Guerillas versus millennials, and one conversation we haven’t had

Four years ago during a casual convening at a friend’s house, one person joked that the National Resistance Movement should write an invoice of how much money they owed Ugandans for having fought in the bush.

Then we would have Bank of Uganda take it out of the national coffers and pay them out to leave power. Now, whereas that seemed like only good-natured humour employed to cope with the events (and Ugandans know how to do this well), it was also a thing we all in the room imagined might work.

Call it desperation, or just being outright fed up of, as we say: “fed up of it (the liberation) being held over our heads.”

A few months ago, we revisited this conversation with other friends – this time from a more defined angle. Why the Museveni generation does not care about recognising the 1986 struggle. Why we are always so quick to dismiss it. The responses betrayed a sense of resignation, from hopelessness masked by a dismissive attitude.

For the late 1980s and the 1990s, the president and his government were heroes in our formative years. Not because we saw the liberation war, but because we most certainly did not – a fact that boomer voters and guerrillas alike have made sure we do not forget.

However, because like any great historical story about a place you call home, the Museveni-led revolution tales as told by our grandparents and parents inspired us. Greatly. It is no secret that boomers (people born between 1945 and 1965) and millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) have, and perhaps always will have a difficult relationship as we have come to witness.

From quarrels about decent clothing versus fashion exploration, right to the second wave versus the third wave fight for women’s liberation. Yet for all these discrepancies resulting from a time lapse between when one camp came into the world and when the other was born, there are not many more accurate representations of the term, generational gap, than the relationship between the Ugandan liberation historicals and millennials.

There is another reason though – as a child is often likely to take up the adults’ habits in their home environment, so are they eager to learn the ideological beliefs followed by the adults. And, for many of us, we believed in the movement largely because of how massive the support for it in the elections we witnessed before 2006 election.

Then a shift happened thereafter. Millennials started to see the inconsistencies with the stories we were raised on, and how the heroes were behaving towards political opponents. Now, we do not know for sure, but what historicals – the ‘converted’ included, boomers and the writers who have done the tremendous work of literary immortalization of our country’s history agree on, is that the National Resistance Movement meant well.

And that they did well for at least the first 10 years after the war. Many things have been argued as what led to the progressive trajectory making a wrong turn. A religious compliance to respectability politics per- haps. Or maybe, a decades-long conditioning to soldier discipline – a teaching that often places the Commander-In-Chief in a dangerous position of beyond reproach.

In the past elections, we learnt of another one, which the brilliant Amama Mbabazi might know something about: an unquestionable belief in the proverbial queue.

Yet one box remains unchecked. The trauma of war, which whereas our grandparents acknowledged and often use as a case for why we must vote the incumbent; for the guerrillas, it is almost never discussed. Not openly at least.

Trauma changes everyone – for worse in many cases. However, unaddressed trauma can morph even the most idolized human being into an unrecognizable tyrant. The historicals often act out: shoot people, slap traffic officers, infantilize opponents and dismiss young people while fearfully clutching onto their 1986 song of struggles and tremendous efforts.

Now, for some, we have to consider that they are just terrible humans. However, what others might have not admitted to themselves perhaps is that; this behaviour is a result of the demons that live in their heads. The carnage they both witnessed and caused.

Pain that lives on, so much so that the only way to silence it is by asserting oppressive power. So, perhaps then it was unrealistic at best in the first place, delusional at worst, for us all to have expected these people to be the same: with the same ideas, passion, principles they had 37 years ago.

The guerrillas fought indeed. For liberation. For peace. For inclusivity. For a better Uganda. But, when the war was done, and it was time to return home from the cold jungle, move into nice warm houses for a change and award themselves medals, they might have forgotten to buy the one thing that they all needed urgently: professional psychotherapy.