A lot has been said about the future direction of the world. A lot has been asked about the nature and the structure of the Post-American world. This article makes great reading.
The End of the American Era | The National Interest
The one excellent thing that can be learned from a lion is that whatever a man intends doing should be done by him with a whole-hearted and strenuous effort. Chanakya
12.23.2011
12.22.2011
12.08.2011
The god that failed and thirteen million reasons to lie.
Kampala- The Daily Monitor Uganda’s leading broadsheet today carried stunning news, the Catholic Church had come out and admitted the famous Uganda martyrs were not killed for their beliefs. It admitted that the alleged martyrs were actually spies in the pay of the French intelligence service; they had been tasked with undermining the government of Kabaka Muwanga.
Furthermore, the church acknowledged that the Martyrs were not heroes for the faith as had been previously portrayed; they were agents serving a temporal rather than spiritual power who had reached the end of the line. The decision to portray them as heroes of the heavenly kingdom rather than the earthly kingdom they served was taken at the highest level in a last ditch effort to gain some political capital from the deaths and put a positive spin on what was in essence a catastrophic failure.
The Catholic population in Uganda has been stunned by the revelation; many of them have been seen wandering listlessly at the Martyrs shrine. The family of Mukajjanga, Mwangas chief executioner feel vindicated by the revelation that their forefather was in fact responsible not for the deaths of men of God but of garden variety traitors.
Further afield, in neighboring Kenya a group of men who have made the yearly pilgrimage to Namugongo on June 3rd every year since 1981 were found hanging in a forest in western Kenya. The suicide notes found at the scene indicated the men were despondent about the revelations and had lost complete faith in the Church and that is the reason they had decided to end it all.
The aforementioned did not actually happen, but something in the same order of magnitude did. The revelation that the National Resistance Movement and its armed wing the National Resistance Army (NRM/A) revolution is in fact not unique in the annals of history; sadly, it is a common, garden variety revolution. The NRM/A which has ruled Uganda since January 1986 shot its way into power and with some messianic zeal proclaimed it had ushered in a fundamental change in Uganda's political life.
This revelation that there is in fact very little unique about NRM/A pivots around the story that Uganda had paid Burundi 32 billion Uganda shillings(Thirteen million dollars) to settle a debt acquired when the present government was nothing more than a rebel outfit. Now, the fact that most of the money seems to have been pilfered by some corrupt officials’ in the ministry of finance is not shocking. The meaty stuff in this is the official acknowledgement that the NRA/M was in fact the beneficiary of considerable external support to the tune of thirteen million dollars. Thirteen million dollars now is plenty of money, thirteen million dollars three decades ago is a veritable fortune.
The NRM/A has been at pains to portray their revolution as something unique. The official narrative has tended to focus on the brevity of the war, it lasted only five years, it has also tended to focus on the ‘fact’ that they had no external support. Theirs was a popular movement nurtured and nourished by the ambitions of the common man even when many of the rebel movements in that time period relied heavily on whichever side of the cold war divide was willing to provide arms.
Furthermore, even when the Torah of the revolution ‘Sowing the Mustard Seed’ acknowledges foreign support in the form of a Libyan Arms drop, the author is at pains to explain that the arms drop was not a game changer in anyway. The official narrative has emphasized the ‘fact’ that the largest supplier of arms to the rebel movement was in fact the then national army in the form of arms captured in battle. In fact, nowhere in the official narrative of the events of the struggle is any mention of Burundi’s contribution made.
The NRM/A has been brutal when it comes to any narrative that challenges the official truth, which is what makes this revelation particularly stunning, the source, it is hard to argue with the official version of events now. In an article years ago Charles Onyango Obbo argued that as long as so much of Uganda’s history remained contested it would carry within it the seeds of future justification for political violence in one form or another. Maybe just maybe now is the time to separate facts from fiction and change the tide of the future.
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