By Fr. Anthony Musala
The court room drama unfolding in Kampala is at best a test of judicial integrity at worst another fatal distraction from the business of revolutionary change which must come….
It is also of course a contest for power within the same political class. It excludes the people of Uganda who are not represented. I therefore tend to agree with Besigye’s non-co-operation stance.
The courts are not independent and cannot be not only due to patronage but because of their historical role as mere arbiters of alien laws.Remember most people do not know what is even contained in their own “Constituion and laws”.
Have they ever been translated into local languages? No. The courts are now simply used to give a thin veneer of respectability to a flagging dictatorship, which fact is seen through by the majority of Ugandans who don’t give a monkey’s.
Whichever side wins is irrelevent to the general struggle of ordinary people for justice, for dignity, for work for decent pay, for health and education, for wealth and for freedom not only in Uganda but in the whole of Africa.
That is important.
Africa is still the poorest and most oppressed continent on earth and this is by the design of both internal or external forces. Those forces combine in anti-people regimes to ensure that Africa is not free. This is really why Uganda is not free.
Our struggle everywhere is also as Africans and blacks against very powerful forces which have historically tried to annihilate us begining with slavery and colonialism and now via opaque ‘economic policies’ generated by multi-nationals and ‘multilaterals’
Africans themselves are wittingly or unwittingly co-opted into this nightmare of a project and so the struggle is sometimes against those Africans who have sold their people, like the current regime in Kampala.
Ours is therefore a very long term struggle, against racism, exploitation, neo-colonialism, and artificial poverty but it is ultimately against genocide or annihilation!
This is true whether in the United States, Jamaica or Uganda. So we must not be deceived by a brief media circus courtroom drama and its outcome!
We must invest our energies strategically, carefully and creatively in the long term political ‘formation’ and liberation of ALL our people, from the grass-roots up. I consider it a sacred duty.
Let’s prepare the people for ownership of their own destiny. Let’s educate the people about who they really are and their own potential; to the sense of their own rights,of their ownership of all state organs which are meant to serve all of them not just a few, of their traditional land rights,of their noble cultures and languages.
Let us stand for the recovery of all stolen “private property”,whether at home or abroad which once belonged to all the people but now is owned by 20 percent of the population, the African elite, while many actually starve.
Let’s awaken a need – the only need – for a sustained class action by the majority of Africans against the entire manipulative process called “politics” by the same old few of recycled political class in Africa.
Let’s organize to stand against those bureaucrats and technocrats and security organizations all of who seem to be without consciences, who will work for whatever murderous regimes in Africa.
Let’s stand against unmitigated global business interests and the “multilaterlism” which always ends up just exploiting the majority of African people . Let’s denounce the “religious and cultural alibis” who being opinion leaders, have failed to speak out for the the people, but instead give legitimacy to these regimes.
Without mass political re-education there can be no awakening of revolutionary zeal in our people which will be the only means of the liberation by the people of themselves.
Without it the masses will become more and more misled and more and more despondent and “victualized” by successive bankrupt regimes which they have ‘elected’ themselves, but which serve global and elite interests only, but which have precious little to offer them.
The regimes in turn will continAue to claim to act ” on behalf of the people while destroying them.
The author is a Roman Catholic Priest
