Photo: Peter Elwelu, a former Deputy Chief of Defence Forces, Uganda
“Kindly remember your officer whom you appointed and entrusted with responsibilities.” With those words, published in New Vision last week, Ms Patricia Apolot, wife of retired Lt Gen Peter Elwelu, appealed to President Museveni. Security operatives, she said, had searched the family’s home in Soroti more than four times in two weeks, over allegations that her husband was plotting a rebellion. I am supremely underqualified to comment on those allegations and will stick to my policy of leaving matters of generals to the generals.
But her distress is a normal human response to an encounter with powerful, armed people who can kill you in seconds. Hers is the terror of the knock on the door, of boots in the bedroom, of not knowing where your husband will sleep tonight. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Ugandans have known that terror since independence sixty-four years ago.
Most of them have been small, nameless members of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. They carried their grief in private. No newspaper recorded their pleas. No president heard them, though his word could have saved their loved ones. Nobody asked him to remember them.
Our country has an unknown number of widows and orphans whose loved ones died simply because politicians would not negotiate and compromise. The earliest such killings I heard about took place in 1963. I was in Primary Five, already reading and hearing news I could not understand except through the faces of my elders. That March, Sir Edward Muteesa II, Kabaka of Buganda, went on what he called a “hunting trip” in Bunyoro’s lost counties, with ex-soldiers whom he settled at Ndaiga and elsewhere to sway the region’s political future. Their methods were brutal. On March 23, Prince Constant Kiiza of the Bunyoro royal clan begged them to stop beating a pregnant woman and take him instead. They beat him to death. Banyoro witnesses said Kiiza had first been brought before the Kabaka, who ordered his killing. At Kaluguza market, with the Kabaka reportedly present, police opened fire with sub-machine guns, killing one person. The dead were ordinary Banyoro, caught in a storm they did not create. No one, to my knowledge, answered for their deaths, and the deaths of many others in incidents that occurred in the area during the run-up to the referendum. Their families buried them in silence.
That violence was the opening lap of a bloody relay that Uganda has run ever since. The baton passes from one decade’s executioner to the next, each runner believing his power shields him from the turn of the wheel. The political compromises that shielded Muteesa collapsed in the flames of the 1966 Mengo Crisis, which sent the Kabaka into exile. The Baganda that were killed, each precious to a family, are now mere statistics in the dark catalogue of our self-destruction, even as we sing our National Anthem’s pledge: “United, free, for liberty, together we’ll always stand.”
Then came Idi Amin’s brutal decade, followed by the Luwero Triangle that bled from 1981 to 1985. The cycle has merely been refined since 1986: Namokora in 1986; Mukura on July 11, 1989, where 69 young men suffocated in a goods wagon into which government soldiers had crammed them; Burcoro in 1991. Then Kasese came in November 2016, an operation overseen by none other than Elwelu himself, who preferred immediate slaughter at Omusinga Charles Wesley Mumbere’s palace to a sustained siege that might have ended in surrender. In November 2020, dozens were shot dead on Kampala’s streets in broad daylight.
Pause with me at Mukura, Tingasiga. Imagine the darkness of that wagon, the heat, the young men clawing for air and calling for mothers who could not hear them. Then multiply that night by every massacre on this list, and by the many that no list records.
Our tragedy is that today’s hunter invariably becomes tomorrow’s prey. Men who once commanded the state’s machinery of violence with unblinking cruelty end up stripped of rank, fleeing the very guns they once directed. When their turn comes, their families plead for the rights, fairness and empathy that these men denied others. In a country governed by the gun, impunity is only a temporary lease.
Why do ordinary citizens join an enterprise that offers them nothing but a front-row seat at their own destruction? The elite do not fight their own battles. They outsource them to the marginalised. When the powerful fall out over ambition, ego and the spoils of the state, they weaponise the regional and tribal anxieties of the people who feed the land. Cloaking naked greed in the robes of tribal defence or national liberation, they trick the ordinary Ugandan into picking up a machete or a rifle. The poor die protecting the privileges of the rich, until the wheel turns and a new master takes the throne.
We must refuse to run this race any longer. Ugandans have tried violence under Obote I, Amin, Obote II, Okello and throughout the current dispensation. We know the results of this sixty-four-year experiment: rivers of blood, generational trauma and suffocating uncertainty about tomorrow. The bullet has never built a hospital, fed a hungry child or established justice. It has only bequeathed the cycle of revenge to the next generation.
To break this curse, we must first silence the guns. The use of state security agencies to settle political scores must end. Armed rebellion must never be an option again, for it perpetuates a useless destructive cycle. We must move from a culture of force to a culture of law, where human rights are the bedrock of our coexistence, not a foreign luxury.
Second, our current and aspiring leaders must embrace honest, patient dialogue and the uncomfortable art of compromise. I was honoured to live in Makerere’s Northcote Hall for five years, but I never agreed with its motto: “Either we win or they lose.” Though said in jest, it became the core belief of our political leaders, the “enlightened ones” included. Leadership is not the annihilation of one’s rivals. We also need a transitional justice mechanism that acknowledges past horrors, provides accountability and heals the grievances that make our people so easy to manipulate.
Above all, we must return to a truth our political history has desecrated: the sanctity of every human life. A nation cannot prosper when its leaders’ lives are treated as sacred while the lives of nameless peasants are dismissed as collateral damage. The true measure of Uganda’s progress is not the survival of its generals but the safety, dignity and peace of its most vulnerable citizens, the Wretched of the Earth who dig the soil and receive nothing but graves in return.
“This Kasese thing was nothing to me,” Elwelu once told journalists. “Forget about Kasese,” he added. Today his wife asks the President to remember his officer. Ejakait Elwelu’s distress, and her plea, carry a lesson we must not squander. Let us remember Prince Kiiza and the peasants of the lost counties, the 69 at Mukura, the more than 100 at Kasese, at least 15 of them children, and the countless nameless ones whose families never had a newspaper to carry their cry.
© Muniini K. Mulera