Friends, allow me to congratulate President Yoweri Museveni for surviving a really cruel life and to live for this long to witness the beautiful story Uganda is turning into. He has lived and breathed for Uganda, a country he loves so dearly and very deeply.
So you know: God cannot select you to lead your people if you don’t love them. Even Idi Amin Dada loved this country dearly so is Dr. Kizza Besigye and now Robert Kyagulanyi Sentamu aka Bobi Wine.
We should also congratulate NUP supreme leader- Bobi Wine- for showing the world that he has 9- lives. That teargas canister would have killed or maimed an ordinary person.
Should I remind you that people whose lives have bigger purposes don’t easily get killed? Affande Salim Saleh for instance, has eight bullets embedded in his body but a friend of mine passed away after a small nail scratched his thigh!
Once again join me we chorus: Happy 80th birthday our comrade leader- Yoweri K. Museveni. Together we should remind him that he has done everything humanly possible for Uganda a country which once existed only by name.
We may disagree on the delivery part of his leadership, but we’re all unanimous that his idea to begin has really realigned Uganda as a steady and now esteemed member among a group of countries.
I don’t know how I can shout out loud to remind you that without Mr. Museveni and his liberation wars, Uganda would not be fairing better than Somalia or even Palestine.
And people like Bobi Wine wouldn’t have the legroom to shake things up. Of course, I wouldn’t be here to write this article.
Therefore Y.K Museveni’s milestone, is our milestone; his failures long became our failures. When you see him talking passionately about coffee or milk; he is talking about our very success.
I know sometimes you misunderstand me and even question whether, I am indeed the author of these articles. The one important aspect is not who writes what but who tells the truth.
Actually I was once advised to write only about the greatness of Bobi Wine then everything will be okay.
I sincerely agree with this idea. But how about the man who created the conditions which have resulted into this beautiful story; indeed turning Uganda into a land of opportunities?
The other day I met a man from the U.K with a monicker Diamond. This is what he said:
“I left Uganda when I was 16 years old and lived a life of hustle on Bristol streets. Little did I know that the friends I left here were driving Range Rovers and I was constantly in Jail!”
It may sound like a fallacy but Uganda should rightly be baptized as the land of “New Money” as a result of the ease with which one can make ends meet.
Of course I am mindful of the millions of our citizens who are still failing to join the money flow, but with the current coffee prices and bumper harvests, many will join soon. Very soon Ugandans, like citizens of developed countries, won’t mind who rules over them.
Therefore, “some of us have reasons to thank God” as President William Ruto once said.
My late father used to tell us that if you’re alive, then you can’t describe yourself as poor. “The only poor people are those without the gift of life!”
We may not have our children living for free for 40 years in the State House, or find ourselves with hefty bank accounts courtesy of our being relatives to the 80 years old Museveni, but we can at least live peacefully in our simple homes and comforted in the knowledge that tomorrow we will wake up alive; that our friends who have gone to work will certainly return home to their families.
This was not a given in the past when rogue security men would pick people randomly on city streets and skirts them away never to return.
That is why we, Ugandans, we became united in our condemnation of ‘drones’ which had returned “pandagali- board the lorry” in our country. Mr. Museveni and the security he commands listened and stopped the menace of drones.
IF I WERE YOU MY COMRADE LEADER (talking to Museveni aside…)
I would go home and take a well-deserved break from the hustle and bustle of leadership. I think after decades of struggle, I deserve to rest perhaps spend the remainder of my not- so- admirable life reflecting on that journey of trepidation and sacrifice I had just traveled.
I would recall that morning in 1966 when with a small group of boys, we went to the Ankole Prime Minister seeking for arms to fight the government of Milton Obote. Yes he did dismiss us and advised us to return to school, but the seeds of liberation and rebellion had been planted.
I would reflect on the many frustrating journeys I made to Makerere University which eventually refused me a chance to study there. They looked at my ethnic background and minimized my academic power erroneously ignoring the great package God had already trusted me to deliver for Uganda indeed Africa.
Those men at the ministry of education and Milton Obote himself, looked at my small stature; lean body and kind eyes and mistook them for stupidity. They blamed me, a mere 23 year old, for having a doubtable lineage which was not my fault.
Those men wanted to turn me into a citizen of a country I have never lived in and felt not it’s heart beat. But these men were inwardly clever men and I will forever be grateful to their myopic thinking. They somehow knew that behind the veneer of quietness, lay a determined soul that will, in not – so – a – distant future change the fortunes of their very lives by snatching power from them.
Alone in a Bugwere forest, I had had this beautiful image of Uganda, a futuristic country I wouldn’t explain to anyone.
As I crisscrossed the then dusty streets of Dar es Salaam, at times chased from offices for begging to feed my comrades, I was never embarrassed but solely focused on the journey ahead.
I had seen a country with plenty of oil and diamonds; coffee and tourism potential second to none. But I had to convince first other Ugandans to share in my phantom dreams.
I had seen the ‘promised land’ and no force under the sun would stand in my way to reach it.
And I will forever be grateful to God for enabling me to withstand all the bad and ugly and lived to be 80 years. This is a blessing because, I know, 99% of Ugandans, indeed humans, don’t live to be 80 years.
Still in that reminiscence world, I had slowly but purposely, convinced a largely skeptical youth to join me we fight the military regime of Idi Amin Dada. Yes he had Mig fighters, Mirage bombers and an assortment of helicopter gunships. But he had not built a critical mass of followers to resist our onslaught.
Then we fought Milton Obote and his illiterate army and defeated them. They had called me a bandit who roamed in the jungles eating insects. When I reached Kampala in January 1986, with my “Kadogos” they melted away like Kabale mist.
My country and my people had undergone turmoil after turmoil and unbeknownst to them; I was already in their midst and ready to sacrifice myself in exchange for a better future for them. I feared no weather elements and pangs of anger; were the least of my worries.
Severally I tried to give up, for the people I was sacrificing my life for were unappreciative. They would occasionally ask me: “Museveni ofaaki- what is bothering you!” in a retort to my unending quest to save my people. I would feel hurt when my own people (Banyankole) failed to understand my mission. They rejected me at Mbarara North in 1980 elections, but I would forgive them because ‘forgiveness’ is the greatest gift you can give yourself.
At 80 years old, I would look back when aged 35 years old and seating among the top- four Ugandans who decided the fate of my people when Idi Amin regime had just fallen in April 1979.
Together with these men (Paulo Muwanga, Tito Okello Lutwa, David Oyite Ojok), we would seat and plan the way forward for a country which had been torn apart by the dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada subsequently strangled and bankrupted by foreign powers.
Yes, at my young age, I had seconded Prof. Yusufu Kironde Lule to be president and when he failed, after only 68 days, I brought in Godfrey Lukongwa Binaisa thinking that, as a prominent lawyer, he would help our people. He wasn’t up to scratch and I helped remove him.
That is why, going by my track record, I will also determine who becomes the next president after I retire. This has always been my forte and there is nothing to suggest otherwise.
I was itching closer to power but still treated with suspicion; as an outsider and a young man with excessive ambitions. It wasn’t ambitions per se, but inflicted by a disease as described by Francis Imbuga in Betray in the City:
“When the madness of an entire nation strikes a solitary mind, is not right to say the man is mad…”
Yes I was mad as hell but I had no way to express my feelings in a language those people understood. They were, by nature, violent men and full of themselves. It was violence they wanted and it was violence I delivered to them.
The story is as long as my 80 years travel through life…
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION:
We shall one day take an audit and understand fully Yoweri Museveni’s contribution not only to Uganda but Africa at large.
He remains among a class of African greatest statesmen like Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and Sekou Toure.
President Yoweri Museveni, at 80 years old, is an even more smarter and wiser man.
He may seem soft (who told you that 80 year olds have beef with people) but with an hawk’s eye and a mind of Mr. Ichuri (hare or wakamyu).
Mr. Ichuri was the smallest animal in the animal kingdom, but towered large over all of them. Yoweri Museveni is our modern-day Mr. Ichuri.
May he live more years to admire and understand fully the beauty of his handiwork.
LAST WORD: “Running a country like Uganda is not easy. It is like driving a trailer on a bad road. You cannot give it to people who are learning to drive or those whose driving permits have been cancelled!”
– Y K. Museveni
Adam Kamulegeya
0779 104 336
adamkam2003@gmail.com
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