ON THE HYPOCRISY OF TERRENCE HOWARD IN UGANDA | By Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine
I have watched a sickening video of Terrence Howard, a BLACK American multiple award winning actor, as he pitched to Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni a new form of ‘flight technology’ that he purportedly ‘invented’, which he claims is going to ‘replace Drones, Helicopters, Aeroplanes,’ etc.
Apparently, he cares so much about poor Ugandans that he is going to first implement his new technology here in Uganda, not in the USA whose government has billions of dollars guaranteed for inventors like him.
What Terrence Howard may not know is that Ugandans have seen Museveni hosting so many other shrewd peddlers of false hope before.
We saw Kanye West (yes the one who said slavery was a choice), promising to build a Jurassic Park here.
We saw musician Akon who came peddling ‘smart cities’ to be built in Uganda, when he has not built any in his homeland Senegal. All he needed was land. This means evicting poor Ugandans from their land to create a mile of land that Akon asked for.
We saw ‘Prof’ Safaraz Niazi who came in early 2020 peddling a Covid19 “vaccine” for use in Uganda at a time when even the richest and most medically advanced countries on earth were still scratching their heads to find one. All he needed was money.
Recently, we saw Pinetti who went off with a huge chunk of land in Lubowa and over a trillion shillings. Now, we have Terrence Howard promising to take Uganda to the moon! He claims to have “all the resources necessary,” but that all he needs is a ‘fertile ground’.
Whether legitimate or not, Mr Howard’s ‘scientific inventions’ are evidently just part of yet another grand scheme that Museveni and the rest of his criminal enterprise have designed to once again take a huge bite out of Uganda’s resources while using the celebrities’ star power to legitimise the authoritarian regime.
Terrence Howard is simply a hired gun participating in a game of con-artistry — and he knows it! If he was doing it in USA where strict and credible accountability is required for expending public resources, Mr. Howard would probably be a candidate for criminal prosecution — and he knows it!
Mr. Howard is a BLACK MAN whose ancestors endured indignity, rape, murder, torture, enforced disappearances, economic disempowerment, and other evils that punctuated slavery and the era when racial segregation was at its peak.
It is from this dark history that Mr. Howard rises among the very few black people who have been elevated to the most prominent and lucrative positions in society. He owes the black people every where on earth a duty to promote freedom and dignity. And yet here he is: coming to Uganda as an intellectual black-colonialist, peddling nothing but intellectual dishonesty!
These are the people Malcom X called House Negroes. I cannot believe that in 2011, Terrence acted Nelson Mandela in a movie called WINNIE MANDELA. What an insult to Madiba?! In that video, Mr Howard says that he has heard of Uganda for “most of my life”.
I am sure before he came to Uganda, let alone wanting to do business here, he did some research and he is aware of the terror that Ugandans are enduring at the hands of Gen. Museveni. It goes without saying, therefore, that he is aware — but does not care — that dictator Museveni has for 36+ years subjected Ugandans to the same evils that Mandela fought.
The same evils as Mr. Howard’s ancestors suffered at the hands of slave-masters and white supremacists. As I write this, in Karamoja region, Ugandans are dying of hunger while Gen. Museveni — a world renown tyrant — spends a billion shillings everyday at home and his son spends some more on lavish birthday parties across the country!
Mr. Howard is not concerned about this oppression of his fellow black people in Uganda so long as he gets his share of the dictator’s loot! How different is he, then, from the House Negro? Just like when Akon dined with the tyrant and said he doesn’t care about democracy at a time when fellow artistes like Nubian Li, Dan Magic and others were in prison for following their conscience, Terrence Howard is colluding with Museveni at a time when his fellow actors, writers, poets and creatives are in exile for siding with oppressed masses! Freedom fighters like Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah who are known for the same hairstyle as Mr. Howard spotted when he met Museveni are known for fighting oppression, not siding with the oppressor the way house negros would! If Terrence Howard really cares about Uganda, the last thing he should do is dine with a tyrant who has looted the country, undermined its democracy, terrorized its people and stagnated its development. I therefore want to put it to you Mr. Howard that Ugandans can do without your opportunism disguised as good will. You should be ashamed of yourself!
Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine is the NUP president.
