Ssemujju Calls on Fellow MPs to Reject New UPDF Bill on SFC

Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda, the Kira municipality legislator has urged his colleagues in parliament to reject the government’s move to make the elite Special Forces Command-SFC an independent service unit of the Uganda People’s Defense Forces-UPDF. 

Last week, the Defence State Minister, Huda Oleru Abason introduced a bill seeking to amend the UPDF Act 2005 to among others make the SFC a service of the UPDF.

Ssemujju who has been the most outspoken critic of the SFC, said parliament must not escort President Yoweri Museveni in legalizing an entity that he created illegally.

Ssemujju has repeatedly said, the SFC is an illegal entity because it was not created by Parliament as both the constitution and the UPDF Act demand. 

Therefore, to Ssemujju for the time the SFC has existed without parliamentary authorization means that it has been an illegal entity that was simply created to serve the interests of President Museveni. Ssemujju said President Museveni embarked on building his army immediately after capturing power in 1986.

Ssemujju says as a journalist he closely followed the military and he remembers that in around 2000, when the government was in the process of enacting, the UPDF Act 2005, President Museveni had meetings with high-ranking members of the army who he presented the idea of forming the SFC. 

He says this was opposed by many who argued that creating an SFC in Uganda, was akin to creating an army with an army. 

“Those who spoke against creating a force within a force argued and rightly so that where they have created them, there have always been problems. In countries like America and Israel, they might have special forces that do particular work but what distinguishes them from the rest of the military is the work they do but they are not a special force. These so-called elite forces are created by dictators as their armies. In America, no president has got an army, but in Iraq and Iran these forces belonged to the leaders and operate outside the regular military,” Ssemujju said. 

He added that if anybody doubts the dangers that a force within a force poses to the country, they should look no further than Sudan where the regular army has been tussling it out for now over a year with the Rapid Support Forces-RSF, the elite force created by former president Omar el Bashir. 

Ssemujju also said that what makes the SFC even more suspect is the mystery in which it is shrouded. He said nobody knows how those in the force are recruited, remunerated, trained, promoted, and what areas they are operating. Unlike the regular army that recruits from across the country, Ssemujju said, the SFC is largely composed of and commanded by people who come from the same ethnic group. 

“When I was at the Makerere university in 1997, Muhoozi came and started recruiting students from his ethnic group, other than that, we don’t know what criteria they use. Everything serious in the military has now been appropriated, the artillery, the mechanized brigade, and the infantry are now all under the SFC because they have become too many. They now even have their headquarters in Entebbe, even before the law is made, for them they are already made with a status, the law simply comes to validate what Museveni has been doing,” Ssemujju said. 

Ssemujju said the introduction of the bill vindicates him and shows the public that when they talk about certain things, they don’t talk about them simply because they don’t like President Museveni and his government but because there are concerns even from people within the system.