Why NRM is finding Buganda so hard to swallow

The 12-year standoff between the current government of Uganda and the ancient Kingdom of Buganda is approaching critical mass.

Unless the National Resistance Movement takes substantial and immediate steps to finally make good on its 1980-1986 bush war promises to Buganda, the dispute will become terminal.

And who knows if Uganda, already battered by four conflicts since Independence — two of which were directly about Buganda — will face yet another meltdown in its politics.

On July 27, the Lukiiko, the kingdom’s parliament, convened an emergency session at its seat in the Bulange Building in Mengo, Old Kampala.

This was in reaction to a front-page report that had appeared in the government-controlled Sunday Vision newspaper alleging that the Kabaka had hocked the land title for that same building to a wealthy central government minister in exchange for a now defaulted loan of $1 million, thus placing the property under threat of seizure.

The inference was that the king was being rather too free with kingdom property, of which he is the custodian.

THE Lukiiko session began with Buganda’s Katikkiro (prime minister) displaying the land title in question to the assembled members and elders in the presence of the packed public gallery.

In the angry submissions that followed, a number of resolutions were passed and applauded that have taken the dispute to a new, more visceral, level: Legal proceedings were instituted against the Vision Corporation; a buyer boycott of its English and Luganda dailies was announced; and planned talks over the earlier outstanding issues between Buganda and central government (on new land laws as well as federation) were suspended.

Most politically potent was the declaration by the Lukiiko that the central government should leave Kampala to Buganda and find another location for its administrative capital city.

This call held symbolic resonance. It was in this same Bulange Building that a similar resolution was passed in 1966, during the standoff between Buganda and the first Milton Obote/UPC government.

That resolution became the pretext for Obote’s ordering the now-infamous armed attack on the institutions of Buganda, resulting in military occupation under a state of emergency — until 1971, when the man Obote chosen to lead the attack and the occupation — one Idi Amin — came to realise that the army could run the country without politicians, and promptly overthrew his boss, but maintained the occupation for the full subsequent nine years of his own rule.

It was Buganda’s experiences of the Obote and Amin occupations that prepared the ground for armed rebellion in Buganda, which was exploited by the NRM/NRA in the Buganda countryside, based on specific promises of restoration to clan leaders who then mobilised the population for the war.

For the past 16 years, the NRM government has been desperately trying to roll back the situation created by the hurried designing and passing of the Traditional Rulers (Restitution) Assets and Properties Act of 1993 (popularly known as Ebyaffe Act — literally “our things” in Luganda), when Ganda post-war militancy forced it to start making good on those promises, starting with the coronation of Kabaka Mutebi.

The Act commits them to recognising the existence of Buganda and other similar entities, but more critically, it re-introduces into law the principle that Buganda has a right to the property seized from it in 1967.

This is the crux of the matter: The central government is legally obliged to hand over significant amounts of valuable real estate to a rival political centre.

Among these is a claim to anywhere between 5,000 and 9,000 square miles of land. 

No central government will ever do this willingly (to put it in perspective, Migingo is less than one square mile, and they are trying to hold on to that!), as it undermines its own power, and overturns the entire logic upon which Uganda stands, as demonstrated by the efforts of Frederick Lugard, Governor Cohen and finally Milton Obote to destroy native identity, so as to establish the new country.

In failing to wholly subsume Buganda into itself, Uganda has taken on the appearance of a python with its prey stuck in its dislocated jaw, unable to either swallow it or spit it out. This is the dilemma of many a post-colonial African state that contains pre-colonial identities.

Thus, Buganda and Uganda have been unable to establish and follow a clear negotiation process, as called for by the Ebyaffe Act.

The problem is that the central government never really expected these “damn natives” to still be asserting their identity after this long, and so never imagined they would be expected to actually start handing over property.

We have therefore seen President Yoweri Museveni buying time by keeping proceedings vague and personal and only making concessions if he thinks he will gain from them in the political short term.

This is standard NRM procedure when faced with a determined opponent: Buy time with “negotiations,” while frantically working behind the scenes to change the material facts.

So, while Buganda engaged in nearly 14 years of diplomatic heavy lifting from 1995, the NRM government began making far-reaching legal and demographic changes to the very land and properties that were under negotiation. Examples of this are:

Donating Buganda's land to “investors”; settling non-Baganda newcomers in these areas and then proposing laws to protect the new “tenants”; creating new districts under “decentralisation,” whose “district land boards” then claim and sell Buganda’s land; creating new “kingdoms” out of ethnic minorities within Buganda; using the 1995 constitution-making process to “constitutionally” remove Kampala from Buganda and most recently, tabling a Bill to expand the same Kampala’s boundaries to eat up areas previously constitutionally defined as being within Buganda.

In addition, the leadership of the kingdom point at what they characterise as a steady stream of  propaganda and invective designed to portray them and their demands in the worst possible light.

“The delays are deliberate, and the insults intentional,” says David Mpanga, minister for research in the kingdom government.

All this explains the new explosion of anger coming from Buganda, and the “back to the future” remix of postures last seen in the tumultuous days of the mid-1960s. The path of a negotiated settlement may well have reached a dead-end.

The challenge for the leadership of East Africa is to recognise the dangers such developments pose to  the hopes of sustainable development across the region.

What is the basis for all the wonderful plans they have for us, especially under the East African Federation?

Waruhiu Itote, in his book Mau Mau General (East African Publishing House, 1967), recounts the rebuke he received from a Muganda fellow soldier as they discussed their impending demobilisation from the British colonial Army, having done military service in Burma during the Second World War.

The Muganda derisively dismissed Itote’s musings about going into farming or business: “We are going back to our own country, where at least we pay our taxes to our own king, but what can you Kikuyu plan for, unless you first fight to be able to pay taxes to your own government?” he asked derisively. Itote says that this remark affected him deeply, and got him thinking. He went on to become General China, one of the leading architects and commanders of the Mau Mau uprising.

The proposed prosecutions of those deemed responsible for Kenya’s 2008 post-election mayhem demonstrate that the country has not resolved the issues and causes of the violence as yet. Given the rumoured linkages of some of the perpetrators (also contained in Kofi Annan’s sealed threatening envelope), it is also unclear if the authorities will be able to lay their hands on all the accused and guilty parties, when the time comes for actual arrests.

This may become a test of the robustness of the Kenyan justice system, a failure of which will only further stoke the ethnic fires, once people feel let down all over again.

The upheavals in Buganda may once again get people elsewhere thinking: If the country you live in doesn’t work for you, why not get rid of it, and create one where you may “pay your taxes” in return for real service?

kalundi@yahoo.com