Uganda: Where Have All the Moderate NRM Voices Gone?

Assistant Inspector General of Police Francis Rwego this week joined the growing list of officers suspended or demoted for handling walk-to-work protestors with kid gloves.
Mr Rwego is accused of failing to throw off Entebbe Road the crowd that turned out to welcome Dr Kizza Besigye back from Nairobi, and therefore inconveniencing the foreign visitors driving in and out of Kampala for the swearing-in ceremony.

One person was shot dead under unclear circumstances and government officials say a rock was hurled at one of the presidential convoys although this claim has not been independently verified.
Despite the incidents, Besigye's team commended Mr Rwego for acting professionally and treating them with respect - a position that has since landed him into trouble.

Mr Rwego is not alone. Alphonse MutAssistant Inspector General of Police Francis Rwego this week joined the growing list of officers suspended or demoted for handling walk-to-work protestors with kid gloves.abazi, then Jinja Road Police Station operations chief, was commended by no less than police boss Maj. Gen. Kale Kayihura after he walked Olara Otunnu to his office during the W2W protests. A few days later, after complaints "from above", Mr Mutabazi was demoted to the obscurity of the Police mechanical workshop.
Meanwhile, Gilbert Bwana Arinaitwe, the Police officer who led Dr Besigye's brutal arrest a fortnight ago, has been publicly commended for a job well done.

Similarly, the hooded man with the hammer who smashed through one of the car windows does not appear in any of the Police 'wanted' adverts, despite all security agencies disowning him. Something is happening in government that should concern its supporters and worry its opponents.
People in the know say the W2W protests have exposed the fault lines between the growing extremist-militant wing of the regime and their rapidly disappearing moderate-pacifist-intellectual counterparts.

After the moderates in the security agencies tried to clean up their act and started throwing Besigye into a more respectable police van, the hard-line elements responded with the hammer incident in which his aides were taken away in the relative comfort of the van while he was thrown into the space on the pick-up truck usually reserved for robbers and corpses.
After a relatively clean election campaign in which NRM shed off its fatigues and got with the programme, engaging with social media, music and catchy messages, the W2W protests have shown that despite the fancy designer suits, the regime's under garments remain army fatigues.

The older generation of NRM officials who could hold an intellectual argument have all since fallen out with the regime or slouched off into silent retirement.
They have been replaced by a motley collection of political journeymen and women, who far outnumber the few bright minds (rebels), who are willing to debate and engage.
The regime has taken on a mercenary streak whereby important tasks, such as explaining and defending government policies and programmes, falls to hired young graduates paid to write daily letters to the editor or call into radio talk shows.

Where have all the NRM intellectuals gone? Where are the young, smart NRM supporters - and I know many - and why are they not willing to step up and debate their positions?
Many will claim that they are denied space in the media. Others will say it is up to the ministers and technocrats to defend their programmes. Bull.
The sad fact is that many of them are busy chewing on their loot and consider it bad manners to speak with their mouths full.
Unable to convince and convert, the regime is now seeking to detain and derail, proposing to roll back some of the most progressive constitutional clauses it gave birth to.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Uganda's crisis today is not due to the actions of the bad people in the regime but because of the silence, over them, by the good people in NRM.