Some time in the beginning of 1982, the embattled Ugandan government’s military intelligence pulled off a last stroke of genius to discourage young men from joining the guerrillas who were fighting in the bush.

Intelligence operatives posing as rebel recruiting agents went around Kampala whispering to youth who wanted to join the rebellion and took them to a forest for training.

After collecting several hundred recruits, the armed instructors turned on them and arrested them all. They were driven back to Kampala shirtless, most of them sporting wounds on the heads and swollen faces as they were paraded at the city square.

For hours, government people harangued the young men, talking about the futility of joining Museveni’s rebels because the government had the capacity “to follow them to the bush, finding them and leaving them there.” The insults heaped on the “rebels” were as hurtful as they were hilarious. A government minister said that capturing them had been easy because Museveni could not afford to feed them and they had surrendered to the state army to escape starvation. 

The minister then magnanimously announced that the government had pardoned the captured young rebels and called on their parents to collect them and take them home. But he advised the parents to only give them little human food at first as it could shock stomachs that had become accustomed to feeding on wild roots – which was all that rebel chief Museveni could provide.

It was scary. Many students I knew abandoned intentions of going to the bush and instead completed their studies before quietly proceeding to Kenya and the then rosy Zimbabwe to find employment. Others headed to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa, rather than face the apparently invincible government army.

While my generation was duped into believing that the government army was stronger than it really was in the 1980s, a somewhat similar lesson was learnt by today’s Ugandan youth last Sunday morning when they woke up to the news on their mobile devices that the renegade former co-ordinator of intelligence services, General David Sejusa, had returned to the country to a red carpet welcome and was escorted from the airport to his country home with a lead car.

Sejusa had fled the country 18 months earlier alleging a plot to assassinate him and other senior security and political figures opposed to what he called a project to propel the president’s son into monarch-style succession of his father.

While in exile, he had continued accusing the government of heinous crimes against the nation, called for the removal of President Yoweri Museveni by means other than elections, and even claimed that he, Ssejusa, had played a central role in rigging the 2006 general election to rob Dr Kizza Besigye of victory.

With hindsight, anyone can now see that Sejusa never meant his own allegations because when he named the venue from where he had orchestrated the said rigging, he named a building whose name had long changed by 2006 and whose occupancy the government had long ceded to the Buganda kingdom. Most likely, Sejusa was coding his message, telling people not to actually believe him.

With Sejusa’s return to Uganda as a free man, which has left his supporters numb with shock, it would take a reckless fool to follow any calls to oppose the government militarily again in future.