If you didn’t know why President Museveni’s became extremely uncomfortable with operations of Action Aid resulting into the international charity NGO’s bank accounts being frozen and its offices raided and besieged by the security forces, just read this.
The hostilities against the Kansanga-based NGO escalated late last year and its staffers went without salary for a couple of months. This was after police liaised with Bank of Uganda to order their bankers to suspend all transactions on the accounts.
There was also a late evening siege at their head offices as police said they were searching for potentially treasonous materials. We have reliably been told by sources in top echelons of government that the NGO’s woes had a lot to do with the failed efforts to alter Article 26 of the Constitution which protects right to private property including land which President Museveni wants to have power to use for infrastructure projects even in cases where owners object to inadequate compensation.
Sometime in September, the leaders of Lango Parliamentary Group (LPG) organized a large community meeting in the Uganda Technical College Hall in Lira town which was attended by close to 10,000 people. These were the clergy, elected leaders and other opinion leaders from the entire Lango sub region.
With exception of a few like Maxwell Akora (who absconded fearing to annoy his relative Betty Amongin), Cecilia Ogwal who was away for the PAP work and Lands Minister Betty Amongin, majority of the 25 MPs making LPG attended the meeting which began at 8am and ended after 6pm.
At the meeting, people freely gave their views and vehemently warned their leaders not to dare vote for the Betty Amongin proposals. All the MPs, including rabid Museveni supporters like HamsonObua of Ajuri County, Amolatar’s Doreen Amulle and Dokolo’s Paul Amoru, spoke angrily against the proposal and vowed to vote against it.
Some speakers at the meeting made remarks that bordered on inciting ethnic sentiments including falsely claiming this was a ploy by rich people from the Bantu tribes to dispossess the poverty-stricken Langis of their land.
Betty Amongin
ACTION AID’S ROLE: The meeting occurred on a Monday after a weekend when Amongin had met and convinced some opinion leaders to support her proposals.
She logistically facilitated them well and they assured her of support. What annoyed government even more was the fact that, because of the funding from Action Aid, the same people Amongin had met attended and denounced the Amongin meeting.
They was enough for each one of them to eat and drink and they even got transport refund more than doubling what Amongin had given at her meeting.
Action Aid’s funding was used to procure plenty of refreshments, a good public address system and to decorate the place so well and thereby creating a lot of fanfare that Museveni strategists didn’t believe could be witnessed at any event where State House money isn’t involved.
Those from faraway places were even accommodated in the best hotels in Lira, all courtesy of the Action Aid fat wallet. Action Aid also brought experts who spoke in Luo and eloquently explained to the gathered crowd the dangers of the land proposals Museveni and Amongin were promoting.
Saying the Action Aid speakers had opened his eyes, Lira district Speaker George Rashid Opio spontaneously stood up and regretted attending Betty Amongin’s meeting the previous day and claimed he was speaking for many other fell elders at the meeting.
After the meeting, some of the LPG members stood in the parking and rang their counterparts in Teso Parliamentary Group, Acholi, Karamoja and West Nile Parliamentary Groups urging them to take advantage of the Action Aid generous funding to organize similar meetings in their regions.
The leadership of Action Aid was contacted by these groups’ leaders and announced readiness to fund similar meetings, a thing that greatly frightened government in Kampala.
Intelligence reports were written which Gen Kale Kayihura was dispatched to confirm as to their veracity. Kayihura’s findings indicated that, if not stopped, Action Aid was going to turn out more dangerous for Museveni than Kizza Besigye and Amama Mbabazi combined.
Things moved so swiftly; President Museveni the next day called a caucus meeting in Entebbe State House where LPG Chairman Okot Ogong read out the resolutions from the Lira meeting and assured the President, on behalf of his LPG members, that as leaders land was something for which they are ready to die.
In that stormy State House meeting, Museveni became angry and shut up Okot Ogong as other NRM MPs pensively looked on. It was in that meeting that Museveni said he was halting the process of the proposed changes and created a committee (with members like Amongin, AG William Byaruhanga, Hamson Obua etc) whose assignment was to find out why the proposal was unpopular.
It had two weeks to report back but before they could even begin their work, the President announced his radio programs aimed at countering the likes of OkotOgong. He called them saboteurs and enemies of development. OkotOgong was cautioned that physical violence would be occasioned if he didn’t tread carefully on the land issue.
At the Action Aid-funded meeting in Lira, Jimmy Akena, Amongi’s husband, was badly attacked by the crowd when they felt his speech at the meeting amounted to being vague as to whether he was for or against the proposal.
Many other leaders who spoke in defense of Amongin faced similar wrath of the people at the meeting. What made matters even worse for Action Aid was the insistence by many speakers at the Lira meeting that the land proposals be de-campaigned along with Magyezi’s proposal to scrap Article 102(b).
Even when the dust appears to have finally settled, one thing is clear that things will never be the same again for Action Aid whose Uganda country manager Arthur Larok has since been transferred to another country.
