A throne of one’s own

The simmering rivalry for continental pre-eminence between Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is bringing them both into company they would not normally be associated with, confirming the maxim that “politics makes for strange bedfellows.”

Colonel Gadaffi is due to hand over the chair of the African Union to President Museveni some time next year.

Ugandan officials have hinted at a Libyan hand in the September Buganda riots, as well as the woefully low turnout — just four of our 40 invited heads of state — at the Kampala October AU summit on refugees.

With the next polls just 14 months away, Uganda’s ruling NRM party seeks to secure its political base by maintaining an open-door policy on every possible ethnic potentate.

Each initiative has come fraught with difficulties: The Busoga clan heads are currently at each other’s throats, accusing the government of bias; the non-Rwenzururu people are voicing a historical objection to their neighbour’s royal ambitions; and the Banyoro are seeking to extract a high price for their loyalty, leading to proposals of some kind of electoral apartheid system in their favour.

In the meantime, Col Gaddafi makes no secret of his Pharaonic ambitions.

While addressing the UN General Assembly earlier this year, he offered the gathered diplomats greetings on behalf of the entire African continent, and not just Libya, which he was actually representing.

He has spent the past few years trawling the African interior in search of every kind of “native ruler,” whom he then seeks to court through various inducements. The most recent was his airlifting of some 22 Kenyan tribal elders to Tripoli in September.

This was preceded by the interest he had taken in the welfare and upbringing of the then boy King Oyo of Toro.

Apart from generous assistance with education and other matters, the Libyan leader also funded the complete renovation of the king’s main palace.

This is part of his openly declared strategy of outflanking what he sees as a coterie of self-satisfied elite Africans controlling the presidencies of sub-Saharan Africa who have no interest in immediately uniting Africa for the benefit of the ordinary African citizen.

In the typical fashion of the politicians of the African “revolutionary left,” the colonel correctly diagnoses a problem but only for the express purposes of exploiting, rather than solving it.

The height of his ambition was revealed at a 2008 summit in Tripoli, where, in a scene replete with irony, the various assembled sultans, chiefs, kings and princes were persuaded to bestow the title “King of Kings” on their eager host.

Gaddafi’s own ascension to power was through the 1969 overthrow of King Idriss of Libya.

More than a few African presidents have been alarmed at the idea of potentates — some of whom remain unrecognised, if not outlawed in their home countries — suddenly being given resources and a diplomatic platform independent of their grip.