KALUNDI SERUMAGA

Kampala

“The vulgarized version of national integration goes like this: ‘We are Ugandans and we all have equal inherent rights to all parts of Uganda’.....We NRM members cannot undermine our vision and programme by associating ourselves with the vulgarized versions..... Genuine integration must include scrupulous respect of everybody’s rights to the land of their heritage.......”

With this bald statement - described by one leading newspaper as a “tribal bombshell” - contained in a July 15 letter offering “guidance” to his minister, President Yoweri Museveni took the country he heads several steps further towards either federation or disintegration, depending on how the various other players exploit this monumental climb-down.

He has proposed that all substantial elective posts –from county and district chairmanships, through to parliamentary seats in the oil-rich Lake Albert Bunyoro (“Unyoro” in Kiswahili) region be “ring-fenced”, making only indigenous Wanyoro eligible to compete for them.

He did not stop at this proposed violation to existing election laws. He went on to further propose that “indigenous Banyoro” be given exclusive ownership rights to any land in Bunyoro, be it public land, or land still registered to the descendants of colonial-era landlords, that they currently occupy.

The President did emphasize that these were mere proposals for the relevant ministerial committee to consider, and added the proviso of a “sunset” clause to rescind any such legislation after a period of 20 years, during which time, the beneficiaries of the land allocations would not be allowed to sell it.

With the ongoing discovery and development of the oilfields in the Albertine Graben since the late 1990’s, ancient and new grievances lying dormant in the area have similarly risen to the surface.

The story of the decline of Bunyoro lies at the heart of the story of the creation of Uganda. Through a series of military expeditions starting in 1893, this empire was virtually destroyed and depopulated by the notorious British soldiers Lugard and Colville, using Swahili mercenaries and remnants of Gen.Charles Gordon’s defeated Sudanese garrison.

They also drafted and armed the Anglican anti-Kabaka faction within the Buganda Kingdom, whose commanders were to obtain private estates in parts of Bunyoro, thus sowing some of the seeds of the current controversy.

Emperor Kabalega’s war of resistance ended with his 1899 capture and imprisonment in first Kismayu (British Somaliland), and later the Seychelles, alongside Buganda’s Kabaka Mwanga whom Lugard’s Anglicans had also deposed. Mwanga died in captivity, and Kabalega was to die later on his way back home after being reprieved in 1926.

After the defeat, the Bunyoro empire was dismembered, and parts of it annexed to neighboring territories like Buganda, Toro, Busoga and Lango. The British went on to exterminate virtually the entire cattle population in Bunyoro, in an attempt to make the menfolk take to growing cotton, and passed decrees banning native ownership of land, as well as the erection of permanent buildings. It was, in short, attempted genocide, going by the current United Nations definitions.

These historical grievances were first exploited by Obote’s Uganda Peoples Congress party to politically isolate the Kingdom of Buganda and led to the wrecking of their joint post-independence coalition government in 1966, ushering in a three-decade cycle of coups and civil wars. The principal victims of this breakdown were the Ugandan federal system; the opportunity for indigenous Africans throughout Uganda to resolve native land ownership claims against Lugard’s state; and native government institutions of Buganda, Bunyoro and elsewhere, which were outlawed by the 1967 Obote-inspired “Republican Constitution”.

The National Resistance Movement introduced itself in Ugandan politics as a promised panacea to all these ills. Their bush war 10-Point Programme itemized a solution to each grievance. However, they were to deliver largely form over substance. The Buganda Kingdom was reinstalled but with no federal powers to collect taxes, or legally own its own territory; the Bunyoro Kingdom was also reinstalled but with no powers to do anything about the Anglicans’ land and the large number of largely “Bakiga” (from Kigezi in the south west) migrant peasants who had been “legally” settled there by any one of the dictatorships that ruled the country in the intervening three decades.

“30 thousand Bakiga were each given, free of charge, 12 acres of land, plus Shs15 million plus facilities like good roads, medical service, schools…things which Banyoro have never got.” complains Henry Mirima, a long-term campaigner for reparations for Bunyoro from Britain, and occasional spokesman for the native Nyoro government.

Everything changed, but everything also stayed the same. That is, until the true extent of the vast oilfields in Bunyoro came to be known. Now, the differences among the various parties interested in Bunyoro have been thrown into high relief. Furthermore, with one more oil giant and another from Turkey reportedly expressing interests in buying into the ongoing oilfield developments, the stakes just got higher.

The migrant populations – most of whose leaders are supporters of the current ruling party as well as the ones that preceded it -- have vowed to make the President eat his words and withdraw his proposal.

What is at stake for them is their undeniable prosperity under this regime, as well as previous ones as a result of the resettlement schemes. This is now translating itself into political power, as they progressively increase their share of elective posts in the areas they dominate numerically. Of the four parliamentarians from the region only one is an indigene. To the native Banyoro, held back by history, this rankles.

“You came to dig, not to rule” is an insult they often hurled at the migrants. But with the prospects of digging up oil, and not merely earth, looming ever larger, the migrants are determined to stay.

The King of Bunyoro (a direct descendant of the mighty Kabalega) has publicly endorsed the President’s proposals. This has been echoed by his most senior native government officials, senior NRM government officials of indigenous Nyoro origin, as well as significant sections of Bunyoro civil society.

The NRM government sees the prospect of oil revenues as perhaps its last possible chance to rid itself of the humiliating diktats that come with donor dependency; and to raise cash for its long promised industrial revolution, not to mention generally bolstering its “popularity” through having control of such a large, independent purse when elections come around.

Therefore, the last thing it needs is the emergence of a Niger Delta type oil war, rooted in dissipated ethnic grievances, in a region of the country neighboring the war zones of two long-term failed states (Democratic Republic of Congo, and non-contiguously, South Sudan). 

The irony here is that it is the NRM’s own Obote-style attempts to also politically isolate Buganda in the face of that kingdom’s own demands that the NRM bush war promises - of return of native Ganda land through federation - be kept, that have given rise to this militant Nyoro nationalism.

The NRM has been actively promoting the claims by ethnic minorities in Buganda who now claim to have been victims of “sub-imperialism”. The strategy seemed to have been to break Buganda down into a host of tiny principalities so as to render federation unfeasible.

Bunyoro leaders were drafted in as the enthusiastic “point men” of this process, by claiming that much of Buganda is actually Nyoro territory that was conquered with Lugard’s help. 

But the price of keeping them on board the anti-Buganda bandwagon was to have to begin making concessions to their other demands against migrants to Bunyoro proper.

Like much of sub-saharan Africa, Uganda remains caught up in historical tension between the rights based on modern citizenship underpinned by the laws of these former colonies, and the older cultural rights of the communities that preceded the colonies and that were swallowed by them, but refused to disappear. Like Obote’s UPC before it, the NRM has sought to politically exploit these tensions, instead of responsibly resolving them. They now face the prospect of being consumed by them, just as the two UPC governments were.

Hence the current demographic gymnastics. In the face of growing Nyoro militancy (culminating in a reported 14-hour meeting-cum-brow-beating-session with leaders from Bunyoro at the end of June), President Museveni is compelled to go on record recognizing in Bunyoro the very same “native rights” principle he opposes in Buganda.

However, his resultant proposals imply the violation of at least three principles of the NRM-made 1995 Constitution; on citizens’ rights, on electoral and on anti-sectarian laws. Ironically, it has now been left to the country’s political Opposition and accompanying commentarial - all republicans at heart - to leap to the defense of those NRM principles, even as one of its principal architects abandons them.

Buganda’s leadership must now be quietly “laughing into their fists” (as Baganda say) at this harvest of ironies; the sight of this wholesale embrace of their arguments for indigenous rights being made by their most implacable critic, not to mention the resultant consternation among the die-hard NRM advocates of what their boss has now dismissed as “vulgar”.

All Buganda has to now do is to point out that what’s good for the Nyoro goose should be good for the Ganda gander.

And therein lies the future challenge for the NRM government, given the many long-standing indigenous claims against the state’s national parks, mining concessions and the settlers that often come in its wake being made by the Karimojong, Mt Elgon’s Benet-Ndorobo and Bwindi’s Twa people for a start. Will Museveni manage to “ring-fence” his policy proposals to Bunyoro?

And what if such thinking were to spread to other parts of the region? The past and recent ethnic cleansing in Kenya’s Rift Valley, based also on competing claims between indigenes against descendants of fellow Kenyans deemed to have bought land stolen by white settlers and then sold on to them, is a very analogous situation. What will this mean for the promised “free movement of goods and people” under the proposed East African Federation? Already, Tanzania had formally expressed an unwillingness to go ahead with the fast-tracking unless Uganda first develops a clear and workable policy on land ownership.

Perhaps the most logical thing is to do what President Museveni is proposing: make friends with the group you estimate to have the greatest capacity to cause the worst trouble for the longest time, and forget about constitutional principles. The trouble with that is it may also mark the end of the modern African state.

Perhaps not such a bad thing after all, given its talent for creating more problems than it solves.

This is a slightly abridged version of the article which was published in The East African news, on Monday, August 31, 2009

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