The murders of Andrew Felix Kaweesi (allegedly formerly known as Gaheesi), Muhammad Kiggundu, Muhammad Kirumira, Joan Kagezi, various muslim clerics, Ibrahim Abiriga and the latest unsuccessful murder of Gen. Edward Katumba Wamala that took his daughter and driver have a few things in common.
One of these is the fact that the killers approached their targets in a similar manner – using motorbikes. The second common aspect is for the President calling the killers pigs and then joining the Police and other security agencies to promise us that they are going to use the clues left by the killers to bring them to justice. None has been brought to justice by the time of this writing!
In order to put into perspective, the inconvenient truths that am going to share in this piece, I want to remind the country that before the Tuesday attack on the life of Gen. Katumba Wamala, the last intriguing murder incident where the President called the killers pigs was the one which claimed the life of his nephew Joshua Rushegyera in September 2019 along the Entebbe Expressway. This particular murder of the President’s nephew never attracted media attention NOR has the Police ever paraded any ‘muslims’ or ‘ADF’ to tell us that they were the ones responsible. Neither do I intend to poke my nose any further into this matter!
This uncharacteristic turn of events suggests one of these two things; either the President and the security apparatus ignored the incident and therefore did not really value the life of the President’s nephew and the pain caused to his family or the President discovered that it was an inside job that was planned and executed by the weevils in the system and he opted to carry out a clandestine clean-up exercise away from the prowlly and nosy media together with their hare-brained Police accomplices. My intuition tells me that the latter is more likely to be the case than the former.
In that case, it would point to the fact that the near absence of these incidents in 2020 could have been the result of stern and resolute actions by the President in a bid to end this, of course not forgetting that much of the year, the country was under a strict movement lockdown and night curfew. Be that as it may, bad politics reared its ugly head in the last quarter of 2020 and the first half of 2021. It is now very clear and has been severally confirmed by Gen. Tibuhaburwa himself that when he gets cornered politically, he resets to his factory settings i.e., the orchestration and application of violence where he believes that he is second to none on this planet.
Indeed, the President needed violence to pull through the last (s)election. This was evident from the killings of over 50 people in November during the infamous Bobi Wine riots, the extrajudicial killings by security such as that of Zebra Ssenyange in Kawempe who is believed by both major political camps (of Gen. Tibuhaburwa and Bobi Wine) to have been a double agent. This means that when the time came to make use of the services of the ‘pigs’ to aid the ‘re-election’ or more accurately the retention of power in favour of the President, the security apparatus went full throttle by fully making use of the services of the pigs. Could this mean that the President dropped the ball? or he forgot that a reset to his factory settings today is not the same as it was 20 years ago? I can tell you for free that the President is not in absolute control of the security apparatus since the Presidency (those around him) has turned into a mad tiger that wants to share power and control with him. To some extent, the mad tiger has forced him to move in their direction and this should worry the rest of us Ugandans as we remain slaves to the cabal that is involved in power struggles with the President within the Presidency.
The fact that none of the murders has resulted in the successful conviction of a single soul of the pigs suggests one of two things; either the security and investigative apparatus is so inefficient and incompetent, or it is highly infiltrated, disjointed and lacks central command. My intuition suggests that the latter is more likely than the former given that I am aware of many well trained and intelligent officers in the system.
Indeed, a chat with some of the well placed and knowledgeable sources in the system will reveal that most of these shootings are carried out by pigs that are conveniently kept in cells where they, in the first place, got detained for one crime or another. The big pigs in the system use these pigs as and when they need their services to do the dirty job of ending life of their enemies or rivals in a ‘clean’ way. Small talk within the system has it that whenever the pigs complete the job, they are safely returned to the cells and kept away so that the harebrained Police go on a wild goose chase looking for criminals that are already ‘safely’ hidden in the cells.
The repeated use of the word ‘pigs’ by Gen. Museveni whenever he is annoyed by these killings points to a General that is helpless and under siege by the mad tiger around his courts. Whether he likes to admit it or not, he does not enjoy as much control over the security apparatus as he did when he had just shot his way into power in 1986. That is the ugly truth. I have free advice for the ‘unadvisable’ Gen. Museveni. If you want to get the pigs responsible for any of these murders, hire private investigators and facilitate them to expand the net to include the homes of Generals, gazetted detention facilities, all safe houses operated by the various security agencies and Police cells. Then you will be sure that you stand the minutest of chances in getting the right pigs responsible for these murders!
Recently, as the country was preparing for the swearing of President Museveni for his eighth term (each term is five years and there was no [s]election for the first two terms) as President, the Army spokesperson informed the public that they had intelligence that there were people planning to disrupt the swearing-in function. We cannot rule out the possibility of this intelligence being the handiwork of disaster capitalists within the security establishment. Disaster capitalism is hinged on fear-mongering and sponsored terrorism among other things. Having failed to secure the expected budgetary support to deal with the purported ‘threats’, the disaster capitalists or big pigs if you like, can decide to call on the services of the pigs to perform one job on a General (Katumba Wamala in this case) in order to send fear within the corridors of power and a largely newbie Parliament in order to have the budgets approved seamlessly in a hurried manner. This is a script picked straight from the mafia playbook. Do you doubt if we have mafia in Uganda?
I will conclude this piece by praying that before the President accepts the harebrained actions of the Police in the form of arrests of a few Muslims, he first ensures that he does soul-searching on the bad politics that he is the epicentre of and also realises that a hunting dog usually hunts for the master and for itself. This is a principle that you must never expect to defy whenever you opt to use homo sapiens as ‘hunting dogs’ for your own personal benefit!
I rest my case.
ERL
Do you have a story in your community or an opinion to share with us: Email us at editorial@watchdoguganda.com
