----Original Message Follows----
From: j ssemakula <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], Buganda Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: FWD: Buganda
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 16:28:04 -0800 (PST)
I was asked to forward this to the net
----forwarded message:
We know that Europeans came to Africa driven by trade and therefore friends and enemies were made on that basis. The nonsense about the Baganda were favoured and all the other rubbish comes from bitter twisted men who are looking for excuses for their hatred against the Baganda. It is time we looked at history with a keen sense of reality.
Adhola read this and you might learn something. I am staking my reputation here talking to you as if you will understand. Whatever...
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Early Rivalry between advocates and opponents of the free enterprise and the issue of Buganda's position in Uganda - Viewed from a politico-economic-historical context:
I. Some individuals and groups were determined to dismantle the institutional set up upon which the economists had based their precdictions of a positive post colonial economic development climate. At a UPC meeting in Mbale, Nabudere, a lawyer with communist sentiments, who was also a university lecturer and a prominent member of the radical group, once threatened that his camp would liquidate those who hindered the progress of the UPC-left. This forewarning pointed to the impending plight Obote's opponents were to face in the future. MPs from the opposition parties took this warning seriously and demanded in the National Assembly that the government clarify what they considered as a sinister threat to their lives. Radical MPs in parliament had a difficult time trying to diminish the ominous implications of Nabudere's statement; their explanations failed to ally the fears of the Kabaka Yekka (KY) and DP MPs. (See Ssekanyolya February 1966 issues). The intolorence !
to opposition displayed by the pro Obote group on this and other occassion was a harbinger of the unpleasant future the free enterprise economic development system was to face under Obote's rule.
II. On the other hand the pro free enterprise individuals and groups who expected to guide Uganda's economic development along the free enterprise path assumed by economists in the "ideal model," were suspicious of one another's motives and therefore lacked a purposeful unity. Within the group were those who considered as unpalatable the position of primus inter pares or "first among equals" Buganda had enjoyed during the colonial era (Ibingira 1973 84-85). The British allowed Buganda substantial autonomy in local administration since they were convinced that the Baganda were capable of looking after their own administrative interests, and through the Native Authority Ordinance of 1919, the British had 'exported' the Buganda model of local administration, and Buganda's civil servants, to much of the rest of the country (Laws of Uganda, vol. II, 1046). People like W.W. Nadiope from Busoga, C.J. Obwangor from Mbale and George Magezi from Bunyoro devoted their energi!
es to demanding that the departing colonial government reverse this status quo. (N. Kasfir 1976, 109).
III. Ugandan scholars, particularly those from Northern Uganda such as G. Pinychwa (1978), have suggested that Buganda's prominence within colonial Uganda was the result of the kingdom's fortuitous location at the center of the colonial state. Other scholars use Buganda as an example to highlight the colonial differential modernization, in support of the underdevelopment school's notions of how the world capitalist system created unequal development in peripheral states, such as Uganda (Kasfir 1976). Kasfir for example claims that colonialists developed Buganda to function as the metropolis while neglecting the rest of the country - the satellites of the peripheral state. Pinychwa and Kasfir's explanations portray the EFFECTS (my emphasis) of colonial rule. These scholars propose, arguably, that the colonial arrangements helpled develop Buganda at the cost of other regions. (There are scholars who believe that since Buganda provided most of the funds for central g!
overnment transfer payments, while none of the twenty one counties of Buganda [in Obote's unitary republican constitution of 1967, in which all reference to Buganda was consciously omitted, these counties were lumped into four regions - Mubende, Masaka, East Mengo, and West Mengo - and still did not receive grants from the government] ever received funds from the central government, other regions benefited as well if not more than Buganda from the colonial arrangements (Low, 1988, Nsibambi 1966).
IV. Both Pinychwa and Kasfir's explanations of Buganda's prominence are flawed and may lead us to erroneous conclusions since they fail to address the colonial regime's fundamental justification for locating its headquarters in Buganda. Like A. D. Low we believe that the British decision to place the territorial capital at Entebbe was not a random act, rather it was because they wanted to study, and take advantage of Buganda's pre colonial structure of administration, which they had decided to adopt when establishing British rule in the rest of the territory comprasing present day Uganda (see the Native Authority Ordinance of 1919, Laws of Uganda, vol II 1046). In addition to the centralized administrative system, Berber mentions the pre colonial centralized road system as another important consideration which attracted the British to place their headquaters in Buganda (Barber 1968).
V. Pinychwa and Kasfir's analyses may mislead the reader when they reverse the order of CAUSE and EFFECT (my emphasis) of the colonial regime's attraction to Buganda. They blame the colonial state for locating most of its organs of administration in Buganda, without mentioning the perilous political conditions that were prevailing in other parts, particularly in the northern territory of present day Uganda, and they do not mention the comparative political order in Buganda when the British arrived in the territory. Yet reality entails that cause precedes effect. British government's disinterest in Northern Uganda was partly due to the prevailing ethnic strife (CAUSE of British disaffection) in the region that pre dated colonial rule. Barber depicts the relationship between the ethnic groups (tribes?), which convinced the British that the area was not suitable (EFFECT upon British policy) to host the colonial headquarters, as follows: "The relations between the tri!
bes had, by this time, settled into a pattern of mutual hostility and raiding and counter raiding for water, grazing, and stock... It was among such people that Macdonald signed 28 treaties, in none of which British protectorate was promised" (Barber 1968).
VI. Similar to Low and Barber we believe explanations of Buganda's prominence in colonial Uganda should not ignore or attempt to downplay the vital role pre colonial political and economic development in Buganda had played in convincing the British to place their headquarters there. During the 700 hundred years that preceeded colonial rule Buganda had evolved into a stable, politically organized, centrally administered kingdom; this, more so than any other considerations attracted the British to locate the colonial headquarters (Low 1988) in the "unattractive" (in European terms) steaming tropical environment on the shores of Lake Victoria at Entebbe in Buganda.
VII. Climatic conditions, proximity to European settlements, and strategic location within the British overseas territory, were usually vital considerations for selecting a site for a colonial territorial headquarters. If local pre colonial political development had not been a paramount consideration for choosing the colonial headquarters in Uganda, other locations would have been more attractive to the British than Entebbe. For example, Mbale on the foothills of Mount Elgon in Eastern Uganda, Kabale in the highlands of Southwest\Western Uganda, each of which place has a modified tropical (high altitude creates a temperate climate in these areas) climate similar to that of Nairobi; Jinja or Tororo, near the country's border with Kenya, where the largest community of European settlers in East Africa lived, or Packwach on the Banks of the strategic Nile close to the territories of the British empire in North Africa.
VIII Those who were frightened of Buganda's prominent position in Ugandan politics included the once influential the late, Grace Ibingira, Uganda's first post colonial Minister of Justice who came from the kindom of Ankole. A British trained lawyer with liberal political sentiments, he was a founding member of the UPC party. Despite his desire to contain Mengo's political stature, Ibingira was sufficiently politically astute to broker a coalition with Buganda as the only sure way to guarantee victory for his party, the UPC. He was therefore one of the major architects of the UPC-KY alliance (Ibingira 1973, xii, 200-202). Although Mengo wanted a federal organization of the state, Ibingira and his friends pushed for unitary constitutional arrangements for the post colonial state (at the time of his death he had converted to fedralism, and was a staunch, eloquent advocate of the federal ideology). Despite the political differences between Mengo and the Ibingira group!
, on the political-economic level the two sides had much in common since both embraced a common economic philosophy of free enterprise.
IX. Ibingira admitted that fear of the prospect of Buganda dominating post-colonial Uganda politically persuaded him and his colleagues from Western and Eastern Uganda to develop a rappot with Obote. They regarded Obote as politically weak and malleable, and hence easy to control, since he came from a politically insiginificant Nilotic ethnic group (Lango, Obote's home district, had only 4 out of the ninety-two seat in the first independence parliament) of Northern Uganda (Ibingira 1973). As king makers, Ibingira and his colleagues (most of whom ended up in jail during Obote's post 1966 rule until his removal by Amin in 1971) thought they would have a firm grip on the national government (Ibingira 1973). A wide, albeit undeclared, political-economic philosophical gap which colored the activities of the UPC existed between the Ibingira and the Obote factions. This gap became clear only when the latter faction ultimately revealed its uncheckered socialist sentiments!
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Highlights of some key paragraphs:
Until they categorically reject the political views of their political mentors ( the likes of Obote and Nabudere); Obote and his UPC-left lack moral or any other authority/credibility, to advise any Ugandan, including the Kabaka, on how to relate with post Obote regimes including that of M7, as Mr. Adhola volunteered in the unsolicited article which he mailed to the Monitor. Nabudere's views, mentioned in Parag I, still frighten many peace loving Ugandans away from the present-day UPC, that was comandeered by the radical wing.
Parag II points to adverse results of hating Baganda. The rabid hatred of the Baganda that permeates Mr. Adhola, Mr. Mukanga and their fellow travellers' postings, tends to blur, in their minds, the genuine political and economic benefits their home regions would derive from a federal political arrangement for Uganda. Those imagining that a federally organized Uganda would make Buganda superior to the rest of the country (like the Obwongors, the Magezis and others once imagined, are caught in an unfortunate time warp; otherwise how do they reconcile their mistaken position with the fact that, the pangs of poverty have been digging ever so deep into the ribs of societies in most parts of Uganda, in the era of unitary rule, than they did during the first four years of post colonial rule, when the federal constituition was in effect? Moreover, architects of the crumbling socio-economic and political systems which have reduced most people in most parts of the country !
to abject poverty were/are non Baganda, who have been weilding national executive political power in the independence era.
Challenges to Modernization and Underdevelopment theoristical analyses of colonial Uganda in Parag III. Pre colonial Buganda had both a developed administrative system and infrastructure, two fundamental prerequisites for socio-economic development; To be successful, a political system must evolve over a long, long period that may stretch into hundreds or even thousands of years. And, citizens must pay allegiance to the rulers. Buganda's established political system pre dated colonial rule and trade and commerce were thriving between Buganda and many of her neighbours at that time. Citizens accepted/recognized their rulers, and participated in communal development projects which included building commuter and trunk roads. Only dishonest scholarship would attribute Buganda's political and socio-economic development to colonial rule, the alleged "kingdom's fortuitous location at the center of the colonial state".
Mr. Adhola and those who share his vitriolic decrying of colonial civil servants from Buganda who once worked in his and his cousins' areas, should pause, and recall the socio-political and economic environment obtaining in those areas at the advent of colonial rule in Uganda, which Barber eloquently helped us to revist, as summarized in paragraph V.
What does it take for one to realize the folly of imposing political unitarism in an ethnically diverse society with strong pluralistic desires such a Uganda? After a lengthy (spanning 35++ years) soul-searching exercise, Ibingira realized that millions of Ugandans had been killed (and that many more millions would be killed by this and successor regimes, under the guise of nation building or national security) by those chasing a illusive goal --- harmonious rule within Uganda's comatose unitary political system, this along with the collapse of the socio-economic, communication, health, welfare etc sytems of the country, since 1966, were too great a cost to Uganda, for him to morally justify continuing advocating the unitary political ideology blindly, which we saw him champion inParags. VII and IX.
Parag IX reveals that the objectives of advocates of the unitary political system were strongly motivated by selfish ethnic/(tribal?) interests rather than a sincere belief in the egalitarian "nationalistic" ideology they espoused in public. Most honest political power brokers seek out politicians who derive power from a strong rather than a fragile political base, to lead a political party. The advantages to the party and the polity, of having the former type of politician (a politician with a large home political base) at the helm of a political party and, possibly, subsquently at the helm of the country's government, should, I assume, be obvious to most people.
That the architects of the UPC party from Western and Eastern Uganda bestowed the leadership of their party to the weakest, least competent candidate they could find 'the weakest link', speaks volumes about their motives; It also helps us to better understand why Obote always felt at home while consorting with the likes of Idi Amin. Worst of all, the decision by the UPC founding fathers to discard merit in favour of expedience (by annoiting Obote as party leader), erected the rickety political stage, upon which ominious political events (events whose repercussions still afflict Ugandans) would inevitably take place in the independence era.
