Susan Magara’s Gruesome Murder Proves Museveni Did Not Liberate Ugandans From Obote

You could be forgiven for thinking William Shakespeare was speaking for Uncle Milton Obote (RIP) when he wrote this in Henry IV: “The noble image of my youth is overspread with them, the youth; therefore my grief stretches itself beyond the hour of my death”…

“The blood weeps from my heart when I do shape, in forms imaginary, th’unguided days and rotten times that you (the youth) shall look upon when I am sleeping with my ancestors (in Abei-buti village, Akokoro Sub-county). For when his headstrong riot hath no curb, when rage and hot blood are his counsellors. When means and lavish manners meet together. O, with what wings shall his affections fly towards fronting peril and unoppos’d decay!”

Why?

No liberator or the liberated could have imagined in 1986 that their innocent daughters, like the late Susan Magara, would in the 2000s make a “love” appointment with the most gruesome death ever recorded in Uganda since independence.

Susan’s “lover” connived with hardcore criminals, kidnapped her, cut off her fingers on camera, which was sent to her inconsolable parents. They paid $200,000 in a desperate but vain bid to buy her precious young life.

As Susan Magara joins a growing list of innocent women who have been murdered by their “lovers,” it is time we, as the liberated, asked our 1986 liberators the one question many of them would rather not face:

How many of the “liberated” parents who welcomed our liberation by Museveni from Obote are today sleeping peacefully whenever their beloved daughters step out for a promised lavish dinner date with their regular “lover” or one picked online, on the street, in a nightclub or at a born-again Christian fellowship?

How many such young women desperate for love have heard of William Shakespeare’s message, conveyed in 'Much Ado About Nothing', in which Beatrice said:

“I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me”?

Rural women are being hacked to death by their “beloved” husbands almost every day, but we never hear about them because they are “nobodies”.

We only hear about the rich and the famous.

On 1st October 2019, a week before the Independence anniversary, Nile Post reported that “police have arrested eight suspects in connection to the shooting along the Kampala-Entebbe Expressway that claimed (Chief Liberator) President Museveni’s nephew Joshua Nteireho Rushegyera and a female colleague, Merina Tumukunde.”

Two years earlier, on 19th August 2017, the Daily Monitor reported that at least 17 women, (daughters of the liberated Ugandans), had met a gruesome death in Entebbe, Wakiso District. The pattern is the same – the women were raped, strangled and thereafter a stick inserted in their private parts and mouths.

Then, in September 2021, the body of Immaculate Mary Asio, wife of Francis Oneme, was recovered from a septic tank in their upscale Muyenga home.

Milton Obote, the only suspect before the liberation war, would have been blamed for all these gruesome murders.

As we pay respect to the victims and their families, let us borrow these words from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and speak to Milton Obote:

“He is in his grave; after life's fitful fever he sleeps well: nor steel, nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, nothing can touch him further.”

President Museveni, thank you for liberating Obote from these malicious, corrupt, tribal and murderous Ugandans.

They have now turned their attention from Obote to you, doing their best not only to destroy your legacy. They are also drafting this epitaph for your timeless political grave:

“Here lies Gen. Yoweri Tibuhaburwa Kaguta Museveni, the liberator who presided over the worst cases of women’s murders and corruption in Uganda.”

These are their coded words for blaming Museveni personally for all the ills that have permeated all strata of society in Uganda since liberation in 1986. Have these Ugandans not ensured that Obote is remembered as a mass murderer, although the man was never seen holding a gun in public or private?

I repeat what I have always said: Museveni is bad; Ugandans are much worse. Susan Magara’s grieving parents and relatives might agree with me.