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Uganda: Music in Museveni's Ears
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The Monitor (Kampala)
ANALYSIS
23 March 2008
Posted to the web 24 March 2008
Alex B. Atuhaire
Kampala
PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni's continued silence on Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gadaffi's life presidency agitations may be an indicator of his tacit approval of what the controversial Libyan leader is preaching.
Back in Kampala after a seven-year absence, Col. Muammar Gadaffi sang his old song - revolutionaries do not leave. Those who watched the proceedings at the event where the Libyan leader made these comments on TV will remember the mischievous smile that was playing on the lips of his host all the time.
"Why should a leader relinquish power when he is doing good things for his people?" Gadaffi is quoted as saying on Monday last week, while speaking during the closing of the Afro-Arab Youth Festival at Speke Resort Munyonyo.
President Museveni, the reigning chairman of the Commonwealth, a club of former British colonies, which holds amongst its principles the very values that Col. Gadaffi was attacking, remained silent, just like he did in 2001, when the Libyan leader first made the same remarks.
And yet the thrust of Gadaffi's agitations were especially kind to the Ugandan President. His guest pointed out that leaders like Mr Museveni, who came to power through a 'revolution', shouldn't be changed at elections.
Gearing up for a possible fourth elective term in 2011, these pronouncements must have sounded like music in Mr Museveni's ears, but of course to the chagrin of many a political analyst.
"He (Gadaffi) is just being a populist," said, Mwambutsya Ndebesa, a political-historian at Makerere University, Kampala.
"If he wanted people to remain in power until they die, why did he overthrow the monarchy [in Libya]? He's just being contradictory," Mr Ndebesa, also a member of this newspaper's panel of experts, told Sunday Monitor in an interview.
Also, Col. Gadaffi's controversial comments will now have served to draw more attention to what is already circulating as the President's push for an unprecedented fourth term.
The Libyan leader, who is no stranger to controversy, similarly kicked off what were then Mr Museveni's third term agitations, when he, in 2001, told a willing Mr Museveni not to simply hand over power.
The Libyan leader summarily said simply that this is not the done thing for "revolutionaries".
Mr Museveni was then in the middle of a hotly contested presidential race, with Opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye breathing down his neck.
Dr Besigye had just issued a dossier which questioned the President's democratic credentials.
As the temperatures kept up, Mr Museveni was forced to promise in his manifesto that he wanted to be elected to serve out his final constitutional term.
But he would later make a U-turn and have the Constitution amended to allow him stand again in 2006 and conform to the true revolutionary spirit in the Gadaffian sense.
So, are Gadaffi's remarks engineered by Mr Museveni's interest in 2011?
According to Prof Morris Ogenga-Latigo, the Leader of Opposition in Parliament, Col. Gadaffi's remarks were akin to the goings-on between a spirit medium and a witch doctor.
"When the witch doctor wants a goat, he claims that the spirit wants it only to go behind the curtain and eat the same goat," Mr Latigo told Sunday Monitor this week.
Consequently, Mr Latigo joined a long and growing line of people who have dismissed the Libyan, saying the controversial leader is not a credible person to agitate for any leadership theory.
"Gadaffi like Museveni overthrew a monarchy but has replaced it with a monarchy led by himself. Museveni went to the bush in protest against vote rigging but has instead turned into a chief rigger, so what revolution are they preaching [about]?" Mr Latigo asked.
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The leader of the Opposition in The House therefore believes that Gadaffi's remarks were calculated to prop up President Museveni's 2011 intentions, because the Ugandan leader knows that with several unresolved political catching up with him, it is important to divert attention.
However, and quite predictably, this speculation has been dismissed by National Resistance Movement (NRM) deputy spokesman, Ofwono Opondo.
"But what Gadaffi is saying is not new," Mr Opondo said, adding, "These are positions that he has been advancing even in Europe."
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