and to get to know this guy. You occasionally read about him in the news[papers] pouring acid on his ex, stealing billions of tax payers cash, forging land titles to steal his father’s property. Causing pain everywhere. I don’t know where Musisi came from. She is unlike any average Ugandan. She represents the false romantic view you develop in your mind about Uganda when you have been away too long. Moses Golola, P.S Kazinda,   Tinyefuza – these are the real Uganda. And you don’t meet them in Texas (USA) or Peckham (UK). You meet them here when you are trying to buy land, when you apply for a passport, when you’re looking for car spare parts, in Mulago Hospital when you have a dying patient, at funerals and weddings when they stand up to speak.

My friend is absolutely correct. Uganda’s morals, values, standards, ethics have sunk so deeply into the mire that there seems no alternative to blending in.

I am sure I told you about the 15 people who moved on to my land on Entebbe Road and claimed they were squatters. They were egged on by the local village leader referred to as an LC1 who signed documents for them. It turns out that the broker (who got a commission on each deal) is related to the LC. All in all the two acres of land were apportioned off for something like 60m/= ($25,000) with the broker and LC getting 5-10%. Not a bad living, fraudulent though it was. That’s Uganda today.

Finally, recently, I managed to get a meeting together for the issue to be thrashed out. By this time the claimants had grown to 28, 10 of them having “bought” in the three months it took me to get the meeting together. On a 2-acre parcel of land. After a lot of yelling, threats to kill me and goodness knows what else, it was clear that I was right and the claimants had been led up shit creek. 15 of them slunk away. One had built slap bang in the most desirable part of the land so I have nicely told him to leave. He won’t so I am already planning to send in goons in the middle of the night to forcibly raze his structure. He has young children but … that isn’t going to worry me at all under the circumstances.

Does that sound to you like a person who has spent the best part of 25 years away from this country?

Precisely.

Just 2 years ago, I would have waited for the law to take its course. But the courts of law are so corrupted that the Chief Justice admits it openly. A small case like mine could take 15 years to resolve. So, even the lawyers (the honest ones) advise you to just take the matter into your own hands and … demolish. Then whoever wishes can sue you if they wish.

That’s the Uganda Yoweri Museveni has helped cement over the past 27 years; morally bankrupt, lawless, corrupt to the core at every level of government, indifferent to the sick or dying, accepting of road accidents that kill thousands a year, impervious to child molestation, inured to violence against men, women and children … a morass of thieving, spineless, pliable, writhing, degenerate politicians, government officials, local and foreign contractors creating such a stench of corruption that all the oil of Arabia can’t cleanse it away.

Humble pie: Minister of Trade, Amelia Kyambadde (middle) tried to take on Jennifer Musisi at a recent demolition but was forced to apologize to her less than four hours later.

That is why we are all in a state of shock at Musisi’s steely, incorruptible, resolve. This country hasn’t known anyone like her in a generation. That brings us to speculate as to what it could all mean. Is it a change of heart in the man who has presided over the total disintegration of the entire country’s moral fabric or is it politics as usual, with Musisi just a pawn, a means to Museveni’s life-time ruling ambitions?

How so?

Populist but powerless and politically inept: Mayor Erias Lukwago regularly ends up on the wrong side of progress

I think Museveni’s calculation is that  If Musisi succeeds, he will take the credit for having rescued Kampala from the incompetent and rudderless leadership of her predecessors all of whom belonged to the opposition Democratic Party. Jennifer Musisi’s current opposition, and the presumptive alternative to her is a man called Erias Lukwago, the current mayor, who spends days and nights plotting how to wrest the initiative from her. But Lukwago is a totally inept politician who sounds far from literate, let alone scholarly. Jennifer Musisi routinely wipes the floor with him by simply being cool, calm, collected and not responding to his frothing. True to his character, Lukwago never fails to open his loud mouth, invariably revealing his limited political acumen.

Musisi has then set about demolishing illegal structures in the center of the city that everyone thought were inviolable since they are owned by government bigwigs. It has left her looking like a Colossus of Rhodes over Kampala. If she succeeds in bringing sanity to the bedlam that is Uganda’s capital city, it will be the final nail in the coffin of the opposition Democratic Party in the city – and that will suit Museveni just fine. That’s why he is willing to sacrifice his kin in the fight to win over the city. His relatives (rumors abound that they are the ones being fronted by all the shady investors carving up the city legally and otherwise) have nowhere else to go so he can let Jennifer Musisi take them on.

The rot that is Uganda has run so deep for so long that it is inconceivable that Museveni has finally had a change of heart and is now willing to eradicate it. The alternative then seems to be that Museveni has his eye on the city’s votes come 2016 (Kampala has never really had much love at the ballot box for Museveni and his NRM) and he might have found the perfect person to help deliver the city to him; Jennifer Musisi.

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Abolish the Ministry of Ethics and Integrity, silly! 2

Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , , ,

Now and then I allow myself leave to wade into Uganda’s largely puerile politics, especially if it is for a good cause. If you bear with me, you will see that I am a genius of sorts if I put my mind to it.

Every Ugandan who can read already knows that Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, is on the back foot, having refused to look for an extra 260bn/= ($104,000,000) for Uganda’s health sector that his own  members of Parliament (MPs) have demanded before they pass his 2012/13 budget. His priority is building Uganda’s defense which he claims is already underfunded and, thus, cannot be touched.

This has led to raised voices, angry standoffs and even a confirmed hissy-fit walking out by the president when his own MPs refused to budge from their demand; if we can find billions to buy used MIG fighters from Russia, we can find the money to make sure that they are not overflying the graves of yet more mothers and children dying in childbirth, more than 300,000 a year and counting according to the government’s own figures.

“Cut spending again elsewhere” Rebecca Kadaga

All the yelling and gnashing of presidential teeth is totally unnecessary – if only Museveni would listen to the Speaker of the House, a feisty woman called Rebecca Kadaga who Museveni thought would be a fawning puppet like her predecessor (the current vice president) only to discover, to his dismay, that she has a mind of her own and exercises it rather more freely than he wishes. She recently asked Museveni and his cabinet why, if they had cut ministry budgets in the past to fight the war against Kony, they couldn’t do the same this time round to boost spending on healthcare.

That’s when a light bulb went on in my head.

Of course! Kadaga has nailed it! Start by getting rid of the Ministry of Ethics and Integrity and … voilà … that would be a saving of 4.2bn/= ($1.7m) at a stroke of a pen.

You might say that this is a drop in the bucket on the road to finding the $104m the MPs are demanding.

Not so if you consider what the Ethics and Integrity ministry’s role seems to be; looking for gay sex.

According to unofficial figures, there are 500,000 gay men and women in Uganda out of a population of 33 million: 2% of the population. Of those half million gay men and women, you have about 20 activists who constantly annoy Minister Lokodo (the current head of the Ethics Ministry) that he has spent his 2011/12 budget to run after them in hotel conferences, ferreting them out of their hotel rooms and rounding them up from public parks as they waved rainbow flags. All this in the name of trying to abolish … gay sex!

High maternal death points to a health crisis (New Vision, May 03, 2007)

And, as we all, know, the Ethics Ministry really doesn’t have anything else to do. In other words, Minister Lokodo and his staff have been allocated $1.7m a year to … look for gay sex, and they still haven’t found it because if they had, we would have heard about it.

So, rather than spending $1.7m to look for gay sex among 20 or so activists with whom the Ethics Ministry engages in fruitless running battles (equivalent to $85,000 per head), why not simply abolish that ministry and move that budget line to the Ministry of Health where the budget allocation is a paltry $8.76 per person?

The Catholic Church and the evangelicals can then take up the anti-gay slack when Minister Lokodo is put out to grass. The latter are already getting plenty of funding from the Bible Belt of the United States and elsewhere to fight homosexuality, and the former seem to be doing rather nicely inveighing against homo-sodomy from the pulpit whenever it catches their hypocritical fancy.

Now, imagine that: being able to save $1.7m and allocate it to dying mothers and children, while still being able to fight the unholy vice of homo-sodomy … without spending a single cent of Ugandan taxpayer money.

It’s really a no-brainer, yes?

All you need is a primary school certificate to do the maths. But this is Uganda … Tss!

Image of the week: Budget slumber 2012

Images, Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , , ,

These images of ministers and other government officials sleeping through Uganda’s budget speech of 2012 are doing the rounds:

Budget snooze 2012

 

It’s not the first time either that government officials have gone to sleep en mass during a national parliamentary event. Here they are in a collective slumber during the president’s State of the Nation speech last year:

State of the Nation 2011

An apt sign of the state of the nation, surely!

 

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