It is not a crime to serve your country
A New Vision article by Edward Mulindwa attacked Olara Otunnu for serving the 1985 Military Council government. According to Mr. Mulindwa, it is unacceptable to serve your country under military regimes.
It is clear Mr. Mulindwa and others view realities from the same frame and stock of divide and rule, and exclusionary politics that has been perfected for the last 23 years by Yoweri Museveni. Divisions along regional, ethnic, historical , and who served what government; who fled and who remained in the country; who fought and did not fight what regime, which have been used too long, as a basis to exclude, marginalise and legitimise injustices.
In the rush to label, condemn and exclude, such proponents confuse the conceptual distinctions between a state and government. The NRM, UPC, FDC, DP and any other party or clique of army generals may form a government; through elections or military putsch. Such regimes or governments, will come and go, but the Ugandan state remains.
Civil and public servants, who take oaths of allegiance to the state, serve the state, no matter what government or regime is in power. And ordinarily, it is not a crime to serve the state. How we serve, use the state and power in ways incongruent with public interests, is what must be scrutinised. Obviously, it is wrong to use public position, office, and state resources to personally enrich oneself, disadvantage others, or to promote and protect personal interests of an individual or a clique.
But to contend that simply because someone served a military government, therefore, we must rule them unfit for leadership is not only simplistic, but arbitrary. We ought to show how a person committed criminal acts, or used state resources and positions for personal benefits, to the neglect of the common national good. But in the New Vision article, Edward Mulindwa adduces nothing to incriminate Olara Otunnu. All he reiterates is the assertion that Dr. Otunnu served a military government, and the hasty conclusion that therefore, he “fought the society that nurtured” him.
Such declarations, unanchored within any specific conceptual detail or known political malfeasances, other than random, fanciful personal sentiments, to frame national questions and structure public debate, is both dangerous and counterproductive. It is the kind of deceptive simplicity that made people attack anyone with a darker colour tone as “Anyanya” in 1986, and single out citizens with “long noses” for punishment in the recent Kabaka riots in Buganda.
The intellectual poverty in the conventional wisdom that anyone who worked for a particular regime or comes from the same region as the president or most of the prominent members of a regime, share equally in the self-enrichment and criminal excesses of the particular government, must be rejected by all reasonable Ugandan nationalists.
We know Olara Outnnu was Foreign Minister, and he made honest efforts to make the Nairobi Peace Negotiations succeed. According to him, he thought it was the best opportunity Uganda had for peace; to refashion the post colonial state, and bring people, accountability, and rights back within the focus of governance, leadership and citizenship. The peace process had brought all warring factions to the table with prospects for a stable government of national unity. But because Yoweri Museveni wanted absolute power for himself alone, he scuttled the Nairobi Peace deal, and plunged the country into renewed violence, and instability.
No doubt, something can be said about the need for peaceful and orderly transfer of power, and the development and respect for a civic and democratic culture. Mr. Mulindwa would have a valid point if he had entreated us to abhor military coups, and violent social and political order, given our experiences and history. However, like a bull rearing at a matador’s red cape, his uncritical charge at Olara Otunnu for merely serving a military government, misses the point, and espouses a subversive mob logic that imperils our country.
We must be a lot more careful in distinguishing what role someone played, rather than condemn, punish and disinherit any Ugandan who may have served the country under a military regime. It does not faze such critics that they make these unqualified moral claims and arguments singling out 1985 coup makers, while the most brutal military dictatorship has been in place for twenty-three uninterrupted years. Moreover, Mr. Mulindwa was a “Muyekera” – part of the “bandits” who brought the current military dictatorship to power through Luwero, which makes his latter-day saintly, moralistic admonitions against other alleged coup supporters prosaic.
This is not to say that Mr. Mulindwa, a former Muyekera, who like St.Paul the Apostle as Saul who became a chief spokesman for Christianity, could not similarly be a credible advocate for peaceful, democratic, orderly political changes. But rather that, he ought emulate St. Paul’s ethics to accept the political gentiles into the national democratic Kingdom, without requiring them to first circumcise themselves. In our case, perhaps it is not to make them ineligible because they are circumcised. Because if we were to extrapolate the logic of Mr. Mulindwa’s prohibition arguments and structure our national institutions and politics on such exclusionary terms, it would mean that anyone who served in Generals Amin’s, Okello’s, and Museveni’s governments, must be ineligible to hold public office in a post NRM Ugandan polity!
Realistically, Ugandans serve the country and the state, but not individual leaders. Let us not take as normal, the current distorted realities in the country where ministers, state agents, and bureaucrats owe allegiance to the president and NRM, but not the state and the country.
It is clear Mr. Mulindwa and others view realities from the same frame and stock of divide and rule, and exclusionary politics that has been perfected for the last 23 years by Yoweri Museveni. Divisions along regional, ethnic, historical , and who served what government; who fled and who remained in the country; who fought and did not fight what regime, which have been used too long, as a basis to exclude, marginalise and legitimise injustices.
In the rush to label, condemn and exclude, such proponents confuse the conceptual distinctions between a state and government. The NRM, UPC, FDC, DP and any other party or clique of army generals may form a government; through elections or military putsch. Such regimes or governments, will come and go, but the Ugandan state remains.
Civil and public servants, who take oaths of allegiance to the state, serve the state, no matter what government or regime is in power. And ordinarily, it is not a crime to serve the state. How we serve, use the state and power in ways incongruent with public interests, is what must be scrutinised. Obviously, it is wrong to use public position, office, and state resources to personally enrich oneself, disadvantage others, or to promote and protect personal interests of an individual or a clique.
But to contend that simply because someone served a military government, therefore, we must rule them unfit for leadership is not only simplistic, but arbitrary. We ought to show how a person committed criminal acts, or used state resources and positions for personal benefits, to the neglect of the common national good. But in the New Vision article, Edward Mulindwa adduces nothing to incriminate Olara Otunnu. All he reiterates is the assertion that Dr. Otunnu served a military government, and the hasty conclusion that therefore, he “fought the society that nurtured” him.
Such declarations, unanchored within any specific conceptual detail or known political malfeasances, other than random, fanciful personal sentiments, to frame national questions and structure public debate, is both dangerous and counterproductive. It is the kind of deceptive simplicity that made people attack anyone with a darker colour tone as “Anyanya” in 1986, and single out citizens with “long noses” for punishment in the recent Kabaka riots in Buganda.
The intellectual poverty in the conventional wisdom that anyone who worked for a particular regime or comes from the same region as the president or most of the prominent members of a regime, share equally in the self-enrichment and criminal excesses of the particular government, must be rejected by all reasonable Ugandan nationalists.
We know Olara Outnnu was Foreign Minister, and he made honest efforts to make the Nairobi Peace Negotiations succeed. According to him, he thought it was the best opportunity Uganda had for peace; to refashion the post colonial state, and bring people, accountability, and rights back within the focus of governance, leadership and citizenship. The peace process had brought all warring factions to the table with prospects for a stable government of national unity. But because Yoweri Museveni wanted absolute power for himself alone, he scuttled the Nairobi Peace deal, and plunged the country into renewed violence, and instability.
No doubt, something can be said about the need for peaceful and orderly transfer of power, and the development and respect for a civic and democratic culture. Mr. Mulindwa would have a valid point if he had entreated us to abhor military coups, and violent social and political order, given our experiences and history. However, like a bull rearing at a matador’s red cape, his uncritical charge at Olara Otunnu for merely serving a military government, misses the point, and espouses a subversive mob logic that imperils our country.
We must be a lot more careful in distinguishing what role someone played, rather than condemn, punish and disinherit any Ugandan who may have served the country under a military regime. It does not faze such critics that they make these unqualified moral claims and arguments singling out 1985 coup makers, while the most brutal military dictatorship has been in place for twenty-three uninterrupted years. Moreover, Mr. Mulindwa was a “Muyekera” – part of the “bandits” who brought the current military dictatorship to power through Luwero, which makes his latter-day saintly, moralistic admonitions against other alleged coup supporters prosaic.
This is not to say that Mr. Mulindwa, a former Muyekera, who like St.Paul the Apostle as Saul who became a chief spokesman for Christianity, could not similarly be a credible advocate for peaceful, democratic, orderly political changes. But rather that, he ought emulate St. Paul’s ethics to accept the political gentiles into the national democratic Kingdom, without requiring them to first circumcise themselves. In our case, perhaps it is not to make them ineligible because they are circumcised. Because if we were to extrapolate the logic of Mr. Mulindwa’s prohibition arguments and structure our national institutions and politics on such exclusionary terms, it would mean that anyone who served in Generals Amin’s, Okello’s, and Museveni’s governments, must be ineligible to hold public office in a post NRM Ugandan polity!
Realistically, Ugandans serve the country and the state, but not individual leaders. Let us not take as normal, the current distorted realities in the country where ministers, state agents, and bureaucrats owe allegiance to the president and NRM, but not the state and the country.
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