We Are All wrong For Keeping Silent As Yoweri Museveni Brutalizes Intellectuals And Professionals In Uganda
President Yoweri Museveni is mistreating the people of Uganda. He has subjected them to poverty for three decades and now he is openly using the police prisons to brutally torture those who come out to say that there is a problem in Uganda. Dear President Museveni, you have outlived your usefulness in Africa’s politics. Give the youths of Uganda a chance to breath.
The opening harsh tone in this article is caused by a sad eventuality that by the time of writing this article, the freshly released political detainee Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, a Ugandan youth , a lawyer and also a promising writer of The Greedy Barbarian and the Banana Republic: Where Writing is Treasonous, who was also named the PEN 2021 Pinter International Writer of Courage Award, has just fled Uganda in search of exile. Where he will go is not yet known. Some months ago, Rukirabashaija won and received the Pinter International Award for his maverick stature in literary writing and intellectual audacity. He is among a few Ugandan youths that have at least tried to speak out against the politics of police brutality in Uganda, to speak some naked truth to power in Uganda . This was why he earned this prestigious and internationally respected literature and writers’ prize that was given to him by Tsitsi Dangarembga in October 2021.
Precedents that led to his arrest are that, in December 2021 , Rukirabashaija used the social media platforms, just like any other oppressed youth of today, to express his dissenting opinion about President Yoweri Museveni and his overtly observable narcissistic plan to have his son General Muhozi to succeed him as the President of Uganda . This kind of social media outbreak is expected and still must be expected as obvious psychological breakdown to be experienced by any educated citizen living a country buckling under social-economic brutality perpetrated by government like that one currently seen in the case of Muhozi and his father Yoweri Museeni. However, the reaction of the Uganda administration was so panicky, the state machinery in charge of using fear to silence Ugandans into voiceless subjugation quickly arrested Rukirabashaija only to torture him in police prison before releasing him on January 26 in 2022.
The Al Jazeera made efforts to reach Rukirabashaija and it held in an interview with him during which Rukirabashaija confirmed that he had been tortured intermittently when he was in Police custody. However, what beats social logic is the reason for arrest and torture. It is so saddening to learn that the offence that made Rukirabashaija to be arrested was sham, lewd and ignorable under normal circumstance in any given space of political maturity.
The Al Jaazeera revealed that Rukirabashaija was arrested through abduction by the Army, during the time of arrest the Army forced Rukirabashaija dance as they barbarically flogged him unconscious for writing on Twitter that ’ Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the president’s son and commander of the land forces, was obese and a curmudgeon.’ But when Rukirabashaija came out of prison, he showed to the public the scaring wounds he got from being tortured in the police custody.
For now, Rukirabashaija has been robbed his mental freedom to live in his country, Uganda, he has fled to Malawi with a plan look for better medical treatment somewhere else like Germany . Rukirabashaija’s escape into exile follows very many other sorriest escapes like that of the South African writer Athol Williams in November 2021 and that of Dr. Stella Nyanzi in the last year . These are only but a few among a hundred of others that have fled Uganda due to fear of police brutality, torture in police custody and very many other violations of basic human rights that a citizen of any modern state is entitled to .
Perhaps, the world is also supposed to know that currently in the year 2022, there are over five million Ugandan youths living in Kenya as economic refugees. Most of these Ugandan youths in Kenya live as ambiguous citizens posing as Kenyans for fear of being arrested for being in Kenya without legal documents. These youths are exploited in Nairobi as cheap farm laborers, sex workers, barber-shop keepers, saloon keeps, domestic baby sitters, dish-washers, hotel stewards and motorbike taxi riders. Yoweri Museveni has robbed these youths their right to productive life in Uganda through his politics of ethnic exclusion and police brutality. This is why the African Union and other inter-governmental organizations should come out and tell President Museveni to give the people of Uganda a chance to breath, when Ugandans breath freely in a political sense, then all of us in Africa will be breathing.
By-Alexander Opicho writes from Lodwar, Kenya