*Re: Political forces behind the Mengo matter* *Sseruganda Old Boy Mr Kintu-Nyago,
Your analysis is spot on. There is one angle though, you have missed. It is the under-the-table machinations now going on between UPC and Mengo. During day-time Yoga Adhola shouts himself insane how evil Baganda are, but in the middle of the night him and Golooba-Mutebi (and a few other chaps) are to found scheming at Kabaka Mutebi's dinner table. The elevation of Golooba-Mutebi by Mengo to the tittle of Buganda's liaison officer with the rest of Uganda has been in the works for quite some time now. In fact it was cooked up by UPC cadres here in the West. It, at first, may appear strange that Mengo and UPC are still having these contacts, under the table, but like you said, the British WASP cannot be expected to have abandoned their tools for control of Africa so easily. They have agents in both Mengo and Namirembe. You say that today even Lubaga is on board. I find it very intriguing that Westminster has found common cause with Rome. But it makes sense since the CIA and MI6 are all WASP institutions. In the scramble for Africa I wonder who, the Chinese or the WASP, will emerge on top. Meanwhile, daily, we continue to see Western institutions rotting and collapsing. It is a strange world. Thank you for your time, comrade !! Mitayo Potosi. =====================* Political forces behind the Mengo matter Kintu Nyago Kampala The argument that government’s refusal to allow Kabaka Mutebi to travel to Kayunga is what led to the riots of the September 10 to 12 fails to explain the actual underlying causes between the two protagonists. The main cause is the debate whether the Mengo establishment (former President Milton Obote used to refer to them as a clique) should be given absolute political power in contemporary Uganda. The forces behind Mengo are not homogenous. They include nostalgic feudalists who clamour for a 1962 independence constitutional type dispensation. This explosive document was crafted by Dr Obote’s Uganda Peoples Congress, the Kabaka Yekka (KY) and the departing British colonial masters at the Lancaster House Constitutional Conference. It gave political power to the Kabaka and Mengo by disenfranchising the ordinary Baganda whose members of Parliament were nominated by a KY monopolised Lukiiko, while also creating a Buganda state within Uganda. Even then, voices of reason opposed this arrangement. These included Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Democratic Party, who actually walked out of the Lancaster House talks, and also the venerated statesman, Catholic Archbishop Joseph Kiwanuka. Both warned against the danger of indulging the Kabaka into politics. But this minority voice was overruled in the interests of the UPC-KY alliance and the British. The result was the creation of a constitutional dispensation that nurtured conflict. Little wonder we reaped the 1966 Crisis and its most traumatic aftermath. Today’s DP has reinvented itself and re-emerged much akin to its 1962 nemesis, the KY. Certainly, both the Archbishop and the DP supremo do turn in their graves at this very thought! For the DP having lost its social political base to the NRM in Buganda, Busoga and Western Uganda, resorted to infiltration of Mengo by articulating a populist political demand for federalism, for its very survival. Hence, the reason DP cadres as Medard Ssegona Akalya-amagwa and Betty Namboze are prominently positioned at Mengo. Probably, they do love their Kabaka. However, it’s wrong for them to involve him in partisan politics for their selfish partisan ends. And it’s disingenuous for them to argue that President Museveni and the NRM are opposed to cultural institutions. For without the democratic political space the NRM struggled to introduce, and the singular determination of Museveni, we would have had no kings in Uganda today. For prior to the 1993 restoration, the dominant tendency within both the NRM and the country was opposed to any such restoration. This explains why this demand was omitted in the manifestoes of both the UPC and DP in the 1980 elections. The third force located at Mengo is that of FDC’s Dr Kizza Besigye. Dr Besigye lacks any monarchist credentials. And was on record to have opposed Museveni’s move to restore these institutions in the 1992 Army Council debate of this issue in Gulu. It marks the height of irony, that the same Dr Besigye is now the daring of Mengo! Unlike the most probably naive Mr Segona and Ms Namboze, Dr Besigye has a more calculating and sinister motive to locate himself at Mengo at this juncture. For unfolding events within both his FDC and nationally have made Dr Besigye to be at his most vulnerable political point ever. Within FDC the irrepressible Beti Kamya recently mounted a mutiny, around the question of Buganda’s marginalisation in that party. This has denied Dr Besigye the little support he had in this region. While the entrance of both DP’s Norbert Mao and the UPC’s Olara Otunnu in the forthcoming Presidential race, indicate that come the next elections, if Dr Besigye is to lead the FDC, then that party had better kiss good bye to the Acholi, Teso and West Nile vote. Incidentally, this is where they got the bulk of their support in 2001 (for Reform Agenda) and 2006 (FDC). Hence Dr Besigye’s current gimmicks at Mengo, calling for an intransigent Kabaka and the immediate granting of Federalism etc. All this is sinister. For Dr Besigye having been a most senior member of the NRM/A, knows fully well the thinking and tenacity of his former colleagues. They would never surrender to political pressure articulated through riots and intimidation. He also knows the enormous capacity of our current State. Hence his sinister advocacy for a confrontation between Mengo and the government, one that definitely the former can’t win, is aimed at causing the embarrassment of the Kabaka or worse! Then lastly is the external Gadhaffi variable. Libya’s Col. Muammar Gadhafi, hitherto a close ally to Mr Museveni and the NRM, is now reportedly behaving as a jilted lover. All due to Mr Museveni’s principled rejection of the over ambitious attempt to leapfrog Africa into a political union with Gadhafi at its helm. In turn, the Libyan leader, who has a long history of funding subversion and dissent abroad, is now reportedly funding Mengo and elements of the political Opposition! It’s this complex web of factors that set the stage for last week’s confrontation and riots. [email protected]
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