By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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On December 20, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni issued a statement on the security situation “ahead of the festive season.”

On the face of it, it is one of most innocuous and pedestrian statements Museveni has ever put out. He reported even on some chicken thieves who were driven off from a farm, as a sign of achievement.

However, it is that which makes it one of the most pregnant statements of his presidency. He addresses “fellow countrymen” (sorry women), “especially Bazukkulu” (grandchildren), doubling down on his recent favourite, but controversial, reference to restless Ugandan youth.

He touts his programme to install cameras around the country as a weapon against crime, but doesn’t cite any success that the electronic surveillance in Kampala has scored in the past few months.

All the successes he cites are from what he calls the “old” method of “people's vigilance,” working with the security services to thwart criminals.

This is important, because “people’s vigilance” and popular participation were the whole basis of the bush war by Museveni’s National Resistance Army/Movement in the early 1980s, and were cited as the reason they were superior to all other Ugandan rebel groups before and since.

Since the 2016 election, there has grown a general recognition within sections of the NRM, and the president, that the political authority derived from popular participation and people’s vigilance has all but vanished, hence the desperate search for a new source of legitimacy – an electronic one.

Cameras are part of that electronic political package, as are dams, and infrastructure. This electronic and infrastructure package is supposed to be the inheritance that Museveni is bequeathing to his grandchildren (Bazukkulu). These grandchildren, though, are proving to be ungrateful brats, who are besotted by a hip-hop musician-turned-Member of Parliament, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine.

But first things first. When Museveni characterises Uganda’s army of unemployed and disaffected youth as grandchildren, he is not lazy or being patronising. It’s clever, because children usually just accept their inheritance, and don’t dictate what it will be.

And grandchildren have even less standing to insist on what they can get. As a son or daughter, you cannot really demand that your parents should bequeath you a massive villa, instead of a small apartment. As a grandchild, you will be more happy that your grandfather left you his favourite comb, not his farm.

For the festive season, Museveni’s government chose to renew its battles with Bobi Wine.

A week after chasing him around the eastern industrial city of Jinja and blocking his planned concert there, the government announced it would not permit his Boxing Day show at his Busaabala “One Love Beach.” In November, after his Kyarenga Concert was banned from the Namboole Stadium, he took it to Busaabala, and had what some billed as the largest paying crowd in Uganda’s history.

Seems outrageous, right? Perhaps not. Given how Museveni views young people, perhaps he actually sees Bobi Wine as a thief who is stealing his children and grandchildren.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3