Museveni Vs Besigye; an Interesting Tale of Two Men in Mortal Combat

Charles Onyango-Obbo

4 May 2011

opinion

Seeing Dr Kizza Besigye in bandages in his Nairobi Hospital room (courtesy of the heavy-handedness of Uganda security operatives), my mind raced 12 years back. On September 1, 1999, at the same Nairobi Hospital, he and his wife Winnie Byanyima brought forth a new life – their son Anselm.

You couldn’t miss the irony. Twelve years ago he and Winnie created a new life. Today, they are back fighting to save Besigye’s life.

About a kilometre away on Saturday, President Yoweri Museveni was also in Nairobi speaking at a business seminar, and later pressed the flesh with Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki at State House. At both the seminar and later in a TV interview, Museveni was repeatedly asked about Besigye, and he manfully justified the actions that left the Colonel on a stretcher.

There are other interesting things about Museveni’s day in Nairobi, but for now let us imagine that you were writing the Museveni vs. Besigye story from Nairobi, and didn’t know about their political contests in Uganda, what would it read like? For one, though for the last 25 years Museveni has returned to Nairobi as a Big Man and got red carpet treatments, the number of days he has spent in the Kenyan capital as president over this period are probably less than 30.

So, while on Saturday he was the man who was walking straight and tall and Besigye was in a wheelchair, it was not always this way. Museveni (most definitely his family) spent a total of anything between two to three years in Kenya as an exile, or a rebel passing through or hiding out on a mission to Uganda.

For several months in late 1985 after the Okello Generals had overthrown Obote II in July, the military junta entered the much-mocked Nairobi Peace Talks with Museveni’s National Resistance Army/Movement in Nairobi. Though the conventional view today is that it was Museveni who broke what came to be lampooned as the Nairobi “peace jokes”, the reality was not that simple. We were part of a small number of journalists who covered that period (the number of scribes in town in 1985 was less than 5 per cent of the hundreds, possibly thousands, the country has today).

Even as the peace talks were signed in November 1985, there was no peace in Kampala. By December of that year, the city was moving towards Mogadishu-type chaos with each of the many rebel armies that the military junta had invited into government, taking part of Kampala and turning it into a fiefdom where it robbed, raped and killed at will. For the people living in Kampala, Museveni’s disregard of the peace agreement and push to seize power was quite popular (though that is an unpopular historical fact).

Besigye too lived in exile in Nairobi, from where he left in the early 1980s to join Museveni’s war in the bush against the Milton Obote II government. He was a doctor at the Aga Khan hospital. This time, he returned as a patient. In fact, one of the most bizarre things is that Besigye faced less risk to his life when he was in the bush with Museveni, than today when Museveni is president.

Also, looking at Museveni-Besigye from a Nairobicentric perspective, I am sure one would be struck that in 1985, he entered into peace talks with fellows whom he had fought a bush war with for over four years. They had tried to kill him, and indeed killed several of his comrades. And Museveni’s rebels too killed the government troops.

Last Saturday, someone asked obliquely whether he would see Besigye in hospital. Kaguta’s son dodged that one, and took a hard line against Besigye and the “walk-to-work” campaign.

A shrewd PR savvy Museveni of years gone would have pulled a surprise, and gone to hospital to see Besigye and say something like; “We have our political differences, but in times like these, you do the correct African thing. We regret that some of our boys used excessive force against Besigye, and we shall investigate how all this happened”. He would return home, and do nothing. But at least he would have blown air into the wound.

Why, one wonders, would Museveni find it in him to meet and do a deal in the Nairobi Peace Talks with the Okellos against whom he fought a shooting war, and yet he cannot put in an appearance – even for the cameras – to see his former comrade and physcian Besigye in hospital?

One possible explanation is that though we have an elected government today, and Uganda is no longer at war, our politics is more polarised today than at the height of the Museveni rebellion in 1985. Secondly, that Museveni only talks when he is in a position of relative weakness, not strength.

Or, alternatively, that he has changed. He is no longer as pragmatic and accommodating as he was 25 years ago.

Whatever the case, we can be sure of one thing. Besigye is no longer the same man he was in the bush and the first few years of NRM rule. He no longer defers to Museveni as “Afande”, “Sir” or “Mzee.”

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