{UAH} REMEMBERING THE LATE DR. SSEMWOGERERE (FEB 1932 - NOV 2022)

Picture: The manifesto of the late Dr. Paul Ssemwogerere for the 1996 general election. (Source: Google images)

The 1996 general election was the first time that I ever voted in a Ugandan election. In an earlier phone call I had told my father that I was thinking about registering and voting in that election. Indeed I had seen the electoral officials registering citizens not far from our gate, and my father was glad that I was taking my civic duties seriously as a citizen of Uganda.

Mr. Ssemwogerere stood as a presidential candidate in that election and lost. He however remained true to his values until his last breath. But for me his biggest contribution to democracy was that he had ran in that specific election, especially given that these were uncertain times of widespread population misery and acute mass poverty, a 9pm-5am curfew had been on for 10 years, Local Defense Unit gunshots could be heard in the middle of every night and the victims remains disappeared by dawn, bodies from the Rwanda genocide were still washing up on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda, the reason Ugandans had stopped eating fish at the time, the Acholi's were still half way into butchering themselves in Northern Uganda, an insurgency that still had ten years to go at the time, thousands of Ugandans were dying of HIV/AIDS every day in rotting hospitals and the global stigma against Uganda as the world capital of feared disease was at its peak, Ugandans were living without electricity and had to spend half of every week lighting their homes and bars with kerosene lamps, and hundreds of thousands of human skulls, the victims of the Liberation Army, were still laying scattered along the country's upcountry roads as scare crows, not against crows but against the surviving humans as the idea was to rule by fear and terror.

This was a surreal Uganda that I had returned to just two years earlier. To me it had regressed by 50 years in all social, political and economic spheres compared to the country I had left behind when we flew to Libya 17 years earlier as the Tanzanians marched into Kampala, and the Ugandan exiles who came with them immediately started viciously fighting amongst themselves for power, leading to six bloody coups in six years. It is under these historic tragic circumstances that Dr. Paul Kawanga Ssemwogerere bravely stepped up as a presidential candidate of such a lawless country where heinous mass murder, economic collapse and ethnic cleansing were being seen as liberation.

Fare Thee Well Dr. Ssemwogerere. Your presidential bid in 1996and the excellent visionary manifesto you presented to the people of Uganda that year, is to me what forced the incumbent military junta that had ruled by an iron fist for ten solid years by then, to start moving from mere great political rhetoric, to actually starting to rebuild a country which they had simply been systematically looting, neglecting and destroying  since 1979.

Mr. Hussein Lumumba Amin
Kampala, Uganda

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