Long-serving Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has indicated clear frustrations with President Felix Tshisekedi wondering if the head of state had taken the side of traitors.
Museveni and Paul Kagame have been accused of fighting proxy wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo as they had allegedly sponsored rebels to destabilize the eastern parts of the country.
Speaking when he visited South Africa, Museveni says Africa was faced with a lot of challenges including internal conflicts that can only be solved by Africans.
Museveni is in South Africa where he received the ‘Order of South Africa’ medal from President Cyril Ramaphosa at a State dinner in Pretoria yesterday. The medal recognizes Museveni’s contributions to liberating South Africa from colonialism.
Museveni referenced the chaos and unrest in Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic and eastern Congo saying some of this was not the making of Africans but its traitors.
“That’s what I was telling His Excellency Tshisekedi that you Tshisekedi, you have to decide. Are you on the side of the traitors or are you on the side of the freedom fighters? Because that’s how they end up….,” he said.
Museveni says those presidents who are traitors of their African brothers end up with nothing because they lack tact.
“They just come,… they end up being nothing because traitors, the first thing, traitors cannot build an army, they can’t build a national political party because they are sectarian – tribe, religion…. because of that they can’t build an army. So because of that, how will you have anything without an army, without a party?,” he wondered.
Museveni said the Uganda army had now intervened in the war in eastern Congo through the East African Command (EAC) that was deployed to help quell the incursion by the rebel group M23.
“In Eastern Congo, now we have intervened with our army there. We can help them but there are what we can not do which can only be done by the locals; build an army. Don’t become bureaucratic. We have seen a lot of those and they have not helped us,” he said in a jab at President Tshisekedi.
President Tshisekedi has recently gone off on Rwanda publicly accusing its president Paul Kagame of helping the M23 to fuel the civil war which is claiming thousands of lives.
On the other end, Rwanda President Paul Kagame has said the civil strife in Congo was a Congolese problem which can be sorted out by the people of Congo.
