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Besigye Attended Eid Prayers In London!

Feature Article File Photo
JUN 16, 2018 LISTEN
File Photo

The Uganda Muslim Community Eid prayers in London were more or less bookended by Kiiza Besigye's speech, with grand social and political reverberations. I never attended myself as I received the message on my phone so late. I suspect that the FDC officials there organised this meeting in haste. It would have been nice to meet Besigye for the first time. Nevertheless,I followed everything online thanks to Dr. Rashid Kasaato's live wire on Facebook.

First of all,It was nice to see Hajji Lutavurigirwa Moses Sserwadda. I didn't know that he's based in the land of 'Matooke, Mitcham, where I once lived for a year or so. He wanted to know why FDC has less presence at local elections.

It was also nice to see Brother Sulaiman Kavulu, and his usual 'sunnah' of smiling all the time. He is the Secretary General of the Uganda Muslim Community in the UK, i believe. I hope he finds a way of finding a permanent home for Uganda Muslims in London. The Uganda- Tanzania Muslim community in Leeds did it through a 7 year fundraising period, and finally managed to get a home, yet there are fewer in numbers. I didn't like my brothers and sisters being blown by the hot wind in an open space, and one person commenting that they would be chased away because one of the cars had been wrongly parked.

It was also nice to see Omulangila Dickson Wasajja in his usual suits and 'never-give-up' spirit. Wasajja has worked to foster the growth of the opposition in diaspora than anybody else I know. I once asked him while at a Buganda conference in Manchester, before the 2016 elections, why Besigye was standing again yet the elections are gonna be rigged again, and he sounded optimistic that Besigye had a plan, he is still optimistic, and I've always wondered what keeps his optimism going, because I didn't see any immediate Besigye 'plan' during or after the elections. Ya well, he knows better!

Besigye was introduced to Muslims by Dr. Rashid Kasaato who is usually provocative, energized and a ray of light. I prefer to look at him as one of Uganda's 'sunshine' being wasted in London. Bringing people together for a meeting ranks high among the legacies he will leave behind. He is another top bloke!

In his speech, Besigye, mentioned that Museveni has always persecuted Muslims, and I didn't see or sense anybody in the audience disagreeing with him on that one. For some reason, every leader seems to target some defenceless group before they jump on another bigger one. A lot of people don't know this but Hitler first targeted the mentally disabled,before the Jews.The Nazis set up the T4 project in the thirties to "cleanse" away 70,000 mentally disabled people, including schizophrenics and epileptics. During WW2 many Germans knew minorities were disappearing, but a lot of Germans just ignored it, as people did so at the systematic killing of sheikhs in Uganda.

People normally start acting when the majority is threatened. For some reason, some people look at Muslims as crazy yet we are really nice people. Our religion teaches us to do a lot of nice things. You just have to get to know us properly. We are decent fellows. Shiekh/ Mufti Mubajje has demanded that the Muslims tortured over Afande Kaweesi's murder be compensated, so we wait and see. We are patient, you know. Otherwise, the police refusal to do the job they are employed and paid to do is extremely serious, particularly as this case is highly important, indeed key to the whole issue of assassinations and kidnappings in Uganda at the moment. Uganda has lost much in the last 20 years - it has lost proper constitutionalism, it has lost its self-respect and its identity as a people.

*Abbey Kibirige Semuwemba*
Stalk my blog at: http://semuwemba.worldpress.com
"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive." - Henry Steele Commager 1902-98

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