These facts should be read with un biased mind. ---------------------------------------------------------->
OPINION - EAST AFRICAN-NAIROBI-KENYA Monday, February 24, 2003 ---------------------------------
JOACHIM BUWEMBO
Let's Admit It, Kabaka Was Treated Shabbily
At the end of January, over 100,000 Baganda peacefully staged a massive demonstration in Kampala city. They were accompanying their Katikkiro (prime minister of the Buganda cultural kingdom) to the Constitutional Review Commission to present a memorandum demanding the restoration of federo (federal rule for Buganda) and the return of Kampala city to the kingdom.
There were other demands in the memorandum but these two, federo and the capital city, are the ones which seem to have caught the attention of everybody, including the least politically inclined.
Many people, especially the non-Baganda, found these demands outrageous. They generally view the demand for federo as the old Buganda "arrogance" and a desire to look different from other regions which do not want the country to be governed on a federal basis. As for returning Kampala City to the jurisdiction of Buganda kingdom, many people describe this as unreasonable at best and anarchist at worst.
It is very easy to form a similar opinion about the Baganda demands, until you pause to ask yourself whether all those people and their leaders are mad to make such demands. Once you accept that they cannot all be mad, you take the next step of trying to understand why they are making such seemingly strange demands.
A preliminary research into the matter reveals how terribly thin the authentic literature on this country's modern political history is. What Ugandan historians have been doing over the past four decades, heaven only knows. But they have not been writing. If they had recorded all the major events of the early and mid 1960s, everyone today would understand why the Baganda are demanding federo and Kampala. One would then be free to disagree or agree with these demands, but from a position of knowledge, not shock and disbelief.
Only 35 years ago, these demands were most logical and did not sound strange at all. In 1965, for instance, Milton Obote abrogated the constitution of Uganda under which the federal system operated. Ex-attorney general and one-time president Godfrey Binaisa recently described how he singlehandedly fabricated the new constitution in one night.
With the agreement under which Buganda was operating in Uganda broken by the central government, the top Buganda council, the Lukiiko, resolved that Milton Obote's government no longer had any business on Buganda soil. That is the resolution that is now being remembered out of context, alarming non-Baganda who are being led to believe that the Baganda will chase them out of Buganda.
Actually, the build-up to that resolution needs to be explained. For over a year, a silent war had been simmering between Kabaka Edward Mutesa, who was also president of Uganda, and prime minister Milton Obote, after a referendum had restored some counties to Bunyoro kingdom from Buganda. Obote then started campaigning openly against the president and finally overthrew the constitution, declaring himself executive president and evicting Mutesa from State House Entebbe.
This eviction was the most humiliating episode of the whole saga, by far surpassing the much-talked about attack by the military on the Kabaka�s palace later. Mutesa�s personal effects were cleared out of State House, loaded onto a truck and dumped outside the gate of his Mengo palace.
It was like a village labourer who, jilted by a beautiful woman, and decides to chase her out of the house which her parents built for the couple, and then cuts up her face so that no other man will look at her.
When Buganda finally passed the resolution telling Obote to remove his government from Buganda soil, since the agreement of 1962 no longer prevailed, he sent troops and turfed the Kabaka out of palace and country.
The change of relationship between the kingdom and the republic was therefore never negotiated � it was imposed. Whether it appears good today, it was a manifestly unjust proceedings.
Even if the Baganda are not given what they demand, common decency requires that the wrong committed against them is explicitly acknowledged.
Unfortunately, many of the people arguing the pros and cons of the issue today only know part of the story, and that is the fault of our historians.
Joachim Buwembo is Editor of The Sunday Vision of Kampala.
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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