 For more videos on People's Juggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch on Thursday that is January the 14th. Uganda will hold its presidential elections and these elections are very crucial. Many experts have described it as one of the most crucial recent times. On one hand, we have President Yoveri Mussavini who's been in power since 1986. His main contender is Bobby White, a very well known musician, a young musician who has emerged as the main face of the opposition, especially very popular among the youth. But more importantly, this election campaign has been marked by a huge amount of violence. There have been reports of, of course, Bobby White has been targeted for many years now, but especially in the run-up to the election, there have been attacks on his rallies, his supporters have been arrested, social media accounts were down yesterday and there was a report that his house had been raided. So to talk more about this, we have with us Milton Alimadi, who's the founder and publisher of Blackstar News and an adjunct professor of African history at Georgia College. Thank you so much for talking to us. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. Yes, so first of all, I think for our viewers, could you just maybe generally set the context of the significance of this election because there has been, of course, a lot of, there have been recent times a lot of reports across the world, but this is also part of a larger process of many years of, especially the youth, but also a number of struggles building up against the income and government as well. Correct. So, general, you're waiting most of any, as you noted in the introduction has been in power since 1986. Primarily, how can I characterize? I would say this is the typical neocolonial state in Africa. And it's very interesting that Kwame Krumah, the first prime minister of Ghana, warned about such a regime in his book, Neocolonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, which he published in 1965. And he said, the West will remain interested in the resources of Africa, even after independence. And if we are not careful, he was, of course, a big advocate of African unity. He said, in order to protect our sovereignty, to protect our resources, and to have independent policy that promotes independent autonomous development in Africa, we need to unite. That's the only way we'll be able to resist diplomatically, politically, and even militarily. Otherwise, they will use other African states to undermine African states by supplying them with weapons, controlling their hijacking their politics, and undermining other African states that want to promote African unity, Pan-Africanism, number one. Number two, they will hijack one of the states to such an extent that the leader of that particular state would not have to take any consideration to electoral politics or to care about the wishes and demands of his population or her population, provided they fulfill the interests of the Western country. And Mosaveni has really lived up to that prediction, to a T, 100%. So he has, for example, rigged the last five elections, and he's hoping to rig this election as well. And yet, this is a regime that gets about $1 billion in financial assistance from the United States, financial as well as military assistance. The weapons are supplied by the United States, the armies are trained by the United States, and they conduct joint exercises together in the region. And Mosaveni's biggest selling card has been essentially renting Uganda's army to the United States. So for example, the United States regards Somalia as one of the most unstable countries in Africa. And there's a movement that the United States characterizes as a radical Islamic group called al-Shabaab, which has been fighting against the U.S.-supported government in Somalia. So the government is so unstable that Uganda actually provides the essential military force that keeps that government in power. The United States fears that a state that is controlled by al-Shabaab would become very hostile to U.S. interests, much as they considered the Afghanistan wars when the Taliban was in power. So if Mosaveni is willing to station 10,000 Ugandan soldiers there and avoid having any U.S. body bags coming back to the U.S., of course, they would prefer that. So the United States pays for that deployment, pays for their training, and this has become a major source of revenue for the Ugandan regime. And it's not by accident that the Ugandan regime has had its military there for almost 12 years now, and Somalia is no less unstable than it was before. And it makes sense because the Ugandan regime has no interest in a stable Somalia, because then they would have to withdraw the forces and that source of income, the financial and diplomatic cover would be removed. So in other words, the Ugandan regime holds the U.S. in a hostage situation, and human rights abuses in Uganda are totally ignored. So that formula has worked at least for the last 12 years. And before that, there were other issues. He was marketing himself as a pro Washington consensus leader in Africa. So that also got him a lot of play for many years. But for the last 12 years, primarily it's been the so-called geopolitical military partner in Africa. But there's one thing new with these elections, as you also alluded to in the introduction, the emergence of the youth. In the past elections, yes, the youth came out too, but the primary supporters of the last candidate who was Dr. Kiza Besiege, who many people believe might have won the last three elections, but the problem is was if any hand picks the election commission. And the election commission will not declare anybody, except Mussolini is the winner. So anyway, many of his supporters were working people, the emerging middle class. So they would come out and protest, but after a while, they would go back to their nine to five jobs to earn a living. What is different in this situation is that most of the supporters of the leading candidate, Bobby Wine, are people of his generation. He's 38 years old. The country is more than 80 percent under the age of 35, a very young country. So these are people, and about 80 percent are also unemployed. So they're always in the street, you see? So this presents a new dynamics. If the election is stolen once again, they don't really have a nine to five job to go back to. They don't have homes to go back to. They're always going to be on the street. So another question is, is the regime willing to commit enough atrocities to disperse them from the streets and maintain power as it has in the past? So that's how it would characterize the current situation. Absolutely. Right. So this context, I wanted to talk to you a bit more about Bobby Wine himself in terms of, of course, the one key aspect you mentioned is the support he gets from the youth. But in terms of, because you've been observing his campaign closely, in terms of policies, in terms of his vision for the country, what exactly does he sort of represent? That's a very good question. And that, you know, in the Ugandan context, we don't, we've not had that tradition of debates, the candidates debate, they outline their agenda, their policies. When we look at his history, this is a young man who emerged from the so-called ghettos in Uganda. So he's very familiar with the underclass, the, the marginalized, the those who have had no access to opportunities and resources because he has lived that experience. And so he's essentially a self-made man was able to use his music to go into not only the music itself, but producing other artists, but also producing a series of short films. And in his films, perhaps we get an indication of his politics. His films, the main characters, always individuals who come up fighting against the state corruption and fighting for the so-called common man or the small man who has to navigate in a very corrupt society. So we get that sense that he opposes the state hijack of the system and state corruption. But he also recently actually did come up with a document in terms of what policies he might pursue. And the policies, I would say are progressive, promoting the empowerment of the unemployed youth. So for example, saying that at the end of the day, our key resource is still, is still the land. And Uganda does have abundant land, but unfortunately under the World Bank, Washington paradigm, that land is being, people are being dispossessed. And increasingly, so-called investors supported by the World Bank and other Western financiers are coming. And the government is displacing people forcefully from the land to the extent that they even burn their homes and just make them homeless and then bring in the so-called investors who are essentially plunderers displacing people from their land. So he's saying that we should use the land to create opportunities for the youth, entrain them in commercial agriculture and show to them that they can actually earn a living and become productive rather than being unemployed on the streets of the urban areas in Uganda. To that extent is how I would characterize his politics and his vision for Uganda. And then of course, he's talking about restoring the constitution. The current dictator has removed the presidential term limits, the age limits of 75 years. And he says that is one of the things that he would work with the new parliament to restore so that the constitution becomes whole again. And Uganda has the rule of law once again. Absolutely. And in this context, I just wanted to quickly ask you about the economic policy framework that was already as employed. You talked about some of these aspects, of course, the Washington Consensus, the arrival of plunderers. But could you also maybe talk about what are the conditions leading to the high level of, for instance, unemployment, which is actually a huge factor in the revival of the opposition as well? Well, essentially in Uganda, a major source of employment, because of course, Uganda, as with many African countries, and they actually have been deindustrializing since the 1960s, unfortunately. So that industries now contribute to a diminishing share of the total income. So since industries collapse, that is not a realistic source of employment. Now you had what you call agricultural co-ops. That had been actually viable for a very long time where people would remain in the urban areas, I mean in the rural areas, and through the agricultural co-op communities that were throughout the country, actually be able to earn a decent living, be able to take care of themselves, take care of their families, send their children to school. But it's a very perverse situation in Uganda. The regime prefers to have the population in penury so that the population is dependent upon the state. And using this as the rationale to be able to control the population. And to the extent, I don't think there's any other country in the world where the president himself is involved in the most marginal decisions. So for example, let me give you just one or two examples. We have what they call Bota-Botas, B-O-D-A, B-O-D-A, and these are these commercial motorcycle taxis all over the country. And in many cities disputes emerge between these motorcyclists themselves and their unions and the local governments, and of course in the capital, the capital government in the city of Kampala. Would you know that in each of these instances, the president of the country himself gets involved in these kind of disputes? So that would just tell you the dictator's sense of priority. When it comes to scholarships, for example, to go to study overseas, the president himself makes the decisions as to who gets these scholarships. And why is this important? Because he wants to make sure that the beneficiaries of all these scholarships are people who come from his particular region, the western region in Uganda. So what we have in Uganda is not only a dysfunctional state, but we have what I have characterized as ethno or ethnic bigotry to the highest extreme, to my believe, not seen in any other African country. People think conditions are bad in Kenya, because Kenya has gotten a lot of coverage when it comes to that issue. But Uganda, I actually believe, has the worst type of ethnic discrimination as a policy pursued by the dictator himself. So you can see that if you now don't have a functioning mass co-op system, because you deliberately destroy that, you want people to be dependent, the country is de-industrializing. So the only other activity that remains are these rent-seeking corruption. And it is so pervasive that in December 2018, a Chinese businessman was actually convicted in a U.S. federal court here in New York for bribing the president himself and his minister of foreign affairs, Sam Kutessa, $1 million as a down payment to other future business activities. The Chinese businessman was paying it on behalf of a big Chinese oil company called CFC China to get preferential treatment in terms of the distribution of oil concessions. And in return for that, the businessman and his company was promising to go into a business partnership with the foreign minister's family and the president's family. That is the kind of condition we have in Uganda. We have a country where the president is looking after his personal interests and that of his family and his close associates. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is collapsing around him. And this is the regime that is still subsidized willingly by the United States and by Britain. Because in addition to making his army available for the U.S. interests, there are also some companies that still benefit individually under these conditions. Forget about everybody else. And one last question just in terms of the trade union and social movement sectors as well. Has there been a larger mobilization at this point of time among these sections which are able to resist the government? Unfortunately not. The trade unions have been destroyed and I'll give you one very tragic example. There's a union of civil employees who are supposed to take care of the interest of workers as well as retirees. So we have the National Social Security Fund of Uganda. And we did a story about this a few years ago in Black Star News. It is so tragic. The minister whose portfolio included the National Social Security Fund had come to visit the United States and then somebody who works, I think the ambassador himself actually, to the United Nations of Uganda told them you should not go back to Uganda. And she said why? She said because I've gotten information that there are plans to arrest you. He said why? Because she actually had been resisting the hijacking of the National Social Security Fund. And how was this being done? When she was given the portfolio, she learned that five million dollars was being stolen every month from the National Social Security Fund. And she found out that the dictator's own brother, named General Salim Saleh, was involved in this embezzlement. And she plugged the hole. She stopped it. She stopped the money from being diverted. And that's why she became an enemy of the state. And she set up a new framework whereby there would be a new overarching commission to oversee the activities of the fund. And it would include the unions and representatives of the government and independent auditors from she has to deal with them. So with the World Bank and IMF, they would be involved as auditors. But the government opposed this move and made sure that the unions were not represented in order for the embezzlement to continue. So when we did this story, obviously she could no longer go back to Uganda. She had already sought asylum anyway. But it became a huge story. And the most horrific kind of story started emerging. You would have people who had worked 20, 30 years and retired. And then they come to find out that they have no money for their retirement because the state itself had been embezzling their money and the union incapacitated and not in opposition to protect them. The unions are destroyed. Independent sources of income are destroyed. Even private businesses who have good ideas, you have to go in partnership with somebody either related to the regime or somebody who comes from his region. So he thought all possible sources of opposition had been locked up. He did not foresee the youth movement. The youth movement emerged very recently, only since 2017 when Bobby Warren was elected member of parliament and he became this new voice. And he was able to do something tremendous. He has signed up millions of new voters to the voting role over the last three years. So now you have a different kind of voting role, a voting role that you cannot control. So most definitely he's going to try to rig the election. But what people are thinking is that the defeat is going to be so overwhelming that it's going to be difficult for him to rig this particular election. So that's why he has made it impossible for independent observers to go there. And I'm just reading before I came out for this interview, a press release from the United States Embassy which had planned to deploy a hundred observers and said only 25 have been accredited by the regime. So therefore the United States has made the decision today not to observe these elections. So it's a very unpredictable situation. We'll see what happens after the election. If he rigs once again, will his enablers in the West continue with this destructive charade going forward? Thank you so much for talking to us. I appreciate the opportunity and I'm always available at your disposal. Thank you. That's all your time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch. Thank you so much.