Kampala riots supply excuse to suppress monarchs

The riots that shook Kampala and several parts of Buganda Kingdom between September 7 and 12 brought loss of life and destruction of property, but they also presented President Yoweri Museveni with the perfect opportunity to bury the issues of monarchy and ethnicity that have long bedevilled him.

In his televised address to parliament on Tuesday last week, President Museveni dwelt little on the long-running demands of Buganda for a federal form of governance and the return of the Kingdom’s properties, namely chunks of land across the kingdom.

Instead, the president used his time on the podium to deliver a history lecture about the great Chwezi Dynasty that predated the Buganda Kingdom. He also made an effort to trace the roots of Ganda nomenclature to the Chwezi lineage.

By choosing to speak about the links between Uganda’s ethnic groups rather than the real cause of the standoff between Mengo and his government, the president left Buganda under no illusions as to whether he will hold his fire on the beleaguered kingdom, as its Attorney General Appolo Makubuya remarked.

“I expected the president to talk about Buganda’s demands. I thought he would address the issues of federo, the return of Buganda’s property, but he did not. That was disappointing, and is an indication that he is not ready to address these genuine demands,” Mr Makubuya said on VOA’s Straight Talk Africa last Wednesday.

Museveni’s clearly set out his thesis: The Buganda Kingdom came after other bigger dynasties that have since disintegrated into smaller units. The Kabaka should only concern himself with preservation of culture: Language, family norms and tribal cohesion, and leave the sophisticated aspects of governing to elected leaders.

Buganda is the biggest and richest monarchy in the country.

However, much of what it lays claim to for its wealth is in the hands of the central government, which in 1966 overran the Kingdom and took over its properties.

Earlier, on the eve of independence on October 8, 1962,Buganda had been accorded a “special status” that saw it governed under a federal arrangement.

This status would be nullified after 1966 when kingdoms were abolished by Milton Obote, and even when the current government restored them in 1993, the new 1995 constitution set out to restrict their roles to that of cultural institutions.

The president does not think Mengo has been keeping to this constitutional principle.

“When we restored the kings, it was our expectation that the cultural institutions would delve into these obvious linkages among our people instead of promoting chauvinism… then what value are adding if you are just recycling old stories?” he asked.

The noises that have been coming out of Mengo indicate otherwise.

The kingdom wants a defined role in governance under a federal structure.

Other monarchs have followed suit.

Bunyoro has found its tongue and voiced tough demands for a share of the oil revenues; Busoga and Toro are also on the edge, ready to jump in should the government yield. But with a law to regulate what the monarchs can and cannot do, it is unlikely that Museveni will give in to the kingdoms’ claims.

“We are going to expeditiously bring a law that will operationalise Article 246 in great detail so that demarcation of roles is clear,” Museveni said.

Backed by his majority in parliament, it is not hard to see where this is going.

The monarchs will lose even the little liberty they had before. They will tour their kingdoms, for instance, only at Museveni’s behest.

The latest reports indicate 23 dead, hundreds hospitalised and many more arrested and charged in the biggest riots in the Kampala area since the demonstrations against the Mabira Forest giveaway two years ago.

But they also leave Museveni with a trump card to neutralise Buganda’s increasingly isolationist ethnic stance.

Mabira, for instance, brought politicians, business people, academia and civil society together, but the Buganda riots were a Ganda issue.

Rioters taunted people in the streets, telling them to sing Buganda’s national anthem to show they were “one of us.”

Museveni’s other quarrel seems to be the snub by Kabaka Ronald Mutebi, who has not taken any of his phone calls for two years now.

The head of state, who is in part responsible for the restoration of the kingdom, has also seen Mengo lately flirt with the oil rich Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi.

Because of this, he would want to turn off such money taps, in which case Mengo would be the loser in this face-off.

With many of its properties yet to be returned by the central government, the coming law could financially cripple the kingdom by limiting its funding from foreign sources.