By Jonah Ruhima
In Uganda and probably the world over I have observed a growing trend of social media armchair analysis propagated by access to the Internet.
This gives the impression that everyone is always somehow an expert on everything, usually drowning out the real experts.
Unfortunately, if we’re talking about real issues of national and international importance, you can only rely on experts on these different issues like military, foreign policy, and the intricacies of the banking system.
There is a section of our country, especially opposition politicians and some biased media houses, who are hell-bent on downplaying every government achievement.
In most cases, using the same success against the government.
Recently, joint security forces carried out several operations where key suspects in the terror attack on Gen Katumba Wamala, an unfortunate incident where he lost his daughter and driver — were arrested.
The tremendous success of this operation answered a lot of questions Ugandans have been asking for years.
It proved the capability of our armed forces to protect the lives and property of Ugandans and defend our sovereign integrity.
It also exposed criminals who have been behind some of the major criminal acts as preliminary investigations connect the recovered weapons to several other terror attacks like the assassination of AIGP Andrew Felix Kaweesi, Maj Kiggundu, and armed robbery at Cheap Hardware Nansana.
Considering the impact of insecurity, all these are major achievements that we must celebrate as a country.
The earlier mentioned section of sadists is busy looking for all possible loopholes to blame the government or downplay this achievement.
They have come out to blame security forces for “killing suspects”.
I’m neither a soldier nor an expert in military operations with answers as to why these gallant, brave intelligent, good officers shot to kill these heartless terrorists, but in ‘Battles of the Ugandan Resistance: A tradition of maneuver’, a book written by Lt Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba — the writer says, “as a rule in special operations, one takes a very pessimistic attitude towards the enemy and from the start comes expecting a fight. In special operations, one prepares for the worst contingency and makes sure that when things go amiss regardless of the small numbers the enemy will be made to pay for it.”
In making any layman’s arguments, one needs to first understand that these good security operatives were confronting terrorist extremists who can kill anyone if the opportunity presents itself and besides that, once such a criminal escapes alive, it means more innocent citizens will be killed.
In most cases, such high-level operations are carried out by the best security operatives. In some incidents, commanders highly valuable to the country. Every patriot would wish the terrorists to die than these valuable officers.
America, the inventors of modern democracy and where these critics report, immediately after the infamous 9/11 terrorist attacks — its security agencies started a rendition program where a number of suspected terrorists were arrested and many kidnapped from their home countries to be tried in America or its allies.
Almost all were Muslims.
Hundreds of human rights reports were written criticizing these operations.
But in response, the American government insisted these were operations aimed at protecting the life of American citizens.
Recently Israel has been criticized for its operations against Hamas which Israel considers a terrorist group. In all those operations not only terrorists were killed but also innocent citizens and children.
This, therefore, is to help you appreciate, different countries will do all they can to protect the lives and property of their citizens and a redline has been drawn on terrorism.
The best you can do as a citizen is not to get involved in criminality.
Security forces took due diligence in building up the crime scene, following up all the available evidence and information to finally zero on these terrorists.
Much of this evidence is acquired through unbiased technology and even when they had all the evidence they took time to fully investigate all the details.
Therefore, there is no doubt that these were the criminals behind the terrorist attack, and whoever defends them in any way literally supports terrorism.
What must come first is the security and safety of Ugandans. We appreciate and honor every officer that was involved in this operation. Thanks for making Uganda safe for us.
The writer is a Ugandan citizen
