Al-Shabaab and Museveni’s bumpy roads

The road from Kampala to Ntungamo, 400km away, is bumpy, especially the 120km stretch between Masaka and Mbarara which is under construction.
By Dicta Asiimwe, The Independent
Yet we had to move fast. We were hurrying to an interview with President Yoweri Museveni – and that made us VIPs, although it did not save us from the suffocating dust wave.
Usually, journalists would not travel 400km just to attend a press conference, but this was the first press conference the President was giving since the July 11 twin bomb attacks on Kampala that killed about 80 people.
Why the President chose to have journalists ferried all the way from Kampala to tiny Ntungamo on the border with Rwanda, I will never know. Perhaps, the President decided to sneak the press conference neatly into his busy schedule; promoting Prosperity for All in the district. Whatever the case, the Media Centre on July 14 herded 40 journalists, local and international, into several vans for the bumpy drive to Ntungamo.
It was freezing cold when we arrived after 10pm and, with teeth chattering, people fell over each other to grab a cup of hot tea.
It was a relief when, unlike his usual style, the President arrived in the tent where he was scheduled to address the press even before the journalists had finished going through the security checks.
Two points..,” the president started as soon as the last journalists, an Al Jezeera team, were ready.
When asked, Museveni said he was “very angry” about the bomb attacks which  he blamed on the Somali radical Islamists group, al – Shabab. The Al-Shabaab are angry too - that Ugandan troops, under the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) are propping up the regime that, with Ethiopian support,  ousted them from power in 2006.
The African Union peace and UN Security Council took the decision to send peacekeepers to Somalia after Ethiopian forces overthrew the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which gave birth to Al-Shabaab. Uganda and Burundi are the only countries to send troops there although many promised. Now Al-Shabaab wants to bomb them out of Somalia.
But Museveni said he would instead push to change the AMISOM mandate from peacekeeping to peace enforcement, a position he said the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) was likely to agree on.
 “We were in Mogadishu doing our small bit of guarding the sea port, presidential palace and airport,” the President said, “(Now) they have invited us to follow them.”
Museveni said withdrawing troops from Somalia is “illogical” because it would mean surrendering the African continent to “terrorists from the Middle East”.
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