Early this week I found myself wrongly in the news being accused with other senior NRM and government officials of ‘disliking’ and ‘fighting’ the outgoing Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Alitwala Kadaga, which claims are contemptuous and shouldn’t pass unchallenged otherwise it becomes a tradition. Without repudiating President Yoweri Museveni’s counsel on handling internal contradictions, l hold that mutual respect must be accorded to all view points in a national discourse.

In the past one year of the Covid19 pandemic, the East Africa Community (EAC) has lost two sitting Heads of State, Pierre Nkurunziza who died on June 20, 2020, and now John Pombe Joseph Magufuli both at relatively young age of 55 and 61 respectively under clouds of suspicion that Covid19 could have known them down. Officially Nkurunziza died of ‘cardiac arrest’ while Magufuli is said to have been suffering from chronic atrial fibrillation for more than a decade.

A year ago the pretentious opposition groups were reported contemplating an alliance to defeat the NRM, but perhaps more precisely dislodge President Yoweri Museveni, whose thirty-four years on the throne gives them itchy pimples. It is also two months since general elections concluded with NRM and President Yoweri Museveni’s triumph leaving the opposition shedding tears of deceit. While 333 incumbent MPs including 38 ministers fell, overall NRM retained overwhelming majority in the forthcoming house, 337 out of 523 seats.

Reports of alleged kidnaps, torture, illegal detentions and disappearances are mostly false alarms but they are nevertheless embarrassment to the well-established track record of the NRM government and must be stamped out immediately. Every person arrested by security agencies must be accounted for in accordance with established procedures and laws of Uganda, offenders punished. Even cases of false alarm and mischief by people who go underground only to surface later must be dealt with.