My Glowing Tribute To Dr Kizza Besigye’s Branding

A   few political commentators tend to under-state the efforts of Dr. Kizza Besigye (KB) in reclaiming the political space we have today.

Although bravery is a scant virtue among any oppressed population, KB’s gallantry has concrete achievements.

Oppressed people often adapt to their state of oppression by submitting or emulating the ways of their Oppressors. KB’s successes in resisting all these mechanism are monumental.

Oppression tends to deform its victims – compromising their senses of reality, self-worth, and imaginations by impeding both mental and physically developments.

You can identify oppressed people by their dependency, timidity, and low confidence when navigating their environment – many become socially obscure, coarse, and duplicitous in their dealings.

To appreciate KB’s achievements, one has to understand such environments and obtaining circumstance where untruth operates as the truth and violence as state symbol.

After three decades of systematic oppression, people become weary, aloof, and distrusting. Gallant men like KB only sustain their paradoxical existence of hope/hopelessness.

The anti-KB sentiments represent those on the side of hopelessness. It is a prerequisite for holding a pie from the state’s breadbasket.

The internalization process of oppression is appealing because it attracts such rewards as Presidential appointment. Interpreting the terse environment in an imperceptive manner helps to validate their failures to thrive independently, and thus, accosting providence.

In that way, KB is a unique brand – a self-sacrificing living legend with a vision for good governance and equality for humankind by breaking the traditions of oppression.

However, after decades of oppression, any prospects of obtaining a state of liberation is daunting to the oppressed. They have never known freedom – how to live free of state patronage. To them, every aspect of life’s glimmer arises from the “glorious” benevolence of the tyrant.

There are Ugandans who, without reservation, claim that KB’s activism has not moved Uganda far. Some even claim that KB is a spent force because he has not dismantled the dictatorship. There are many strange explanations in dismissing KB; all compromised versions of the truth, all of which help to rationalize the ascendancy of the tyranny.

These apologists never confront the social, political, and structural imbalances and commonplace restraints mounted against a free society – the very conditions upon which they are meticulously dominated, exploited, and oppressed.

There is imperceptible fear to recognise sham rituals such as fake elections, corruption, over-zealously militarised police, and personalised armies, all of which conflate to the perpetuation of unequal society and oppressive states.

How can an army or police forces that are functionaries of dictatorship become professional?

The KB success story cannot be told as a singular narrative isolated from the complex and adverse political context in which it obtains. The roles of his colleagues and institutions they built, without which, they could not have claimed the political space that we have today must also suffice.

KB tested and exposed the lack of professionalism in the various personalized institutions that hold the tyranny in place and found them all wanting. The army is a personalized instrument of power of Mr. Museveni, culpable to the highest levels of nepotism, sectarianism, and corruption in as much as the Police, and other departments in abeyance with that regime.

The Kayihura Uganda Police, I think, is modeled after Adolf Hitler’s notorious Gestapo.

Profoundly, KB exposed the Museveni’s gibberish talks about constitutionalism and rule of law – revealing that the people control neither the power nor the will to decide on how they want to be governed.

And, KB exposed two contradicting societies – one that is above the laws with command over every resources; and the other, constructed in the sub-state zone under oppression and exploitation. It experiences egregious laws requiring the state to decide for them when to associate, talk to each other, laugh, play, and make merry or gloomy.

Mr. Komakech is a social critic and political analyst. Can contact via mordust_26@yahoo.ca