Last week on Thursday, Uganda went to a very frightening and dark place where it last was probably 35 years ago.
Security officers waylaid opposition leader Kizza Besigye’s car, and using hammers, batons, and gun butts broke its windows and pumped it full of pepper spray.
The other occupants were beaten unconscious, and a blinded Besigye — with one hand bandaged from a rubber bullet wound the police inflicted two weeks earlier — was thrown into the back of a police pick-up, stuffed under a metal bench, and driven away.
There were many cameras around filming and some photojournalists, perhaps fearing being injured in what has been a very violent crackdown on people walking to work to protest high food and fuel prices, were wearing flak jackets and helmets!
The Besigye arrest video went viral on social media, and shocked commentators spoke of a “return to the bloody days of military dictator Idi Amin,” and how the Besigye arrest was a scene straight out of the film The Last King of Scotland, which was loosely based on Amin and his final degeneration into insanity.
For once, parliament was united in its criticism of the security officers’ behaviour, and there were tears in the House.
In an indication of the level of disgrace, both the servile Prime Minister Prof Apollo Nsibambi, and the steelier Amama Mbabazi, secretary-general of Uganda’s ruling party NRM and Security Minister, came out to criticise the treatment of Besigye.
Beyond the horror scenes, though, what seems to be underway in Uganda is something familiar — democratic reversal, and regime decomposition.
In Africa and parts of the Third World, it is not uncommon for a regime that comes to power on a progressive and anti-corruption platform, turns a broken economy around, tames inflation, presides over years of growth, writes a new Constitution, introduces market and social reforms, and holds elections, to turn into a corrupt predatory government that undoes and throws away all the changes it wrought.
A comparison between how the Kenyan and Ugandan government tackled the crises over fuel and food prices, demonstrates this. In the space of three weeks, the Kenya government first sharply cut duties on diesel and kerosene, and then all but scrapped them.
In Uganda, in the space of three weeks, Besigye was arrested and jailed four times, and 10 people killed over the same issue.
Why the difference? My sense is that in countries like Kenya, Malawi, Ghana, Zambia, the ouster of the old regime through civil mass political action, engenders a culture of irreverence and defiance toward authority that allows democracy to grow in a more conventional and healthy way.
In countries like Uganda and Zimbabwe, where the old order is overthrown through a long and bitter armed struggle involving a few thousand brave men and women, the liberators tended to be hero-worshipped for their sacrifice, and to view their victory as the result of only the exceptional abilities of their small band of fighters.
In more than half the cases, when the people eventually tire of them and begin to treat them as ordinary contemptible politicians, their transition from demigods to ordinary mortals is an ugly affair that ends with many body bags on the roadside. Uganda seems to have entered that zone.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]
