By Mulengera Reporters
The year was 1999 and Dr. Kizza Besigye, then a serving military officer, had weeks earlier released and caused his dissenting governance views to be published in the Ugandan media. In the famous missive, Besigye explained why he thought Gen Museveni had diverted from the original ideals for which he and others had joined his NRA revel army to fight past regimes.
Those days (1999) a vibrant MP for Mbarara Municipality, Byanyima returned from the 6th Parliament’s end of year party. And this was past mid-night December 1999. She says she found Dr. KB praying and seated on their bed, waiting for her. The two had wedded and become husband and wife only months earlier. They were residing in Luzira, not yet in Kasangati.
“I have been waiting for you to come back before I sleep because there is something very important I have to tell you before I go to sleep. I’m going to challenge President Museveni in the 2001 elections,” Besigye declared to his spouse. This is one of the many things the unusually relaxed Winnie Byanyima recounted to journalists during her Saturday media engagement at her Kasangati residence.
The media engagement was coordinated by the Katonga faction Secretary General Harod Kaija who has been helping out with such media errands since Besigye’s detention last November. Byanyima had called reporters to update them on the latest on Besigye’s health having ended his hunger strike after 8 days of eating nothing.
A journalist asked her if this was the worst Besigye, herself as a spouse and other family members had been through since 1999 when he first challenged Museveni openly. She then offered to tell a long story in response making it clear that her spouse had ceaselessly been “a hounded man” from the day he declared open challenge to Museveni.
She recalled asking Besigye during their mid-night discussion if he knew what he was going into by offering to openly take on Gen Museveni as his main challenger after more senior cadres of the Movement (like Moses Kigongo, Bidandi Ssali etc) had declined to lead the fight against Museveni whose intentions to rule for life clearly amounted to betraying the more than 500,000 peasants who died in his NRA five year bush war.
Byanyima recalled asking Dr. Besigye during their midnight chat as they sat on their bed whether he had properly thought about the consequences and mentally prepared himself as Gen Museveni would predictably fight back very viscously. She recalls telling him how his decision was going to change and complicate life for the rest of his family members for an eternity.
“I told him ‘my husband the President Museveni you want to run against has emotionally put it in his head that he isn’t supposed to be competed against.’ I asked him ‘do you realise the risk you are getting all of us into?’ He seemed prepared and his decision was well thought out because today, 25 years later, I have never seen him regret even when things worse than we ever anticipated have been visited upon all of us his immediate family members,” Byanyima submitted before reporters at her Kasangati residence during the Saturday media engagement which she used to thank Ugandans, Kenyans and governments across the world for understanding and standing in solidarity with Dr. Besigye for all these years and more so between now and last November.
She recalled how Museveni’s first public response was to furiously declare Besigye a traitor who he vowed to send 6 feet under (implying death). Indeed, Byanyima said countless efforts have been made to liquidate Besigye who has only kept surviving by the grace of God.
She recalled how Besigye was overtly and covertly trailed wherever he went; making it clear this was the case for much of the last 25 years including 2001-2005 when he painfully lived in exile in SA.
That when they began constructing their house in Kasangati in the mid-2000s, the state approached and bought out several of their neighbors in order to establish security houses inside which government spies have lived up to this day. The purpose of this is to maximize surveillance so that whoever comes to Besigye’s home gets to be identified and known. Who are such visitors? For how long do they stay? And how often do they visit?
That for many years, one of the neighbors was coerced into having a huge CCTV camera mounted on his fence directly facing into Besigye’s residence. She told journalists they had to get used to that overt evasion of privacy having realised there was nothing they could do about that particular spy camera. That some of their meetings with people they value have had to be shifted to some other safer places far away from their Kasangati residence in order to minimize on such unprovoked and unjustifiable surveillance.
While promising to reveal more in her upcoming memoirs, Byanyima said that as a spouse, she was proud of Dr. Besigye because he hadn’t betrayed or let her down by accepting to be subdued and captured by Gen YK Museveni even when he has suffered more than any other political activist in post-independence Uganda. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
