MUSEVENI IS AN EFFECT OF THE PROBLEM WE NEVER WANT TO DISCUSS.

By: Anselm Ssebuguzi.

 

I love Uganda politics and I love giving out my opinion on all the day to day events of Uganda on social media. I love Uganda and I wish that one day we shall live a peaceful world where politics is not a battle field between the opposition politicians and the government.

 

I'm a voter in Sweden and on 22nd August, Swedish polling centres opened up for the general elections. I voted and I have one more chance to vote on 9th August (the official voting day) in case I change my mind.

 

It was peaceful, I saw no police around and no agents representing candidates, because the system is built on trust and national spirit. The electoral officials I saw were mostly old people.

 

As I cast my vote, I wondered if uganda can develop this kind of consciousness. But that same evening, someone added me to a WhatsApp group of the Ugandan community in Sweden which solved my awe.

 

Although I often express no interest whenever they include me in such groups, they continue adding me to several of them. There are thousands of such organisations for Ugandans in Sweden that start up but collapse due to lack of consensus among themselves.

 

Before I removed myself like I always do, a section of members sounded irritated by a member who sent in a Luganda message. They argued that only English or Swedish languages should be used. It was a heated tribal argument to the extent that someone suggested that each group member should be free to post in their respective languages, and I imagined how the conversation would look confusing as it was in the land of Shinar during the construction of the tower of Babel.

 

But through the argument, I identified that Uganda's problem is not Museveni.  Museveni is just an effect of the problem we never want to discuss. The real problem is ethnic competition and underscore the importance of building Uganda around ideas rather than tribal identities.

 

The last 35 years, the opposition in Uganda has put it's attention to removing Museveni but in the absence of efforts to build honest political parties that compete on the basis of ideas, many Ugandans have reverted to tribal identities as foundations for political competition.

 

What happened to our stable and unique culture, which depict brotherhood or neighbourliness?