{UAH} UGANDA'S INSECURITY REALITIES?

Fellow Ugandans,

Each persons role in relation to the rising crime rates must be analyzed soberly and with intelligible facts. Whether leaders, security circles or the media, everyone should exercise the utmost professionalism, and nobody should be playing diversionary political blame games in their statements at a time when Ugandans are united in seeking an end to the harrowing deaths and the ensuing sad graphic images that fill the tabloid newspaper's front pages these days.

People's lives are in question and surviving family members await truth and justice in the memory of their dead.

In my understanding, where applicable, the sins of the Ugandan media (including social media), are generally more political than criminal. So hunting bloggers and activists with new online monitoring technologies will possibly not end the heinous murders. In fact it will only end up proving the false diagnosis that the people of Uganda are being told about the killing frenzy. We might as well declare that the hunt for online activists is another politically motivated endeavour altogether, and completely separate from the hunt for Kaweesi murderers for example.

We should also recognize that usually there is a pro-active cooperation between security agencies, the general public, the mainstream media, and social media, when publishing and sharing information about criminals, missing persons, stolen property (i.e. vehicles) and wanted terrorists. The press and social media are therefore by far a force for good at so many more levels. Even those against social media today are actually using it as we speak. They know that first the internet is a platform for communication. But more importantly, it is also a platform with an unimaginable amount of freely available useful knowledge and general information from around the world to share. Data that was once completely unavailable to the people of this continent just a decade ago.

Yes, innovation is a reality that older generations have trouble keeping up with.  But that should not apply at the leadership level.

As I said recently in one of my public writings, what the internet offers outweighs any reason to curtail its use. That would be backwardness. On the contrary access to the internet should be understood at the same level as access to a tarmacked road, access to clean water, access to a public school, a health center, or access to electricity. It is that important as an additional basic tool that can spur development simply with knowledge, information sharing and communication.

In Uganda, what I have noticed is that misinformation in the media is usually at a partisan politics level. Including leaders maliciously slandering and even insulting their predecessors. There is therefore I'll will and arrogance involved. Other times misinformation is caused by corruption, envy, journalistic unprofessionalism, or sometimes mere laziness where an editorial chain of individuals all fail to ensure a thorough fact-checking before publishing news stories. But the legal remedies against slander and false information with malice aforethought, those punishments already exist in the laws of Uganda (the laws on defamation for example). They simply need to be fully resorted to in courts of law rather than one person constantly threatening extra-judicial repression against people he/she calls "parasites", yet he/she also engages in the very same parasitic behaviour against other people.

However, as the country seeks for solutions to the current disturbing wave of disappearances, grim assassinations, shocking serial murders and gruesome ransom/kidnaps, we need not deploy divisive measures that violate freedoms and privacy principles.

But rather come together to address insecurity with increased cooperation and interaction right from within communities. I thought that was what community policing was all about. If there is little interaction at the community level, then it seems Uganda police was just engaging in empty Public relation stunts for the news camera's and calling it community policing.

Worse still, it also appears that state agents (including police officers, intelligence, military and the infamous Crime Preventers) are said to be behind the vicious criminality against the people of Uganda whose lives and property these officers are paid to protect. Several of these officers have reportedly been rounded up in recent months, including several known assassins, armed robbers and violent murderers who were knowingly recruited in security services over the years. About a month ago a recently fired Minister of Security called for a stop to state-sponsored persecution of members of a particular religion whom even the general public knows that they are being framed and imprisoned on trumped up charges. Just a week ago we started reading news reports of state agents now being summoned for the very crimes that were previously blamed on religious infighting amongst Muslims.

What evil policy of sectarian religious bigotry could be under implementation in all this murderous confusion of death, torture and dark gallows?

Furthermore, it appears that the evidence and suspects in some of these murder cases were deliberately stage-managed to divert attention from the real insider culprits.

Things are happening in this country. There are political opponents who have been enduring serious abuse and mistreatment at the hands of the police and other state agencies for the past two decades. Every citizen has seen those excesses on TV news, even forcefully undressing women publicly. We have seen political opponents bungled in the infamous blue police van that whisks them away at break neck speed to secret locations as blows, kicks and rapings happen at the back of the vehicle in motion.

We have seen several courts and even parliament invaded by armed men in broad daylight, but we have been acting as if all that is normal civilized conduct of state institutions. And we would prefer in our cowardly instincts to rather complain about Idi Amin who is not here. I remember he used to say "Wacha hao. Yote no siasa tu. (meaning in Swahili: "Just leave them. All that is just their politics").

Now a new "10 point security initiative" was being rolled out last Wednesday in Parliament and covered live by all media houses including on their social media accounts. Now thats when they'll remember that social media is good, isn't it?

A security plan that includes new technologies like drones and online monitoring software. But this new security plan also involves citizens again being inconvenienced. Forced to bare the costs of acquiring new compulsory number plates with tracking devices that will probably be procured to an insider's benefit. Motorcycle riders forced to have registered helmets and forego their second hand European winter jackets with hoodies. Lets first be clear that these new measures are at speech level as we speak. We know that if we ever get to implementation, it is another matter altogether. Furthermore none of these ideas have been budgeted for in the next financial year, yet we just heard the 2018/2019 budget reading last week.

Remember that these new measures are being added to the previous nationwide inconvenience where all citizens and visitors were last year forced to embark on a 5 months compulsory national simcard registration exercise for their cellphone numbers. An exercise that was in combination with a compulsory national ID card acquisition for every citizen. The excuse was the same: "We need the compulsory registrations to catch the murderers and fight criminality. We will defeat them".

When? Aren't they around you?

I saw mothers straight from the maternity ward with new born babies still pink in color, sitting on the grass in line for their national ID and Simcard registration last year. It was sad to see the once famous musician John Khawa looking like he was plucked by force from some deathbed to "Go and register". He had to be held by a young relative as he was shakingly standing in line. One had to be there in person especially for the photograph and finger prints.

Meanwhile it turns out that the very state agents discussing, chairing and ordering all these measures in the Joint Anti-Terrorist Taskforce meetings, are some of the very people now being summoned behind military facility walls for confessions on the very murders they were saying they are fighting.

I cannot forget the public announcements made by known criminals and murderers who boastfully granted Ugandans a crime break as they wished us a Merry Christmas & Happy New year live on the evening prime time news bulletin at the end of last year. But not before others had publicly declared to the same press that: "We work on Police bosses orders."

As I watched one of the TV talk shows that had a panel of discussants, it was obvious that nobody was thinking deeply or technically enough on matter. It appeared to be a political debate rather than a serious look at where the hard evidence is taking this matter versus where the politics is directing public opinion.

But regardless of all the crazy criminal developments knowingly happening with total impunity under the Museveni regime, what all leaders, all political parties, all security agencies, and all Ugandans have to first agree on in unison, is that neither the late Honourable Ibrahim Abiriga, the late AIGP Felix Kaweesi, the late Susan Magara, the late Prosecutor Joan Kagezi, the late Justice Richard Mafabi, the late Case Clinic accountant Francis Ekalungar, the late Muslim clerics, the late Entebbe women, the late Gen. Aronda Nyakairima, the late Celinah Nebanda, the late Gen. Bamzee, the late Andrew Kayiira, the late Major Noble Mayombo, the late Gen. Kazini, the late former ADF Major Kiggundu, the late Karamoja muzungu Reverand Father Declan O'Toole, the late victims of the 2016 Kasese massacre, or any of the other countless victims, none of them was ever shot, raped, poisoned, strangled, tortured or stabbed to death by social media, the press, or the people.

Signed: Hussein Lumumba Amin

22nd June 2018

Kampala, Uganda

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