Dr Stella Nyanzi: SHAM DEMOCRACY CASTRATED OUR REVOLUTION!
It is not that difficult to understand the seeming inertia in Uganda right now. People who enthusiastically believed in regime-change in January, have now lost steam.
Huge hopes of instantly removing dictator Museveni from state house were quickly deflated – like a balloon loosing air through holes. That is how the regular sham elections beat the revolution.
Innocent believers in presidential elections rush to raise their hopes that the sham ballot will facilitate the masses to undo the establishment of a military autocrat.
Hopes of beating the dictator at his own game rise faster and higher than bread baked with yeast. Soon, the sham election gives fanatic hope to the innocent gullible believers.
They first get high, and then intoxicated with the hope of a new Uganda without dictator Museveni in statehouse. The euphoria is beautiful!
And then the systemic rig of elections happens. The dictator skilfully engineers another bloody win for himself. This terrible rape of the hope of the masses of a ghastly.
When the sham victory for the dictatorship is complemented with death of civilians, abductions by men in drones, torture during interrogation, imprisonment in illegal places and widespread poverty, the dashing of hope is fast and massive.
Hope is quickly replaced with disappointment and fear. And then the masses in the opposition get resigned to another five years of living under dictatorship.
People slowly move on to living a hopeless life of trying to make ends meet under massive corruption, blatant violent militarism, growing repression, fear of drones attacking their neighbours, and dysfunction.
They tack their hopes of regime-change into the far recesses of their minds and go back to work, a defeated beaten people.
They take off their revolution tee-shirts and wear their work-aprons, so that they can find food to feed their hungry children.
That is how the sham elections called democracy beat us down.
So what? What must we do? Must we give up the hope of freedom? No! We must never give up.
Instead, we must re-organise the revolution and liberation struggle away from the elections which Museveni totally corrupted. We must resume re-organising…
Dr Stella Nyanzi is an academic, politician and activist
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