On 11 September 2009, it was reported that 24 people had died from angry protests by supporters of the king of Buganda, Kabaka Ronald Mutebi, for what they considered a sleight to the dignity of their monarch by the ‘national’ government. President Yoweri Museveni had dared to limit the movements of the kabaka within his kingdom. Official figures tend to underestimate the real quantity of casualties inflicted by security forces. Suppressing the image of the government as a murderer its own citizens becomes more important than acknowledging the human dignity of the victims by reporting their death with transparency. We can assume that government forces killed a larger number of protesters.

The tragic deaths could have been prevented by Uganda’s political, religious and social leaders, the Commonwealth and the peer review mechanism of the African Union. We can take a brief look at each site of possible intervention.

To start with the Commonwealth, we must recall that Emeka Anyaoku, the secretary general, got Commonwealth heads of governments to form from among themselves a select group that would intervene in the affairs of a member country to correct a condition of bad governance there. Anyaoku reports that he studied Latin and Greek both at a private secondary school in eastern Nigeria and at the University of Ibadan. We can only speculate the effect of this learning experience on the brain and disposition of a child whose mother tongue emerged from tropical forest ecology. I assume that the slogan 'we shall overcome' would become for him 'we must triumph', a determination to be creative under severely challenging circumstances.

Reading Emeka Anyaoku’s autobiography, one is constantly exposed to the man’s ability to turn difficulty into climbed mountains. It is out of failed governance in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Pakistan, Gambia, apartheid South Africa and other Commonwealth countries that he proposed to his bosses the need for a mechanism that would enable them to intervene in member states to ensure that principles that are dear to the body are honoured in practice. The crisis that led to the tragic deaths in Uganda was planted as a time-bomb by British colonial administrators, and should have assumed urgent priority by the Commonwealth from 1962. That it exploded before memories of a summit of Commonwealth leaders held in Kampala had faded from its streets is condemnable evidence of an organisation that is prepared to toast its leaders while sitting on an active political volcano. In 1966 its host, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria’s federal prime minister, would be murdered before all those who had attended its summit in Lagos had arrived back in their country’s capitals.

NEPAD’s (New Partnership for Africa's Development) 'Peer Review' mechanism has slower responses than that of the Commonwealth. They use study and research teams to ascertain levels of bad governance before recommending corrective measures. A country must, however, volunteer to be reviewed. Uganda has done so and its ailment has been a long drawn out malaise which should have been tackled.

And what is this ailment which Uganda’s leaders themselves have not been able to sort out since independence in 1962? Milton Obote came into Uganda’s politics from a tradition of what E.E. Evans-Pritchard called 'balanced antagonism', i.e., nobody is allowed to accumulate power and use it over others. If you use a verbal insult against another person you earn an instant counter-insult. Buganda’s monarchism was rooted in the power accumulated around the Kabaka and his chiefs. In Obote’s republican Lango culture, power was dispersed to every homestead. Just as the Baganda could not tolerate the power of Uganda’s prime minister being higher than that of their Kabaka, Obote’s supporters could not tolerate the notion of a supreme king that superseded the nation’s prime minister. Here was the making of a constitutional crisis.

The arrival of Museveni added to this political chemistry that of the legacy of the ‘Blood Lakes region’ that had reigned in Burundi and Rwanda. Cattle herders (whom Taban Lo Liyong once referred to as 'human ticks who are parasites on cattle') used techniques of armed, verbal and social violence against agricultural peoples to extort labour and grains from them. In Burundi and Rwanda the techniques of verbal and social violence had provoked so much hatred from the agricultural Hutu peoples that Belgian social engineers had easily channelled it into horrendous massacres against the Tutsi. In Uganda while the Bahima supported the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC), the Bairu supported the opposition Democratic Party. A pogrom against the Bahima was probably prevented by the British rigging the 1962 elections in favour of the Obote-led UPC. The same British colonialists had also gotten Belgian colonial officials to round up peasants from Rwanda and export them to work as cheap labour on farms owned by Buganda’s chiefs. Such labour quickly got treated with an ideology of contempt. That contempt was subsequently splashed over all ethnic groups from western Uganda. Museveni’s presidency has suffered from that legacy of contempt by the people of Buganda. Obote had benefited from a residual goodwill across Buganda out of a long pre-colonial record of both Bunyoro Kitara and Buganda making periodic alliances with Lango to fight each other. Museveni from the onset lacked that social capital. When Museveni refers to rioters in Kampala as 'the criminals', he is fighting for a contempt high ground in the same way as Kabaka Mutebi refusing to take his phone calls.

This legacy has come to haunt politics in Uganda. In 1966 Obote’s troops under one Colonel Idi Amin attacked Kabaka Mutesa’s palace and drove him into exile in London. The country would pay an enormous prize for tickling Idi Amin’s appetite for the use of the gun to get and keep political power. It is a putrid legacy which the African Union and the Commonwealth should have already intervened over with the necessary creativity. Failure to do so continues to leave a horizon of more violence. Paradoxically, Nigeria is one possible model to borrow from. In 1966 and 1967 explosions of pogroms against Igbos all across northern Nigeria were linked to Igbos from a 'republican' cultural legacy being seen to wish to humiliate and dominate a people with ancient ruling aristocracies. The aristocrats have, however, to protect their future by working to defend their share of power in Nigeria at large through muscling for an effective presence in all government agencies and the economy. The constitutional requirements that federal permanent secretaries and the cabinet must represent from each state and that each federal government agency and top executives of political parties must reflect Nigeria’s 'federal character' are creative efforts to achieve this goal.

Another example that the Commonwealth would have aided Buganda to benefit from was the record of Serete Khama assuming the leadership of anti-colonial nationalism in Botswana. It could be said that the political class in Buganda never recovered from their squandering of Kabaka Edward Mutesa’s historic opportunity to exploit the stupidity of British colonial officials when they deported him to Britain because he rejected Uganda joining a proposed east African federation in which European settlers in Kenya would be dominant. The countrywide sentiment around him as a nationalist fighter was wasted by a call for the secession of Buganda from a looming independent Uganda.

Museveni on the other hand would benefit from being helped to abandon the temptation to hold onto the old ethnic formula of turning other Ugandans into larger oppressed Bairu or Hutus. It is a formula which, as the head of the Anglican church has said, leaves the country weak and bitterly divided along ethnic, religious and economic inequality lines. Outsiders, including Sudan, Libya, Egypt and Turkey with imperial ambitions would find it easy-picking. It is a situation in which Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem would have urged all pan-Africanists to intervene to turn Africa's intellectuals, civil society and political and military leaders away from fascistic visions that can only lead to collective slavery under external powers.

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* Okello Oculi is the executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.