Omar Kalinge-Nnyago
Kampala
Last July when I started writing about my meeting with a strange Seer, the prognosis was of terrible days and upheaval soon to visit Uganda and Rwanda. In light of Thursday's demonstrations in Kampala against the sale of Mabira forest and the completely unexpected violence that erupted, several people have been asking me if all this fits into what the Seer has predicted so far.
The answer is, it very much does so. In July 2006 when I mentioned impending doom, Rwanda was being lauded by its admirers as the African Singapore in the making. Uganda, while chronically disorganised as usual, was settling fatalistically into the post-election reality of President Yoweri Museveni as head of state for another five years.
Then came the November 2006 report by the French judge investigating the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane and in Uganda, the sale of Mabira forest becoming the most emotive issue of Museveni's 21-year rule and one that has turned many in the National Resistance Movement regime hostile to Museveni.
None of these events should surprise the public anymore. They were foretold to happen and are thus far right on course to culminate in their terrible ending. Here is a time line of the forecasts that have been uncannily accurate so far.
In early 1990, the Seer predicted that Museveni would support the exiled Rwandese Tutsi wage a guerrilla war that would be successful and they would take political power in Rwanda.
However, said the Seer, while the Rwanda Patriotic Front government would appear strong and even invincible to many, this RPF regime would not rule Rwanda for a long time.
Rwanda, said the Seer, is soon to be snatched from the grasp of the Tutsi and returned to the Hutu and to French influence. American and British influence in the Great Lakes will fade away.
In 1994, the Seer predicted that Ugandan politician Winnie Byanyima -- at that time a noisily pro-NRM delegate to the Constituent Assembly -- would marry an opposition political figure and that this figure would one day become president of Uganda.
Early in 1994, the Seer predicted that the Rwandese President Juvenal Habyarimana would be assassinated while flying in a plane.
In 2000, the Seer predicted that President Laurent Desire Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo would be assassinated.
Late in 2005 after Dr Kizza Besigye returned from four years of exile in South Africa, the Seer forecast that Besigye would be forced back into exile one day not too distant in the future.
Also in 2005, the Seer said two major assassinations in Rwanda and Uganda are going to shock the world. I have met the Seer on July 3, 2006, October 21, 2006, and recently, March 28, 2007 to discuss these incredibly accurate news projections.
That day in October, I also asked the Seer what would happen to Ethiopia.
The Seer said Ethiopia would soon fight a short but intense war with Somalia, and as abruptly as it had started it would stop.
It would then be followed by a long, drawn-out period of Iraq-like chaos and armed insurrection. We are already witnessing Somalia sink into the exact conditions prophesied by the Seer. It took the Ethiopian army about a week to overrrun the Somali capital Mogadishu and yet today an Islamist insurrgency rages, with Ugandan and Ethiopian troops coming under fire. Few people could have foreseen this.
In October, I pressed the Seer to tell me when these calamitous events soon to befall Uganda and Rwanda would take place. The Seer said they would start "one and a half years from now", which I calculated to mean starting from April 2008 and soon onward.
As we can now see, the Mabira riots of April 2007 have signalled another episode in this active and drawn-out resistance to Museveni's rule.
The riots were not about the Indians. When I most recently met the Seer, I asked about this prediction regarding Besigye. Was it not you who told me last July that Besigye would return into exile and would never be president, I asked the Seer. Yes, said the Seer, Besigye will return to exile; but who told you that Besigye's return to exile means that he will not be president?
In this March meeting the Seer said there are two people who will come from "a long distance away" who will be the next presidents of Uganda and that Besigye will be one of them.
The president will not give in a single inch on any national issue and his increasing intransigence will come a corresponding stiff-willed reaction from the public and (most ominously, from his own inner circle.)
The greatest danger for the incumbent in Uganda, as in Rwanda, will come from their own inner circles. These are the events taking shape in Uganda. The demonstration- and riot-filled first four months of 2007 are a dress rehearsal for the upheaval we shall witness sometime in the future.
Source: Daily Monitor, April 16, 2007