Why Uganda’s bishops Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 20:26:56 +0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
Why Uganda’s bishops Nov 30 - Dec 6, 2003 A few weeks ago, Catholic prelate, Emmanuel Cardinal Wamala was the subject of attack for daring to make a political statement opposing President Museveni’s perceived bid for a ‘third term’. Weeks later, Anglican prelate Archbishop Livingstone Nkoyoyo said that talking about ‘third term’ now was a waste of energy. Juma A. Okuku delves into the politics of Christian Church in Uganda and why it has failed to drive democracy unlike its Kenya counterpart. The Christian churches have been involved, albeit differently, in the Kenyan and Ugandan democratisation processes for some time. For decades, Christian churches in Kenya have been at the centre of the pressures for democratisation while in Uganda, they have rarely spearheaded democratic change but have instead, mediated between state power and the general population. The Kenya case The opportunity or capacity of the church to engage in the process of democratisation in Kenya has been facilitated by three factors – its organisational resources, the deteriorating socio-economic conditions in the country and by the emergence of an oppressive one-party state in the post-colonial era. In regard to the latter process, the church was one of the institutions that managed to retain a degree of corporate independence from the state. It is this organisational resource that was put to critical use in the struggle against oppression in the 1980s and 1990s. Originating from the colonial period, the dense network of structures, bodies and organisations of the church in virtually every social and economic sphere, gave it an organisational distinctiveness. In the struggle for change, both the established Christian churches and their collective entities, the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) and the Evangelical Fellowship of Kenya (EFK), demonstrated a willingness to reach out to the disenfranchised and those on the margins of society. As a space of integration and construction of solidarities and because of its ability to combine both scarce and profane resources, the church in this way came to enjoy a specific type of power, namely, a power to deliver and a power to tame and define reality. It is from this position that its most important ministers spoke out. Concurrently, deteriorating socio-economic conditions gave the church even more legitimacy as it expanded its social and economic projects. A further opportunity for the church arose as a result of the rise of an oppressive one-party state in Kenya. When civil society is repressed by a state, churches often remain ‘zones of freedom’ and tend to take up the political functions of the repressed. As a result, due to its popular credibility, the church becomes one of the only remaining tools available for the expression of dissatisfaction and the urge for change in the country. The church in Kenya contributed to the establishment of pluralism in a number of ways. First, it was central in generating and sustaining a public discourse on democracy and change. It criticised excesses in the exercise of state power. It protested against changes in the electoral law, which removed the secret ballot and replaced it with a public queuing system; it denounced the brutal evictions of squatters in Nairobi and the state-engineered ethnic clashes in the Rift valley, which had turned it into an ‘unhappy valley’. The discourse that the church forced upon the state created an atmosphere conducive to change by accelerating processes aimed at transformation that were already underway. This discourse was informed by the conviction that the question of power and oppression was not a preserve of government and politicians. The late Bishop Muge perhaps summed this up most aptly while addressing the Church of the Province of Kenya’s Youth Organisation, He warned that ‘the church couldn’t compromise theological issues with secular or temporal matters’. The church was urged to protest ‘when God-given rights and liberties are violated’. The church had a special duty to ‘give voice to the voiceless’. Reverend B. Njoroge Kariuki went a step further: “The church has a duty beyond the rescue of victims of oppression. It must try to destroy the cause of oppression. The church will have to enter the political arena to do this.’ In a sense, therefore, the clergy was concerned that civil liberties had been curtailed and saw it as their duty to contribute to bringing about change. While the church contributed tremendously to democratisation process in Kenya, there were limitations in that much of the political stance taken during the process of political liberalisation was largely a function of ethnicity and political patronage. The social bases of most of the ‘activist’ institutions were ethnic groups with strong political traditions but which had been excluded from power, particularly the Luo, Luhya and the Kikuyu who were, after Jomo Kenyatta died, systematically purged out of the centres of power. What this shows is that in most African societies, ethnicity and political patronage have to be taken into serious consideration in civil society discourse. The Uganda case The church in Uganda played quite a different role to that of its Kenyan counterparts. This is explained through an examination of the determinants of church involvement in Uganda’s socio-political conflicts and an examination of the restricted nature of the church’s discourse on democracy and human rights in Uganda. Finally, the implications of the tendency for sections of the Ugandan church to identify itself with the holders of power is explored. The identification of the Anglican and Catholic churches as establishment and anti-establishment respectively had profound implications for the involvement of the church in the struggle for democratisation in Uganda. It produced an animosity between the two Christian churches with disastrous results for the democratisation process as it has precluded the presentation of any form of united front on issues of civil liberties and human rights. The historical origins of this animosity can be traced to the colonial period. The Catholic Church lost the battle for political power to the Anglican Church in the 1890s. From then, the Catholic Church concentrated on building up a ‘spiritual kingdom’, parallel to the state but not in direct competition with it, loyally co-operating with the colonial government in a more or less apolitical way. The centrality of the Catholic Church in the formation of the opposition Democratic Party in the mid-1950s only exacerbated this polarisation. This compromised the autonomy that civil society organisations such as the church are supposed to have. The position of the Anglican Church did not help matters as there appeared divisions in its internal organisational structures on the basis of ethnicity and regionalism. The nature of church-state interaction and the articulation of the democratic question by the church was further complicated by unresolved regional and ethnic issues. Overall, these divisions obstructed the capacity of the church to advance the collective will of the society on issues of democracy and human rights. During colonialism and especially towards independence, the ethnic question came to dominate the internal politics of the Anglican Church. If the Baganda were preoccupied with fears of losing their status and integrity as a nation in an independent Uganda, other ethnic groups were equally apprehensive about renewed domination by Buganda. The election of the first Anglican African Bishop in 1965, Bishop Erika Sabiti, a non-Muganda, caused an uproar. Such ethnic chauvinism could not help to bring the church to the fore on the major issues of democracy and democratisation. By contrast, the Catholic Church under the leadership of Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka in the late colonial era emphasised the need for respect for human rights and, inter alia, for the equality of the people. While this was positive in comparison to the Anglican Church, it could not be realised in practical terms. The propositions of individual bishops are no substitute for institutional capacities and the Catholic Church was unable escape the vexed problem of ethnicity. Overall, the combination of the unresolved regional question, the animosity between the Catholic and Anglican churches plus the quasi-establishment stance of the Anglican Church, precluded the full deployment of the organisational capacities of the Christian church in Uganda to mount an effective challenge to authoritarianism in the country. This is illustrated by the fact that the erosion of human rights and civil liberties in post-colonial Uganda, was, in general, met with silence by the church. Typical comments that were made did not directly concern the internal politics of Uganda. On January 16, 1967, for instance, the government ordered ten Roman Catholic missionaries to leave the country. Archbishop Emmanuel Nsubuga (RIP) issued a statement in protest: “Catholics in Uganda and elsewhere are deeply perturbed by the government’s decision this week to expel 10 priests who were accused of helping and sheltering Sudanese rebels and of involving Uganda in danger of a war with the Sudan.” Internally, however, the Church remained silent as hundreds of political figures were detained without trial in the 1960s. At the height of human rights abuses in the 1970s during Idi Amin’s regime, a unity against oppression was forged between Buganda and the rest of Uganda, between Catholics and Protestants, and within the Church itself. However, inspite of this, weaknesses in the church of Uganda, the religious rivalries between Catholics and Protestants, inhibited an effective response. Perhaps the context, particularly the character of Idi Amin’s regime, conditioned any response. As one commentator correctly observed, “to protest was to risk some definable punishment that could be calculated in advance ... ills involving loss of property, torture, imprisonment and death, not to mention reprisals on ones family”. For example, Anglican Archbishop Janan Luwum was murdered while several other bishops had to flee to exile in order to survive during the Amin era. Survival became paramount to the struggle for human rights. Perhaps the major failing of the Christian church in the democratisation process in Uganda has been the maintenance of the quasi-establishment stance of the Anglican Church on the one hand, and the ambiguity of the Catholic Church on the question of democracy, on the other. This ambiguity in the Catholic Church was exemplified by the wavering positions of the Church leadership on the question of democracy. In 1986, for instance, the Catholic bishops declared that “a multi-party system of government is an expression of the fundamental principle of freedom of assembly and association guaranteed by our National Constitution”. Three years later they had fallen in line with the state position on the democratisation process and the return of multi-party politics. They collectively stated that on “the concrete question of what form government Uganda should adopt, we must state clearly that the church does not advocate one form”. Patronage and corruption, as in Kenya, further compounded the situation. Patronage-based political economies like that of Uganda produce incentives for civil society actors to organise platforms for gaining power rather than creating reform. State officials both threaten and infiltrate organisations in order to deflect initiatives for reform. The increasingly dwindling sources of donor funds resulted in religious leaders – Christian and Muslim, succumbing to patronage from the state. For instance, all religious leaders received donations of four-wheel drive vehicles from the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government of President Yoweri Museveni. As a result, the church in Uganda has more often than not blessed the wishes of the power holders. This is clearly illustrated by the stand of the church on the so-called no-party system of governance. As R. Kassimir has noted: Clearly the current political system under the NRM falls short of the definition of democracy commonly accepted by civil society approaches, with critics pointing not only to the unfair electoral advantages of the NRM in a no-party system, but also to restrictions on associational rights in civil society itself. In spite of this the church has largely endorsed these infringements on inalienable fundamental human rights at the altar of patronage from the state. The elevation of the NRM, which is in reality a political party, to a ‘system’ and then to subject the population to a referendum on ‘political systems’ in June 2000, was an abuse of the civil rights of the people of Uganda. Yet, the church, which should have acted as the voice of the voiceless, largely endorsed the process. The Ugandan Joint Christian Council (UJCC), in a joint pastoral letter of May 24, 1999, was supportive of the referendum. It suggested that “the referendum on political systems ... offers to the people of Uganda the opportunity to make a choice of the political system that best promotes the interests of the country”. Six weeks later a law to regulate the process. The Referendum Act (1999) was fraudulently passed in parliament without a quorum present. Yet, three months later, the same joint council was urging people, using the usual state arguments, to participate in the exercise essentially aimed at entrenching a one party monolithic state. The UJCC recommended that, “The referendum is a constitutional issue. So it is being recommended that in the spirit of constitutionalism all citizens should participate”. As noted earlier, this stand of the Church on the democratisation process in Uganda stands in stack contrast to that of the Kenyan churches which in the 1980s and 1990s took upon themselves the role of advocating democracy. The author is a lecturer at Makerere University’s Political Science Department. He is currently based at the Graduate School of Public and Development Management at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. © 2003 The Monitor Publications Mitayo Potosi _________________________________________________________________ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 -------------------------------------------- This service is hosted on the Infocom network http://www.infocom.co.ug
