The former UN diplomat and UPC party presidential candidate Olara Otunnu has explained the changing tide of international opinion and pressure piling up on President Yoweri Museveni.

Olara Otunnu was the guest on the KFM Hot Seat show tonight, Monday Feb. 8, 2010.

Last Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010, Otunnu appeared on the New Vision-owned radio station Vision Voice and voiced the same message.

Otunnu is currently on a countrywide tour and media appearance to promote his bid for the Uganda People's Congress party presidency.

In the first ten minutes of the show, Otunnu told the host, Charles Mwanguhya-Mpagi, that there are many countries and other international actors who have a vested interest in Museveni remaining in power, regardless of what they know about the realities in Uganda.

Otunnu returned to Uganda in Aug. 2009 after more than 23 and a half years in exile. He had been Uganda's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in the early 1980s and in Aug. 1985 was named Foreign Minister by the Tito Okello military junta that had recently seized power.

Since the late 1980s, Otunnu took on various diplomatic assignments with the United Nations headquarters in New York.

A Ugandan source in London told the Uganda Record that Otunnu is the man behind the U.S. Congressional directive to the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to keep a close eye on the forthcoming Ugandan general election in 2011.

"It is a mandatory directive", Otunnu told KFM and "They are not talking about observing the actual conduct of the election" but the whole exercise.

Otunnu also told the KFM show that the incident in December 2009 in which his car was involved in an accident (some say attack and harassment by Museveni's Presidential Guard Brigade) is being investigated by the U.S. Congress.

Throughout the show, Otunnu's tone, urgency, and confidence indicated that he has decided to take a fully international strategy for his presidential campaign, by grafting powerful U.S. Congressmen and the machinery of the U.S. government to bring pressure to bear on Museveni ahead of the election.

At 7:30p.m., Otunnu said that if there is anybody in Uganda who knows "where his bread is buttered" and knows the full import of what the U.S. Congressional decree means, it is President Museveni.

Otunnu said that just because "Mr. Museveni has always got away with murder" does not mean he will continue getting away with murder. "The situation has changed," Otunnu said emphatically.

His voice now urgent, his demeanor assertive, Otunnu appears to have found a confidence from somewhere, a newly found sense of momentum. In his radio comments, he dispensed with the illusions most Ugandan politicians harbour, that there will be an election of any real form in 2011.

Rather, Otunnu has now become the first politician to have moved decisively to plan B, to a recognition that the election is foregone and the only hope for salvaging it is to tap into the same source of power that Museveni has --- the western capitals, especially Washington DC.

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