Any time a Ugandan writer starts throwing Kinyarwanda terms into their articles, it is an unfailing harbinger that he is about to serve his pretentious claims to his readers. Asumani Bisiika has made a living out of this annoying routine that he uses as street cred to deceive that he has sources inside Rwanda or that he is informed about happenings in the country. In a recent article in The Daily Monitor under the title Rwanda’s security problems, real and imagined, Karoli Ssemogerere picks up from Bisika, hollering about Massamba (sic) Arihe, without any context. As a result, this too reads like the stale, pretentious, CMI talking-points that characterise Bisiika’s writing in a newspaper that was, in the days of Charles Onyango-Obbo, respected.
Ssemogerere wonders why Rwandans have "found it difficult to retain their Ugandan ties,” why his friends in Rwanda have stopped visiting Uganda, and why Ugandan milk producers on the Ugandan side of the border have lost a market and income for their milk. He thinks that all this is due to an "unexplained tension between Uganda and Rwanda [that] has soured the mood” between the two countries.
Ssemogerere thinks it’s a coincidence that his Rwandan friends stopped visiting Uganda when a campaign to harrass Rwandans started there around the time Rwandan National Congress (RNC) operatives started to operate as if auxiliaries embedded with the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) in 2017. He thinks it’s a mere coincidence that this is the period that marks people’s fear to go to Uganda, which was followed by a Government of Rwanda official travel advisory against non-essential visits because the safety of Rwandans in Uganda could not be assured.
President Museveni has not only publicly admitted to CMI’s facilitation of RNC operatives in Uganda; he has admitted to meeting the terror organization's top representatives at State House, in a letter he wrote to President Kagame in March 2019. "Your Excellency Paul Kagame, Greetings from the people of Uganda, and from myself. I am writing to let you know that by accident I, at last, had a meeting with a Rwandan who admitted to being a member of the group you told me about, Rwanda National Congress (RNC). This is a lady known as Mukankusi, whom am sure you know, but whom I have never met before,” Museveni writes in the letter before admitting to having met also with Tribert Rujugiro, the chief financier of the RNC. How the President of a country meets anybody "by accident", let alone a representative of a terror organization bent on destabilizing a neighbouring country, is left unexplained. As a Rwandan social media commentator asked tongue-in-cheek, did they bump into each other as they both strolled the grounds of State House, Entebbe?
Exactly one year before, in March 2018, at a joint press conference held at Entebbe State House between Museveni and Kagame the former admitted that his security forces had been working with RNC recruits, "When I met President Kagame in Addis he gave me some facts which I followed up … A group of Banyarwanda was being recruited through Tanzania and Burundi to go to Congo. They said they were going for church work but when they were interrogated, it was found out the work wasn’t exactly religious,” Museveni said. (in the YouTube clip, Museveni’s confession starts at 12 minutes 45 seconds). In other words, it is not Kigali that is "associated with failed bids to undermine Museveni.” The opposite has been proven beyond any doubt and Museveni himself has conceded so.
CMI talking points
Ssemogerere then dives deep into CMI propaganda that Kigali "has been associated with a number of failed leadership bids to undermine Museveni” and that casual labourers are going to Uganda to run away from "Rwanda’s much-vaunted economy, landlessness and poverty” and that when they are in Uganda they conduct " intelligence activities.”
These are the risible propaganda excuses CMI has used to justify the wholesale harassment of Rwandans in Uganda. They have detained and deported thousands of Rwandans – and even Ugandans of Rwandan origin – on the pretext that they are "spies.” Why a country would need thousands of spies inside another and why intelligence work would be assigned to casual laborer "sharecroppers” has not been explained. Neither have they wondered why the thousands of Ugandan casual laborers in Gatsata, Kigali, have never been harassed or branded spies to be detained, tortured and dumped on Rwanda's border with Uganda in retaliation for that Uganda is doing to Rwandans. Even as Kampala has been returning tortured and maimed bodies, Ugandans in Rwanda have continued to go about their livelihoods unmolested and unbothered. Moreover, if Rwandans "cross the border” to Uganda to escape poverty, what are the Ugandans who reside in Rwanda escaping?
Ssemogerere says he has stopped visiting Rwanda. But this is entirely his choice because, unlike the fate of Rwandans in Uganda, he knows very well that nothing of the sort done to Rwandans in his country would happen to him were he to visit.
Finally, Ssemogerere is right that in 1994 "many Rwandans openly identified with their motherland.” However, those who have denied this identity have been a nightmare to Rwanda because they feel like they have to prove that they have no relations whatsoever with Rwanda and are 100 per cent Ugandans, by displaying overt hatred of and engaging in destablizing Rwanda.
The continuous need to actively hide and disprove their real identity – knowing they are engaging in a deception – is what makes many highly-placed Ugandans in politics and security services so dangerous for Uganda-Rwanda telations.
Ssemogerere and The Daily Monitor should stop channeling crude CMI talking points. Most Ugandans and Rwandans know what is really going on between Uganda and Rwanda, and the underlying causes. Identity crises can be a source of a lot of debilitating pathologies.