Face Off

Reminiscent of the classic series "The Good Cop and Bad Cop" in ordinary situations its a psychological tactic used in negotiation and interrogation,however in this context this is a dual between one,on the  right side NRM media propagandist Mwenda and two on the left side FREE UGANDA publicist Magombe.

The subject in the centre of the  fight is President Obama who recently made a maiden speech as the first US president to address the AU leaders in Addis Abbaba .The content of his speech was laced with a scathing attack on the leaders who tinker with the Constitution to extend their tenure in office. Invite you to be the judge of this intellectual battle.

When Political Crime interfaced with Dr. Magombe a while ago ,inquiring what necessitated a person of  his status to get into a dog fight with a known puppet of the Museveni-Kagame connection here was his response. 

"Museveni is scrambling to re-organize his collapsed propaganda machinery after the Mirundi, ofwono opondo and sarah kagingo axis ground to a halt. That is why he is now fronting the Mwendas and other bribed senior journalists, but we have seen through and exploded his fruitless efforts.So from now we will go on full offensive against the likes of Mwenda, We will expose, shame and destroy their primitive propaganda techniques"

Magombe said.

First on the podium is Mwenda

Below is Mwenda’s article in full:

United States President Barack Obama is the most admired foreign leader in Africa because he has ancestral roots in our continent.

This is partly the reason his ill-informed and stereotypical admonitions of our leaders attracted cheers from a large section of our elite class.

But it is also because we African elites have internalize the ideology of our conquerors that presents us as inferior, inadequate, and incapable of self-government.

Bob Marley’s words that we must liberate ourselves from mental slavery are important here.

In his speech to the African Union in Addis Ababa on Tuesday, Obama acted like a colonial headman lecturing the natives on how to behave as good subjects.

Yet behind Obama’s seeming concern for our good lies the social contempt he holds us in.

Flagrant hypocrisy

Why doesn’t Obama openly admonish leaders of Western Europe whenever he visits their countries? Is it because they govern better? Who has the right to make this judgement and by what criteria?

There is a lot of corruption and widespread human rights abuses (especially of migrant minorities) in Western Europe – not to mention the brutality, genocides, forced labour, and racism that characterised their governance of Africa during colonial rule.

The difference between Africa and these nations is that we are poorer in material possessions. But does their present wealth imply better governance?

To use Jean Bricmont’s analogy from his book Humanitarian Imperialism, the US and Western Europe behave like a mafia godfather who, as he grows old, decides to defend law and order and begins to attack his lesser colleagues in crime, preaching brotherly love and the sanctity of human life – all the while holding onto his ill-gotten wealth and the income it generates.

Who would fail to denounce such flagrant hypocrisy? In any case, is the US such a model country in governance to give Obama the moral authority to lecture Africans?

In the US, a black person is killed by the highly militarized police force every 28 hours .

Scores of black people in the US are stopped and searched every minute for no other reason than the colour of their skin.

Blacks constitute 12-13 percent of the US population but 43 percent of its prison population. Although there are only 33 million blacks in the US, there are one million (nearly four percent) of them in jail.

Indeed, the incarceration rate of blacks in the US is 10 times that of blacks in apartheid South Africa.

According to Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, there are double the number of blacks in jail than in college.

There are more black people in jail today than were enslaved in 1850; and more blacks are disenfranchised today than in 1875, when the 15th amendment prohibiting discrimination in voting rights based on race was passed.

In Obama’s hometown of Chicago, the total population of black males with a felony record is 80 percent of the adult black male workforce.

The 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa Obama admonishes have a combined population of 961 million and their total prison population is 830,000.

If sub-Saharan Africa jailed its people at the same rate as the US jails its black population, we would have 38.4 million people in jail.

Dehumanizing Africans

But these are not the only state abuses in the US.

There are mass surveillance program mes that allow the federal government to eavesdrop on almost every communication of American citizens and allies, the indefinite imprisonment without trial and torture of suspects in Guantanamo Bay and other illegal detention facilities around the world.

The corruption of Washington and Wall Street – where corporate profits are privatized and losses nationalized – goes without saying.

Steven Biko, a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle, said that the greatest weapon in the hands of an oppressor is never his guns and armies, but the mind of the oppressed.

Invading sovereign nations and toppling their governments while leaving chaos in their wake, the large scale use of drones which kill innocent civilians in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are the kind of crimes the US commits.

This is not an argument of two wrongs making a right. Rather it is to show that Obama’s choice to lecture Africa is a product of the social contempt he and his countrymen and women have for black people.

Many African leaders do not treat their people with the cruel contempt with which the US treats its black citizens.

True some of our leaders use the police against their political rivals. But the US uses its police daily against innocent poor black people who are not even contesting for political power from the white financial, industrial, and military aristocracy that rules that country.

Why dehumanize them?

Contrary to Obama’s self-appointed role as the secular priest of good governance, Africans fight for more freedom, democracy, and clean government daily.

And in these struggles, the US has consistently sided with our oppressors.

It was complicit in the  murder  of Patrice Lumumba,  supported apartheid South Africa against Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC, whom it declared terrorists), financed the terrorist organisation National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and propped up incompetent and corrupt tyrants like Mobutu, Samuel Doe, and Siad Barre.

Instead of coming to lecture, Obama should have had the humility to come and apologize to Africans for his country’s sadistic adventures on our continent.

Indeed, Obama has no moral right to lecture Africans on democracy, human rights, and clean government because his country has been sponsoring corrupt and cruel policies against black people at home and thieving tyrants on our continent.

If there are weaknesses in our governance they are ours to struggle against and overcome.

Steven Biko, a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle, said that the greatest weapon in the hands of an oppressor is never his guns and armies, but the mind of the oppressed.

This was clear from the assembled African elites in Addis Ababa who were cheering Obama as he presented himself as the altruist advising our leaders on how to lead us better.

Like all imperial powers before it, the US seeks to dominate the world in order to exploit it. This is how it sustains her greedy consumption.

But to disguise its intentions, the US rewrites history, employs selective indignation, and chooses arbitrary priorities to present its selfish agenda.

Obama being of African ancestry is the best puppet the US uses to disguise its contempt for Africans. But the best he can do is to mind his own business and let us mind ours.

Andrew M Mwenda is the founder of The Independent, East Africa’s leading news magazine.

Next on the podium is Magombe

Why Ugandans have to see through Andrew Mwenda's intellectual dishonesty.

No one is disputing all those facts which Mr Andrew Mwenda writes about the US or other imperialists, i.e how they have exploited Africa; how those societies are also engulfed in corruption; and how minorities in those countries are mistreated, etc etc. We all know very well what 'colonialists and imperialists' have done and continue to do to Africa.

What, however, should be of interest to modern-day Ugandans and Africans, beyond castigating the role played by those 'outside dark forces' in creating and sustaining Africa's problems, is to additionally look inward and reflect on the role that WE AFRICANS OURSELVES have played and continue to play in the destruction and rape of our Mother continent.

The problem with the so-called contemporary 'African thinkers', like Mr Andrew Mwenda, as one Ugandan observer (going by the pen-name Rabba Naga) put it on the online Africa-at-Heart (UAH)- Stereo discussion forum, is that they are "a Symbol of the ideological conflict of the African elite"

According to Rabba Naga, "...before we condemn Mwenda, first ask, what does he really represent? If you were to ask him and he was to answer truthfully, can he reconcile his views of yesterday and those of today? Mwenda, like all the African traitors before him, is a perfect symbol of that ideological conflict of the African elite, many of whom are guilty of political and ideological betrayal of our people and should be written off."

Unfortunately for Mwenda, he underestimated the intelligence of Ugandans, by thinking that they are not clever enough to know what his actual motives were in his assault on Barak Obama's condemnation of African dictators, like Yoweri Museveni, who seek to rule for life and will do anything, including gross violations of the peoples' rights and freedoms, to illegally entrench themselves in power.

Andrew Mwenda's links and connections to Museveni's state house are no secret to most Ugandans. Nearly everyone in Uganda today knows how Andrew Mwenda works within the shadows of Mr Museveni's state house. Ugandans also know very well what Andrew has been up to in Kagame's Rwanda.

It is no secret whatsoever that what Andrew has been doing, for some time now, is a 'not-so-clever' packaging of the defense of the Museveni state house, something he does under the guise of engaging in a pan-Africanist assault on imperialism.

If Andrew is honest enough, let him now come out with a blunt critique of Mr Museveni's undemocratic and repressive credentials, as he once did - in the days gone by. Let him help Ugandans to understand better the inner-workings of Museveni dictatorship. Andrew can do this using his inside-knowledge and his close connections to the first family. Why is he quiet about all that now, when he used to do so before?

Why is it that these days Mr Andrew Mwenda is only interested in leaping to the defense of Museveni and other African dictators, and is not minutely interested in analyzing the murders, political harassment and repression of political opponents in Uganda and other African countries.

It is no wonder that many Ugandans are criticizing the Andrew Mwenda approaches to Ugandan politics. Forget for once his colorful songs (true as they may be) about Western imperialism. Those issues have been well articulated over the decades by TRUE AND HONEST PAN-AFRICANISTS, LIKE KWAME NKRUMAH.

What Ugandans and Africans in general now want to hear from Andrew Mwenda and all those who profess to be the 'new African Pan-Africanists' is something, even just a few words, about the ills and pains of African people as caused and perpetuated by African killers, dictators and thieves upon their own African peoples.

Reaction to Mwendas article by other Ugandans.

Having read Andrew Mwenda's rebuttal on Obama's AU speech, I am prompted to ask myself, What do we want as Africans?
The article discredits Obama's moral authority to admonish African leaders on good governance, citing the ills that US has committed in Africa, and also goes forward to mention the current predicaments of black people in US such as; the police brutality, mass-incarceration, poverty, among others.
Although I am always critical on the ills of US, and many of the westerns nations, colonialism inclusive,but two wrongs do not make right! WRONG is WRONG!
I also find it immature for us as Africans to ''pull the colonialism card'' whenever our leaders are held accountable for their mistakes. Whether we like it or not, at some point we need to grow up as a people and hold our leaders accountable for the rampant corruption, human rights abuse, power-greed among others without bias, without arrogance.
If our leaders are as powerful as they seem or say, and really want to control the destinies of their countries, why do they still accept aid from US or western nations, through USAID, NORAD, DAAD, IRISH AID, SIDA, among others? When it comes to aid, yes our leaders sign agreement and take the money and in most cases misappropriate it! But when one of those donor countries speaks out on poor governance, then we begin to say,
''Africans problems require African solutions''
The aid accepted is an indirect gesture that you are giving donor countries permission to interfere into your domestic politics! If you accept some one to feed your family, it means that you have bequeathed the power to the breadwinner.
Who should admonish African leaders when the African Union has failed to do its work. When has the AU stood out to talk about the human rights abuses of political rivals in Uganda, Rwanda, and other African nations, when did stand out to condemn the genocides done by Sudan in Darfur, and the slavery in Mauritania, among other predicaments in Africa?
The irony is that AU's larger part of the budget is funded by EU, US and China, so who has the moral and financial authority to talk about the ills of the ''BIG MEN'' OF AFRICA, when the ''BIG MEN'' can not pay their bills?
At some point, all the excuses that we give for our governance failures shall not hold water and that point is NOW!