By Mulengera Reporters
Gloves have finally come off for Dr. Kizza Besigye’s Kenyan lawyer Martha Karua who for more than a year had been restraining herself from making controversial statements targeted at the person of President YK Museveni.
For more than a year now, Karua, a much-respected human rights defender and senior leader in the EAC region, has been a familiar face in the Ugandan news ecosystem because of her involvement as the leading defense lawyer for key opposition figure Kizza Besigye who for roughly two years now has been in Luzira prison battling treason charges.
However, her utterances had largely been limited to the Court case and she had been cautious not to get involved in the Uganda partisan politics of directly calling out President Museveni. But the Monday events at Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport (where she says acts of torture were occasioned as Uganda’s immigration agents struggled to prevent her from proceeding to Kampala to observe proceedings at the Magistrates Court where her fellow defense counsel Erias Lukwago was appearing for bail) have warranted an escalation.
Martha Karua, a leading political figure from the influential Kenyan tribe of the Kikuyus, on return home in Nairobi after a dramatic day in Uganda, granted several TV interviews to officially give her account of what she went through during the Monday fracas.
One of these interviews was with KTN news network of Kenya whose platform she used to make reference to growing tendencies of ‘rogue’ leadership, in a bid to depict what is happening in Museveni’s Uganda and Samia Suluhu’s Tanzania. She said the two countries are now under ‘rogue’ Presidents who she said the people of East Africa have a duty to collectively and directly fight. She was previously manhandled and tortured in Tanzania as well, when she had gone there to follow up on the treason case facing that country’s leading opposition figure.
The other interview Karua gave on Tuesday was with NTV Kenya, whose widely-watched morning show she used to directly attack Gen YK Museveni like never before. She called on Gen Museveni to tread carefully and avoid conducting the government business as if he personally and the Ugandan state are one and same.
Denying claims that she is a foreigner with no business to interfere in Uganda’s governance processes, Karua said she is an East African citizen with a regional passport which she said entitles her to travel to Uganda and practice law from there in her capacity as Besigye’s lead counsel. She made reference to the special practicing certificate which Uganda’s Law Council issued for her and it’s still valid.
Karua said that Gen Museveni is now a paranoid leader who has decided to get rid of Besigye and Obed Lutale except that he just wants to use courts of law to make his thing seem legit. Karua said she learnt of the plot to get rid of her and Erias Lukwago, so that the Ugandan State House ends up being the one to choose defense lawyers for Besigye, two months ago and was therefore not surprised with Monday events.
That Gen Museveni has been hurting over her involvement in the case because of the growing regional and continental scrutiny and publicity her involvement has generated while publicizing human rights abuses in Uganda. That the arrest of Lukwago a week earlier and her deportation on Monday are all aimed at depriving Dr. KB of his God-given right to be represented by a lawyer of his choice. She added that all this proves that KB is an innocent man who is merely being politically persecuted because Gen Museveni and his son aren’t comfortable with his political views.
She urged Kenyans not to develop negative feelings against the Ugandan people because the problem is Gen Museveni personally and not the population. Karua thanked the Kenyan ambassador in Uganda for yielding to pressure from the Kenyan civil society groups and directly protesting to the Ugandan authorities about her maltreatment at the airport.
She said there is no way she can be legally declared persona non-grata in Kampala because that requires a reason which doesn’t exist because she hasn’t committed any offence to deserve such sanctioning. She said the regime in Kampala is merely panicking because they simply have no case against Dr. KB, whose choice of defense lawyers they now want to determine having failed to compromise her and Erias Lukwago to betray or misadvise their client.
Karua warned Gen Museveni to become human and stop criminalizing opposition because, even after 40 years, his leadership over Uganda will come to an end and can never last forever. She made it clear there will be Uganda long after Gen Museveni and his son have expired into eternity, which is why the incumbent President in Kampala has to treat her well. She said there are growing indicators that she is the one Kenyans are going to elect to become their President next year.
She said she is wondering how Gen Museveni intends to deal with Kenya, a neighbor Kampala needs to co-exist with out of necessity, the day she become President in Nairobi given that he has now concentrated on imagining that President Ruto is going to last forever. She said very soon Gen Museveni will have to re-learn and unlearn while having to deal with the new reality when she is the fellow President running the show in Nairobi.
She said she doesn’t want a situation where the bilateral relations between Nairobi and Kampala become complicated or even break down totally simply because someone Gen Museveni’s security forces resented and brutalized is now the President of Kenya, whose current leader Ruto she insisted is on his way out as Kenyans are going to vote him out come next year.
She castigated Museveni and Suluhu for being the EAC region’s bad-mannered Presidents whose unchecked exercise of power had clearly complicated the EAC regional integration project. She accused the two leaders of being intolerant and for working towards criminalizing dissent, a situation she insisted Kenyans have a duty to vigorously confront because, as fellow East Africans, Ugandans too deserve to live under a democratic dispensation.
Martha Karua also, at length, explained the torture she went through at the hands of Uganda’s immigration officials who she said forcefully grabbed her two mobile phones from which they went ahead to illegally mine and extract sensitive personal information.
At a Tuesday news conference in Kampala at Besigye’s PFF party headquarters, Freedom Front Deputy President Lulume Bayiga led fellow opposition leaders (Saddam Gayira of PPP and Jimmy Akena of UPC) to controversially claim that the Ugandan government intends to cow Martha Karua by adding her onto the Kizza Besigye treason case exactly in the same way they have done with Erias Lukwago.
Insisting that she committed no crime to deserve such maltreatment, Karua vowed to institute human rights enforcement cases in the Ugandan courts, the EACJ and at the African Court of Human and People’s rights against Museveni’s government. She said that time had come for Kenyans to stand up to dictatorship both in Uganda and Tanzania because it’s their duty as East Africans.
She said that after going through a lot of humiliation even when she hadn’t done anything wrong, the Ugandan officials returned her phones after hours of holding onto them. She said she refused to take them back for her own safety because she is very sure her gadgets had been compromised. That she told Museveni’s airport officials to keep the phones as they prepare to face off with her in court.
She said part of the reason why she refused to get them back was that she felt insecure and feared potential harm, including being poisoned through those phones or even the same gadgets being used to facilitate ongoing espionage. She expressed fears that Dr. KB will never get anything close to a fair trial without her and Erias Lukwago being the ones to co-leading his defense team.
She also expressed fears that the remaining members of KB’s legal team could be harmed next until we get to a point when every Kampala lawyer fears to be there for him so that the Musevenist state gets the opportunity to be the ones to get defense lawyers for him.
She asserted that Dr. KB and Obed Lutale have already been condemned and their trial can only end up with a judgment that Gen Museveni wants, namely a conviction and death sentence which Kampala is prepared to immediately effect. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
