OFWONO OPONDO: Anita Among UK sanction, the panama papers; unhelpful conspiracies 

The United Kingdom government sanction on Speaker Annet Anita Among and two former ministers is like holding a stick from the wrong end and shouldn’t spin heads in Uganda. After all a while back, similar measures were placed on Gen. Kale Kayihura and Prisons Commissioner General Johnson Byabashaija, yet life has continued normally.

Everything put aside, Anita Among is a nice person always on the ready to help people in need, and even those not so much in real need but would like free rides especially when they can reach her, and hence the much-maligned Corporate Social Responsibility phrase that has now made a pillar in communities yonder Bukedea.

It’s hard not to like AAA when you meet her either at home, office, social functions, or on a flight as I once did in Dubai airport business lounge, and she wondered why I hadn’t popped into her office since we jointly worked to evict Rebecca Kadaga from speakership following the 2021 general elections. We were allies supporting late Jacob Oulanyah.

In December 2021 when I popped in, her body language was open, welcoming, very relaxed and she handed me five million towards hosting a family social function. Just like that, no signing anywhere. And well it’s now publicly documented that she, like President Yoweri Museveni has touched many lives with financial generosities.

These sanctions are mostly a tool of imperial blackmail by western governments losing grip of dominance. Some years back the world media salivated over the Panama and Pandora Papers over alleged hidden, perhaps ill-gotten wealth of government leaders believed would fall, but nigh. Then September 11, 2001, when two planes out of clear blue skies struck the World Trade Centre but more appropriately United States trade centre in New York City for which the Taliban and Sadam Hussein were blamed.

In the frenzy and anger, then president, George W. Bush declared a global war on terror where Afghanistan and Iraq became the first targets. The two wars have cost the US over 3000 dead soldiers and 30,000 wounded in foreign battlefields, trillions of dollars, image, prestige, and invincibility around the world. Since then, US lost another war in Syria to Russia before hastily and chaotically abandoning Afghanistan in humiliation and shame. The result today is reflected in two aged men Joe Biden and Donald Trump desperately slugging out for the US presidency for the second time raising global trepidations.

As for the Panama and Pandora Papers no one even remembers them anymore and so Among doesn’t need to worry that much. Gen Kayihura and Byabashaijja similarly sanctioned on heresies continue living normal lives in Uganda.

And of course, few remember the embarrassment that rocked the Catholic Church around the world over sex-pest priests, some jailed or defrocked for molesting minors under their care. At the time some people blamed US philanthropist George Soros for seeking to destroy the Catholic Church for his own greed. Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Cuban, and North Korean economies, state institutions and leaders similarly sanctioned have withstood and, in some cases, even grown to embarrass the diabolical western world.

Some people invent false conspiracies even when real ones exist and as so with public matters the language used is deficient of basic logic often intended to mislead by their architects. As a gift the UK parliament has now exposed itself by peddling a regime change in Uganda for passing the Anti-homosexuality law and in tandem extending invitation to the leader of opposition.

This fantasy can only succeed if Uganda’s elites remain gullible interrogate due to short attention span, being compromised, or derailed towards groundless concerns made worse by the convergence of digital and social media.

The author,  Ofwono Opondo is the Government of Uganda Spokesperson