As our country, Uganda ๐บ๐ฌ turns 64, Dictator Museveni had earlier planned to decorate himself with the highest medal in a ceremony staged by his own office.
The celebration was sorrowfully held virtually, with only a handful of dignitaries and selected religious leaders attending physically.
At State House Entebbe, Despot Museveni received the Order of the Commander-in-Chief.
The Presidential Awards Committee operates from the Office of the President how funny and hilarious that sounds. The ceremony is at the presidentโs residence. State House pays the bill and Museveni receives the prize.
That is not an honour, it is a political theatre dressed up as national recognition, typical senility at play.
As expected, the arrangement was comical and so revealing. The state creates the award, controls the process, stages the ceremony and then presents the medal to the dying dude who has controlled the state for four decades.
Museveni does not merely receive honours. Under his system, the machinery of government can be made to manufacture them for him.
It is the kind of spectacle associated with rulers who have stayed in power so long that the distinction between the country and the ruler begins to disappear.
Uganda is not Museveni. State House is not Museveni, yet after 40 years, the institutions increasingly behave as though celebrating him is synonymous with celebrating Uganda.
Museveni has also received the Order of Katonga from the Chief Justice, an institution that is constitutionally expected to stand independently from the executive.
This is how political systems gradually become a one man show. The medal’s citation praises Museveni’s staged contribution to peace and security. Peace for whom?
Ask the Ugandans killed during the November 2020 protests. Ask those whose internet access was cut around the 2021 election. Ask journalists, opposition figures and activists who have faced detention, intimidation, torture and extrajudicial killings.
Ask Kizza Besigye, a fellow bush-war fighter and liberator who was abducted from Nairobi in 2024 and placed before a military court over trumped-upcharges, a practice Uganda’s Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional when applied to civilians.
A government can call silence peace. A frightened population can look quiet.
But quiet is not peace. Fear is not stability. And the absence of protest is not proof of freedom.
The Constitution has already been defiled enough, dictator Museveni’s longevity is not even related to winning elections. The rules themselves have been changed.
Term limits were removed in 2005. The presidential age limit was removed in 2017 and each time the Constitution presented a barrier to another term, the political system found a way around it.
Now, after another election theft, the same system is to decorating the dude who is soon dying office.
As we celebrate the 64th Independence, it’s perplexing that for most of the middle age citizens, the only president they have ever known is this cancer-striken foreign criminal, M7.