After charging Agaba and Komakech with murder, will KCCA be able to bite again?

The near unanimous public condemnation of former KCCA director of planning, George Agaba and his bodyguard, Santos Komakech has caused them to be charged with murder before investigation. Their crime was video recorded yet most commentators on this subject have not cared to watch the entire video closely. More critically, the cameraman focused almost entirely on Komakech and ignored the action to which this police officer was reacting i.e. a large mob of people wielding sticks, an axe, iron bars and stones. The mob was using these instruments to lynch KCCA officers.

I have watched the 19 minutes video that NTV gave me. It shows there was clear and immediate danger to the lives of Agaba, Komakech and all the KCCA officers at the scene.  It shows the violence began after Agaba and his KCCA members had finished their work and were walking to the car to drive away when a woman grabbed a stick from one of the KCCA officers and began to assault him.  A man with an axe and another with an iron bar joined her. Others can be seen in the video picking stones. They surrounded the KCCA officials and began beating them. They threatened Agaba. It was in the heat of the moment that Agaba pulled a gun from the car and, because he had little physical space to cock it, gave it to Komakech.

Contrary to media reports, the video shows Agaba to have been extremely calm as the LC1 chairman asked for an extra two hours to organise people to remove their property from the kiosks. Agaba calmly explains that they had been given three notices over a period of 86 days and they had not complied. From a humanitarian angle, possibly Agaba should have accepted the request. However, from an institutional point of view, the 86 days were enough for these people to remove their goods. If this was Finland, Norway or Sweden, the city officials would have acted like Agaba.

The other suspicion is that the mob needed the two hours to mobilise violence against KCCA officers who were not armed. This was confirmed when they attacked KCCA officers who were leaving the scene. However, the video shows that KCCA officials allowed people who wanted to shift their mobile kiosks to do so. Matters were made worse by KCCA officials demolishing the illegal structures even as Agaba and the chairman negotiated. This increased public anger. Towards the end, Agaba had actually yielded to some of the requests and allowed people with permanent structures an extra two days to remove their property.

For Komakech, the video does not show a man shooting randomly. Rather it shows an officer conducting tactical manoeuvres – pointing a gun at the crowd and often not shooting. Each time he shoots, he fires a few scare bullets. Even by all standards the muzzle of the gun looks a little bit raised. When I visited the scene, I noticed that Komakech was played a deadly hand by the terrain as the victims were on more raised ground than him and were not in his line of sight. So Komakech did know even know that he shot anyone during the scuffle.

The video also shows that in the heat of anger, KCCA officials begin beating up a peaceful man who was only seated and not participating in the riot. Komakech himself joins the beating. This is where KCCA officials can be held to account. Overall the video shows Komakech playing the role of a courageous defender of the lives of KCCA staff against a very aggressive mob. But when the police arrived at the scene a few hours later, they immediately took the side of the mob, denouncing KCCA for murder.

The video shows co-operation between police and the mob. It works with them to remove barricades they had illegally established in the middle of the road. The police even releases to the happy mob hooligans who had arrested for beating KCCA staff and were on police trucks.

I have talked to the Inspector General of Police Kale Kayihura who says, like many other reasonable Ugandans, that Komakech overreacted. Yet watching the full video shows that if Komakech overreacted, it was because he and his team were in a much weaker position relative to the angry, noisy, axe and iron bar-wielding aggressive mob. They could easily have been overrun and killed.

Secondly, it is clear that Agaba as team leader underestimated the challenge before him. He went to evict a large group of people without sufficient security precaution. This is what actually caused the tragedy. I have evidence that KCCA notified the police several times to come and witness the eviction. In subsequent interviews, again from NTV, police officers claim Agaba did not notify them. I have more information that police wanted Agaba to pay them to escort him and he refused.

The speed with which police moved to recommend charges of murder against both Agaba and Komakech was unprecedented.  Last year, police officers trying to quell Walk-to-Work demonstrations killed several people but none has been arrested and charged with murder.

Ten months later, Kayihura claims to be investigating the circumstances in which these demonstrators were killed. Police has instead arrested masses of demonstrators who the DPP has charged with treason. I have condemned these treason charges.

I am the only independent journalist who has consistently defended Kayihura and the police. I argue that circumstances of a case should be investigated before arresting police officers accused of killing demonstrators. This is out of the principle that when police go to quell a near riotous mob, their lives should be protected first. If there is danger to their lives, they should have a right to defend themselves even if it means killing someone.

What we are seeing in the Agaba-Komakech case in relation to the Walk-to-Work example are clear attempts by Kayihura to reduce police into a political instrument of defending the presidency of Yoweri Museveni only. I have consistently argued that before arresting any police officer, the matter should be investigated and case established. Opposition leader Kizza Besigye often has no control over the unemployed angry youths he leads in protests. They destroy people’s property. Many in Uganda’s chattering class want to ignore the rights of ordinary women selling mandazi, roasted ground nuts and chapatti by the roadside whose property gets looted by Besigye’s riotous mobs. Many others ignore the threats imposed by these mobs to the police. Indeed, without sufficient protection, police officers trying to quell riots can easily get killed.

The same Kayihura took only hours to investigate the case of Komakech and recommend to the DPP to charge him with murder. This shows that Kayihura is fair to police officers who kill Besigye supporters (i.e. for threatening Museveni’s political power) but does not care about those who defend public land against encroachers. This use of public institutions in a partisan way is the basis of my disagreement with the NRM, the wider opposition and a significant section of Uganda’s chattering classes.

This country needs basic principles around which public decisions can be taken regardless of the actors involved. Police should have rules of engagement that must be applied whether they are cracking down on Walk-to-Work or dealing with a case of encroachers on public land. There is a video showing this mob lynching KCCA officers – 15 of them were injured and their medical reports have been given to the police. Some members of this mob were arrested but police has since released them without any charges. This means that police is promoting impunity.

To make matters worse, the police officers who went to the scene sided with the riotous mob. They made speeches condemning KCCA thereby undermining its authority. The RDC did the same. Kayihura went further and gave the mob labour and police construction materials to resettle on the road reserve and offered to protect their illegal act. The police and the mob claim they were not given sufficient notice, which is not true. The notice was given first for 28 days. It expired and KCCA gave another of 28 days which also expired. Then it gave a third notice of 30 days – making it a total of 86 days but the encroachers refused to vacate the land. What did anyone expect KCCA to do: Go and kiss them?

The institutional integrity of the state has been significantly compromised by private interests inside of the state and outside of it. Government employees routinely divert public funds to serve their private interests. Equally powerful individuals and ordinary people outside the state appropriate public assets like land to private use. Both are defended and protected by President Museveni. Uganda’s chattering class looks at only one side where those inside the state and their powerful allies outside of it, like Hassan Basajabalaba, indulge in this form of corruption. But they ignore the other insidious part of the problem: Museveni’s continuous defence of the corruption of the masses (voters) who appropriate public land.

As I write this article, masses of ordinary people have occupied many square miles of forest reserves, protected wetlands and game reserves. The National Forestry Authority (NFA) and the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) have tried to evict them. But these ordinary people petition the president. In pandering to the whims of these voters, Museveni has written letters telling encroachers to stay on reserves. Whenever NFA or UWA officials show up, peasants pull out the president’s letters. Kayihura provides police protection to the encroachers against lawful eviction by NFA and UWA. The claim that only the rich are protected is not true.

This private use of public assets is corruption that Uganda’s chattering classes ignore.  The principle of self defence has to be applied to a police officer whether he is evicting encroachers or breaking up a demonstration by Besigye.

That is why during the oil debate, I argued that the principle of not accusing anyone without substantiating one’s claims must be applied. This must be irrespective of whether it is Gerald Karuhanga against Sam Kutesa or Noble Mayombo against Kizza Besigye. I defended Besigye in 2005 against being charged with rape. In fact the state had a much superior case against Besigye than Karuhanga had against Kutesa and Hillary Onek. They had a victim, she had lived with Besigye and there was an old woman in the house who claimed to have been told by the victim about this rape.

In Karuhanga’s case, he presented to parliament documents whose validity he cannot demonstrate. He had not investigated and established some minimum validity about them.

In 2009, someone got a court order to evict people who were occupying his land in Natete. He went with auctioneers to Natete Police Post where he got police officers – as required by law – to witness the eviction. They accepted. After the eviction, the evicted group petitioned the president. Museveni and Kayihura went to the scene, arrested the police officers, frog-matched them and humiliated them in front of the mob and the mass media. Why punish the police for obeying the law? Everyone remained silent in the face of this abuse of police officers.

Is it surprising, therefore, that when the 2009 Kayunga riots broke out, the police in Natete, given their experience, were too terrified to defend the station from an angry mob? They ran away. The mob burnt down the police station – the only police station that was burnt done during that riot. The lesson is simple: police should not be punished for defending the rights of others against angry and violent mobs.

The action police and Kayihura have taken since the Agaba-Komakech incident has significantly undermined the ability of KCCA to conduct meaningful work in improving our chaotic city. As soon as people heard that Agaba had been sent to jail, vendors returned unto the streets. When a KCCA official tried to chase one of them and the vendor fell into a ditch, police arrested the KCCA official involved instead. He is still in jail.

Slowly but steadily, the authority of the state in Uganda has been weakened by a naive pursuit of “democracy.” The institutional independence of most state institutions has been undermined by this misconceived belief that democracy means pandering to every whim of every group that is able to organise political pressure. Rather than public institutions working on the basis of laws, they are often made to merely respond to pressure from mobilised demand-groups.

Mobs and popular pressure cannot organise and defend collective interests consistently because of their ad hoc nature. Only entrenched laws and the rule of such laws will do that. Kampala is a city in a mess – one sprawling garbage heap and slum. Everyone – rich or poor, powerful or weak – has occupied a road reserve or public land. Government needs to send a signal to everyone that it will not tolerate this impunity. However, if there was any chance that Jennifer Musisi would clean-up Kampala and re-establish order in the city, that hope has suffered a significant dent by the of charging Agaba and Komakech with murder.

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