I grieve for my murdered brother but it’s for our Uganda that I mourn By Daniel K. Kalinaki On the night of Sunday June 30, my brother Andrew Mpubani returned home from a night out with friends in Mbarara Town. As he waited for the gate to his house to be opened, two, maybe more, thugs armed with knives and machetes, attacked him. He tried to defend himself and fought back against his attackers but he was stabbed close to heart. When the gate was opened the thugs fled, leaving him groaning in pain and bleeding badly. An alarm was raised and arrangements were made to take him to the nearest health facility. By the time he got there it was too late. He had bled to death. He was 48. It is hard, may be even inappropriate, to grieve in public. Different people deal with the loss of dear ones every day. Some deaths, such as the horrific inferno on the Northern Bypass last week, occur in spectacular fashion and draw a lot of attention. Victims are named, condolences are offered, and vows are made to ensure that such senseless deaths don’t recur. And then the cycle is repeated. But what is, for us, a personal loss is symptomatic of a wider national tragedy. Every day the news is awash with horrific murders and senseless violence. In Rakai thugs dig through a wall and slaughter members of a family in their beds. In a Kampala suburb a gang of thugs with iron bars bludgeons a young journalist to death. In Kanungu a family patriarch is beheaded. Pick a town, pick a suburb, pick a village; there are anecdotes of criminal violence waiting to be told. A lot of it is fuelled by youth unemployment. It thrives on the absence of the rule of law, and the quiet disappearance of the State, especially the police and health services, in areas that matter to citizens. I do not wish to point the finger of blame for my brother’s murder – he could have been stabbed in Miami, and not Mbarara, for what it’s worth – beyond the hands that stabbed him but how many families across the country are mourning children whose deaths could have been prevented? How many mothers are burying their murdered children without the closure of knowing who killed them and why, let alone finding justice for them? How many Ugandans have taken their sick and injured to hospitals and watched them waste to death because there was no blood, no oxygen, no doctor, no bed or no bribe to pay? The thugs who killed Andrew reportedly took his wallet and mobile phone. Why did they have to take so much for so little? We might never know. On June 15, 2010, the Monitor bureau chief in Mbarara was attacked at his home in Biafra, a suburb of Mbarara Town, by machete-wielding thugs. He bravely fought back and grabbed a machete and a mobile phone from the thugs, who fled. He reported to the police and handed over the items. Despite making several trips to the police, the case remains unresolved three years later. It became another statistic to be brushed up, cleaned up through the spin cycle and put forth as a feel-good story when the next annual crime report is published. How can you fail to trace a thug or his associates through his phone calls? The night Andrew was murdered I spent an hour watching YouTube videos of police breaking up one demonstration or the other in Kampala. How, I wondered, were the police able to deploy so many resources so quickly whenever a political rally was threatened but fail to invest enough in crime labs, foot patrols and evidence gathering? Now I know. The cost is not in the billions spent on tear gas or armoured anti-riot cars. Neither is the cost the $150 million that the government spends on treating its trusted supporters abroad every year while thousands fall at home from treatable and preventable deaths. The real cost of this is not money. It is blood. My brother, a law-abiding citizen who paid his taxes and followed the rules, died like a dog, caked in his own blood. We all grieve for him. But it is for my country that I mourn, for it has gone to the dogs and seeps with the blood of the innocents, and the anguish of the powerless. Today I celebrate my brother’s life – and the lives of other Ugandans murdered with similar brutality and callousness over the last 50 years – but I cry for Uganda. [email protected] Credit: Daily Monitor For The Story
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 15:11:11 +0000
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