buyondo jimmy

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UGANDA PROTESTS

May 9th 2011 05:50

Juma Nsubuga sits on his hospital bed with his left leg bandaged in the mid-thigh and the right one on the floor. There are four ladies seated next to his bed. They are all chatting quietly but whenever they try to involve him in their conversation. He just shuts them up.
The 30-year-old farmer and brick layer, who resides in Kasangati Wampewo, was one of the 20 people that were rushed to Mulago Referral Hospital last Friday after they were allegedly shot by police and military as they dispersed demonstrators.

The father of three was visiting his mother on the fateful day. “I was at my mother’s place the day I was shot. I had come to check on her,” he says. He narrates that the following day, which was a Friday, he decided to go to the garden at 8am because people at Kasangati had vowed to demonstrate that day against the brutal way Forum for Democratic Change president Kizza Besigye had been arrested a day earlier.

“So as to get out of the way of the police and the rioters, I went to the garden. It’s in a place called Kisenyi in Kasangati. I stayed there with some other collegues until 12.30p.m.”

Coming home
By that time, Nsubuga had started feeling hungry so he decided to go back home for lunch after which he would return and continue with the digging. “When I got home, I found my mother cooking beans. However, she needed water and she was sending one of my sons to go and collect her some water from the tank. But it was closed. So I offered to get her four jerricans of water from the tap that was across the road,” he recollects.

Nsubuga filled all four jerricans and carried the first two to the house. However, when he was coming out to go and pick the other two jerricans, he saw military men crossing the road and walking towards their house.

“I did not want anything to do with the military because in front of our house, which is facing the road, some people had burnt tyres. So when I saw the military men walking towards our house, I and some other four men started running towards Kisenyi. But I do not know why the military men picked on me because out of the blue, I felt a bullet going through my left thigh. The last thing I remember is having been carried by some men into a car that I did not recognise.”

He woke up later on Friday night on a hospital bed with a blood-soaked bandage around his thigh.
At the moment, his major worry is whether he will walk again. He says: “Since I came here, the medical personnel are always around but they do not have any medicine. I am not sure how long I am going to stay in this place.”

“I am so worried because a man like me who used to move without asking for anyone’s help, I have to wait for my mother to come and support me to the toilet. Even in the toilet, I just have to sit. It does not matter whether the toilet is dirty or not. I have to sit down because I can’t squat.”

“My leg is swollen although I have only been here for a few days. So I am not even sure what might happen as time goes on. I am scared that I might not even be able to walk again. All I want is the doctors to come and treat me. If they can’t, let them amputate me so that I can know that I am completely lame,” he says with tears forming in his eyes.

The farmer is also worried about the state in which his family is in right now.
“I really have a big problem with being in this place because I have a family and other dependents that my mother does not know of. I don’t know what they are up to at the moment. So I am worried about them.”

Financial strain
Nsubuga’s being at the hospital is also causing financial constraints on the family and Ms Zam Nabweteme, his mother, is afraid of how they will make it through. “We have to spend a lot of money on his feeding and other necessities and the fact that both of us are here and none is working, making it harder.”

The patient blames his condition on government. He thus appeals to government to come to his rescue.
“I feel useless lying in this hospital bed and I think it’s the government’s fault. But the message I have for the government is that I am not a leader and I am not a freedom fighter and the only thing I do is what really concerns me. Meaning, I am innocent,” he says.

“So all I am asking from the government is to help save my life so that I can get out of this crippled state I am in right now.”

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POOR LEADERS

May 9th 2011 05:48

Three men in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party remain the most contested and spoken about more than six decades since their separate violent deaths; Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Luitpold Himmler.

It is said they were the closest to Hitler and had ‘absolute loyalty’ to the man recorded to have butchered six million Jews. Like their master, none of them died by the swords they wielded rather they chose the most psychotic shortcut – suicide.

Goering was found guilty by an Allied court and sentenced to death by hanging but committed suicide the night before his execution and Goebbels, the man reported to have witnessed Hitler’s death took the life of his six children, his wife as well his.

Himmler was an interesting character. As chief of the German Police and later minister of Interior, he headed the most feared intelligence organisation at the time, the Gestapo aka Secret State Police.

Allied forces
As Allied forces closed in on the Nazi and Hitler, Himmler developed cold feet and tried to get an easy way out to save his neck. While staying closer to Hitler, he secretly started negotiations with Western Allies, promising them he could turn the German army to the British and American.
He also promised he could release all the Jews in concentration camps. Himmler’s wider scheme of things was that he could play his cards against Hitler, get his boss captured or killed then he would succeed Hitler and probably survive the Allied onslaught.

It didn’t turn out according to his plan. He was arrested by British forces then as most Nazi officials did, he committed suicide days before he appeared before a jury for questioning.
Over the centuries - from the times of the Roman Empire to-date - many leaders whose crimes have been absolved by history were judged harshly by their contemporaries who held them directly responsible for atrocities, deaths and other inhuman acts against their own people. But there are also some whom history has not let off the hook, which is where the likes of Hitler, Idi Amin and Sadam Hussein, among others, fall unless later history brings forth evidence of their innocence.

Many leaders, especially in the African context, have been shielded from blame by an extension of their culpability to those who surrounded them during their tenure. Such talk like being under the influence of an iron First Lady is common– a case of the recently disposed Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo - that the guy was ready to cede power but Ms Simone Gbagbo held him by his collar shirt and told him she would finish him off by herself. Some are betrayed by a lover; it is said, Sani Abacha was in the company of two beauties when he died. Idi Amin had people like Gen. Isaac Maliyamungu, the man claimed to have single-handedly masterminded the hundreds of deaths of innocent Ugandans under Amin’s regime.

In modern times, such auxiliary affiliates pay a hefty price of their masters’ crimes by being led to The Hague. Six Kenyan high caliber officials are currently facing questioning at the International Criminal Court for the atrocities in Kenya after the elections in 2008. Maybe one day history will find out that they acted as shields for some big man quietly seated somewhere in Kenya.

Hague material
So, when ASP Gilbert Bwana Arinaitwe took to the streets to affront demonstrators who were protesting against rising food and fuel prices, he must have been under orders [and Internal Affairs State Minister Matia Kasaija has confirmed this] to keep law and order. In the intensity of the moment and the excitement of temporary heroism, however, he took the law into his own hands and did what some now view as very good material for The Hague.

If The Hague came knocking today, how much of Arinaitwe’s excesses will be attributed to him and not his bosses? He could be found reasonably responsible but he is a State agent and some of what he did, like Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Luitpold Himmler argued in the fall of 1945, that he too was serving a State.

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