By CHARITY NGILU

On May 12, 2011 an event of great ramifications to Africa was witnessed in Uganda. It was a gathering of Africa’s presidents at the inauguration of the President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni for a fourth term.

On the sidelines the police were brutalising and spraying dissenting voices with toxic coloured paint. But what was curiously disturbing was the sight of the calibre of leaders who attended the inauguration.

The picture of brotherly support among leaders whose very holding office is a blot in Africa’s quest for good governance is a disturbing portrait of Africa as a continent walking one step forward and staggering three backwards. A leadership that is like a big elephant that moves painfully slow on the breaking back of its hunger ravaged, poverty stricken and income less people.

Stolen elections

This inauguration happening against a background of an emerging trend of stolen elections and leaders refusing to hand over power leaves a lot to be desired. Since 2007 when Kenya held a disputed election that cost our people lives and property, there has been a trend for African dictators to lose elections, refuse to cede power and brutalise their own people in the name of power. Zimbabwe, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya and now Uganda are just but a few bad examples of this worrying trend.

Africa is a continent that has promised much but delivered little to its people. It is a continent that is blessed with abundant and rare minerals and other natural resources; a continent of more than 400 million people and the fastest growing market; a continent of vast natural resources that could sustain the rest of the world. Yet it is also the continent that is most poor, ravaged by all manner of man made problems — unhealthy population, food insecurity, poor infrastructure, uneducated citizenry, technologically inept.

These are the issues we elect leaders to deal with. Indeed as our people peacefully and fervently queued to vote for their leaders they expressed optimism that these challenges and problems will be things of the past. Yet over 50 years since the colonialists left, these problems still bedevil Africa. I dare say that the problem in Africa is a failure of good, visionary, committed and compassionate leadership. It is a leadership that time and again reneges on its promises. It is largely a leadership that is preoccupied with clinging on to power and intolerance to dissent with ‘me-myself-and-I syndrome’.

The recent events in Uganda are a case in point. Here is a President who came to power on the platform of hope and as a saviour in1986. In his early presidency he was a beacon of hope and even delivered a new Constitution. However, since the promulgation of that Constitution in 1996, President Museveni has worked hard to turn Uganda’s clock backward. The blatant beating up, arbitrary arrest and detention of opposition leaders whose only crime is a claim to their constitutional rights and responsibilities, is contemptuous of democratic ideals.

Raw power

I pose a question to President Museveni, however insecure you are, how would a people who choose to walk to work threaten your government? How would unarmed women carrying baskets to the market be a security threat to your government?

Is the fear of your own electorate and people the reason you paraded your whole war machinery in a demonstration of raw power? Which external force are you fighting? Is Besigye and the opposition in Uganda an external force?

I take the view that all evidence points to Museveni as a leader who surely exhibits the very African-big-man syndrome. This is the syndrome that also makes them parade poor, hungry women, youth and children to dance and clap to entertain them in a way that mocks their suffering.

To the presidents who attended the inauguration while Museveni was brutalising his citizens;

Is this the neighbour you want to be seen around with?

If a man is known to beat his wife and brutalise his children and invites you to a celebration at his home, would you attend and praise him?

What message would you be sending to his family, that this is the way things are done?

Seeing the presidents who attended the inauguration one is left to refer to the adage " show me your friends and I can tell your character’?

To my own President;

What kind of solidarity was that at Museveni’s inauguration?

Is this the way we are going to forge a formidable, democratic prosperous East African Community?

My president, you surely know the struggle that you have been a part of that led us to deliver the fruits of the democracy we all now enjoy. I surely hope that when you attended this event you took the opportunity to tell Museveni to desist from his barbaric ways of battering his citizens.

The writer is Minister of Water and Irrigation.