by BFBankie
Joweri Museveni and Paul Kagame
Since the 80s the Ugandan president initiated several wars to pursue his expansionist and African ambitions – he took power in Kampala in 1986 after a long guerrilla war that killed hundreds of thousands of Ugandans. It was at the guise of the Pan African Congress of April 1994 in Kampala that he started the first big step of his regional military strategy by facilitating the assassination of two presidents, the Rwandan Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian Cyprien Ntaryamira respectively on April 6th 1994.
20 years later, the Ugandan president with regional allies affirm that they can go even further in their campaign. “We are now much stronger in every sense of the word: politically, militarily, socially and economically.” This was his declaration in Kigali on April 7th, 2014 during the 20th commemoration of the Rwandan genocide. The statement obviously deliberately ignore the genocides war crimes and crimes against humanity they had to commit in the entire region to become what he states them to be today.
For those who have followed closely his political journey, they know how he has become a master of deception, and that perhaps explains his longevity in power but also his special relationship with the neo-colonialist forces which can match his policies of deceit.
Some of us went to Kampala, hoping that the problems of Dar ( ie the exclusion of elements of the Diaspora – CLR James etc) would not be repeated.
I was the only person who honored Col Otafiire first invitation to the First Preparatory Committee meeting. Nobody else showed up. I attended all the Prep Comms of the 8th PAC. As we got closer to Congress these meeting became bigger.
I nominated Tajudeen for the SG position and Babu agreed ( that Prep Comm was held in a hotel in Entebbe). I saw Tajudeen later at one or two Prep Comms just before Congress.
Bye the way the First Prep Comm came as a result of the UK Steering Committee sending a letter via the Uganda High Commission in London to Uganda requesting an 8th PAC. I delivered that letter to the Embassy. I moved shortly
thereafter to Namibia. Before the aborted First Prep Comm, Col Otafiire came to see me in Windhoek. He was followed by President Yoweri Museveni who at his own request made a State visit to Namibia and talked about his intention to convene
The 7th PAC.As we got closer to the Congress in Kampala my relationship with Otafiire became strained. He marginalized me within the Prep Comm.
All this is history, background to the 7th Congress. It was its aftermath which was unacceptable, because without informing Us, the window dressing of the Congress, Museveni, Otafiire and others launched a military campaign to ‘unify’ central Africa, reaching into Zaire ( as DRC was then called). They used the Congress to kick-off a grand campaign. They should have told us. In the last few hours of the Congress President Museveni told us that the plane had crashed killing the Presidents, and made his apologies for absenting himself from the Closing Ceremony. This is known by Tajudeen (who is late ) and Napoleon and all who were around the Kampala Secretariat for the 7th PAC, which Secretariat you are working with to convene your meeting in Accra.
Apart from which the Ugandans, Rwandese and Congolese know of these Ugandan adventures in Central Africa, which involved the Elder Kabila.
These are the reasons some of us said no more Pan-African Congresses convened by neo- colonials. That was why we convened the 8th in Johannesburg in January this year in the format we did. In future we should return to the format of the Manchester Congress of 1945, because we cannot trust our states to act in the interests of the Africans. We published the accounts of the Johannesburg Congress to ensure its transparency and integrity. These will be found with the outcomes on the 8th PAC website (www.8thpac.com).
Your involvement of the AUC is your choice. Such an attendance in the Pan-African Congress series is unprecedented. A study of the records of the Congresses shows how far we have come and what you have done.
The Congress series is the only platform of integrity we have which has been sustained since our encounter with external forces.
With the Arabs, the way their forced migration went those taken lost their identity as Africans in the process and became Arabs.
It was our encounter with the Europeans that gave us Pan-Africanism.
We are not children and we must all live with the choices we are now making.
