Sticks and stones will break your bones in Kampala

Ugandan politics has long acquired the regional reputation of being more of a contact sport than anywhere else, and recent acts and statements by our national leaders are only serving to confirm that lead.

Over the past week or so, a remarkable series of words or deeds have shown that the act and threat of assault have become a form of political interaction deemed acceptable even in very high office.

The first is the ongoing three-year mystery of what we now call the Kiboko Squad.

While not wielding actual hippo-hide whips but clubs and heavy canes instead, these are groups of youngish men who appear at the scene of opposition demonstrations and proceed to assault anyone thought to be a participant.

First seen during the 2007 demonstrations against government plans to give away a portion of the ancient Mabira forest, these casually dressed gentlemen were most recently seen during the attempt by some opposition parties to stage a rally protesting the composition of the Electoral Commission.

On that occasion, Kiiza Besigye, leader of the party with the most opposition seats in parliament, found himself a recipient of their tender mercies.

In the past, senior security officials have been heard defending these attacks as actions of ordinary citizens frustrated with the constant disruption to city life caused by opposition demos.

This time round, the police boss declared that he had absolutely no idea of the identities and origin of these people, but would conduct an investigation to find out.

He may have trouble doing just that. At an earlier rally just outside the town centre, the crowd did manage to corner one of the Kiboko men in a nearby building.

He was promptly retrieved by one of the police contingents ever present at rallies, but had vanished from their custody by the time the activists went to make a statement at the police station

Meanwhile, Members of Parliament have just heartily endorsed the recent action by a woman MP in administering two sharp slaps to a street beggar who had been arrested for using the malnourished child of another woman as bait for passers-by.

Despite this assault happening on police premises and in full view of police officers — during one of the Uganda police’s idiosyncratic press briefings where suspects are paraded before the media — the police took no action.

Uganda’s Daily Monitor quotes another MP as saying, “I salute the MP for her action because as a parent I too would have done the same. The child was suffering at the hands of a woman who was not her mother.”

The endorsement by her parliamentary colleagues came as a result of public outrage — the general feeling being that this was no way to address the underlying problems of rural poverty that are driving many people from northeastern Uganda into the hands of organised begging rings in the capital.

As if to emphasise their point, the MP’s colleagues delivered their vote of confidence on the just concluded Day of the African Child