Sarah Bireete and the price of speaking truth to power

When Dr Sarah Bireete was rounded up from her house and taken to Natete Police station, I received nervous messages from friends asking me whether I was safe.

Because Dr Bireete and I have done plenty of political talk shows together, and often agree on almost everything – oftentimes complementing each other – my friends’ concerns came from a good place.

Not many friends were concerned, I should not exaggerate. Exactly three wonderful friends asked if I was safe. I said to all them that to become politically active in these times is to live a life of the proverbial enkoko y’omutamiivu as the Baganda have said: The chicken of a drunkard is ever counting its days backwards because if it counted forwards, it does not know when the ever-intoxicated boss will return home with a decision to have it slaughtered. There will be no occasion nor warning.

There will be no guests, and it won’t be a festive season either. But just that day, the boss would have felt like eating chicken. But while I acknowledged being enkoko y’omutamiivu, I also gave my friends another Luganda saying about not fearing the dark – because it is too dark.

Only folks raised in the countryside without in-house toilets but pit-latrines constructed 20-meters away from the main house (like polling stations) will understand this saying best. So, in defiance of the dark, the Baganda noted: We shall not defecate in our houses because we fear the darkness outside.

Since the decision to ease oneself inside the house is too much to bear (because that will be a long, long night), we will go out and ease ourselves nevertheless. It is the political hunting season – and seems like the hunters are leaving no-one untouched.

SARAH BIREETE IN CONTEXT

Revolutions have to have their poets – and Sarah Bireete is one such poet. The poet is expected to craft the arguments, frame the problem, and challenge the status quo. The poet – analyst, icon, leader – have to give coherence and inspiration to the foot-soldiers.

They have to craft the argument for why this fight has to continue, and why the foot-soldiers have to return the next day. You see, unlike ordinary folks who witness things, the poet, pundit, analyst, icon experiences the same things differently.

Thus, they reconstruct them not only in language, but also with a plot-line for revolutionary action. This is the role that Sarah Bireete continues to play – and it is this role that attracted the wrath of the state to her house.

Perhaps the most interviewed person in Uganda in the last five years, Sarah has done many political talk-shows that some stations have joked about giving her a worker’s ID; she is ever at their stations. Impatient to speak to her compatriots, Dr Bireete created another platform at her Center for Constitutional Governance (CCG) – a YouTube platform called, Civic Space TV.

While many pundits in Kampala have a tendency to speak cryptically, being neither here nor there, Sarah speaks plainly and simply. I have not seen a pundit who speaks from their heart, and even lose their cool in the process, like Dr Bireete.

Neither have I seen a pundit who cares to check the right legal provisions, and stats and figures, then brutally, wittily uses them in very sharp and coherently delivered arguments. (I am anthropologist, a Foucault reader, who loves generating theory. I thus appreciate evidence differently, sometimes, problematically). Sarah is precise.

Look dear reader, I think I am a free-spirited person but Sarah Bireete goes hard in the paint: she is fearless and unstoppably brave. I have seen her plenty of times candidly warn government co-panelists in their faces about the damage they have done to Uganda.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

Outside the scribblings on the charge sheet – “and others still at large” – it is so obvious her crime is her activism on the one hand, and seeking to awaken her compatriots by giving them discourse, and endlessly point to the mess of the holders of power.

In all fairness, all governments across the world find public intellectuals a threat to their hold on power. They would rather silence them and this often takes many from ranging from misinforming entire populations, securitizing life, sanctions, murders to imprisonment.

Sarah is clearly being silenced, and in the process she is being used to send signals to others of her punditry tribe: others still at large. To be honest, dear reader, I was not surprised my friend Sarah Bireete was picked up. She spoke so much truths and boldly.

Chances are high she will be held up for a long time. I will not be surprised if many other comrades in the business of public intellectualism and activism – Godwin Toko, Agartha Atuhaire, Dr Spire Ssentongo – are also picked up under the same circumstances.

They speak so much truth as well, and are often checking the system. I will not be surprised if I were picked up myself. It might not be that I speak so much truth, but that I rarely focus on the goodness that has happened under bwana Museveni.

To be fair, we simply love this country too much: Look, while there could be options to escape the nervous conditions in Uganda presently into the lands abroad, this place will still need its people to debate its future while they are located on its soils.

Uganda has given us so much, and the best way to return the favour is to continue participating in the debate to make it better. If our interlocutors on the NRM side have chosen violence and intimidation, then we have no choice but to live in the world they have created.

See, they also have to live in the same violent state they have curated – and if Fanon would help us here, violence only begets more violence.