{UAH} Will Buganda Be Governed by Museveni -Mengo MOU?

Ssemujju Nganda: Will Buganda be governed by Museveni -Mengo MOU?

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Tuesday, 13 August 2013 22:31

Written by Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda

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Last week, I travelled to Bunyoro for the second time in two months, to check on the new infrastructure that is springing up in this area.

Together with members of the committee on the National Economy, I travelled about 60 kilometres outside Hoima town towards Lake Albert for an on-spot check on the Kabalega hydro power station.

This small power station, which generates about 9MW, and government, want to borrow about $30 million to transmit this power (9MW) to a sub-station near Hoima town for distribution to other users including Kinyara Sugar Works.

On our way from the Kabalega hydro power station, we travelled on part of a brand new tarmac road, Hoima-Kaiso Tonya, being constructed by a Turkish company also using borrowed money. There is also another loan to construct a tarmac road between Hoima and Masindi up to Kiryandongo.

There are two points to note here. First, all the major infrastructure projects in Bunyoro are being funded by loans to be repaid after 30 to 40 years. Secondly, the current generation of leaders will not pay a single penny towards servicing of these loans.

One would therefore be right to say that our children or grand children who will service these loans are the ones funding the development of Bunyoro. I have already written about the level of indebtedness in earlier articles. Uganda is now the most indebted member of the East African Community.

Remember in the late 1990s, some of our lenders wrote off the biggest portion of our foreign debt reducing it to something like $1.5 billion. It is now approaching $6 billion yet our visionary ruler continues to create an impression that the economy is doing well and that we are able to fund nearly the whole of our budget. There is excitement in Bunyoro that finally this government has remembered them.

But also important to note is that Bunyoro is being remembered after discovery of commercial quantities of oil deposits. There will now be a refinery in Bunyoro, some sort of a modern airport, tarmac roads, new power sub-stations and a railway line.

Why, then, did African scholars blame Europeans for having laid communication networks targeting mining areas and the coast to enable export of raw materials? Our visionary leader is not a colonialist but a patriotic Pan-Africanist. How come he is behaving like Sir Philip Mitchell and Capt Frederick Lugard?

The visionary is in Entebbe dispensing handouts, his parking yard permanently filled to capacity with needy people pleading for his personal rescue. From MPs to cultural leaders and Muslims looking for a decent iftar meal – all trek to Entebbe. That is how far we have travelled back in history.

And that brings me to the Entebbe memorandum of understanding (MOU) the visionary leader signed with Buganda over ebyaffe. Katikkiro Charles Peter Mayiga claims he signed it with him [Museveni] but the visionary says he signed it with our Kabaka.

Certainly the return of our property and payment of what is due to Buganda is a welcome development. It is the manner in which it was done that I have a problem with.

Buganda becomes the first claimant to sign an MOU not with government but with the president. And there are conditions to fulfill, including the fact that Mengo must stop criticising the NRM government.
But most intriguing is that under the MOU, the Kabaka of Buganda is now free to move within his kingdom. Pardon me! I thought movements within Uganda by every citizen are guaranteed by the Constitution and not a Capt Lugard of sorts in Entebbe.

So the MOU has become some sort of a travel permit that the katikkiro must wave at Grace Turyagumanawe at Ssezibwa bridge for him to cross to Bugerere. The other day our Kabaka was humiliated for not answering someone's phone calls. Won't he be humiliated again for not respecting the MOU?

There are interesting quotations in Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom that I want to use to conclude my column today.

At one point during his 27-year incarceration, Mandela was offered a conditional release but he responded: "I am not prepared to sell the birth-right of the people to be free."

The popularity of leaders like Mandela was an invitation to counter-attack by the government. Mandela was banned from speaking, from attending gatherings, from leaving Johannesburg (You can compare this to Banda or Kasangati), from belonging to any organisation. Speeches, demonstrations, peaceful protests all became illegal.

Of all that group of young men, Mandela and his close friend and co-leader Walter Sisulu were perhaps the fastest to get to grips with the harsh realities of an African struggle against the most powerful adversary in Africa: a highly industrialized, well armed state manned by a fanatical group of white men determined to defend their privileges and their prejudice.

This white group was aided by the complicity of American, British, West German and Japanese investment in the most profitable system of oppression on the continent.
For God and My Country!

The author is Kyadondo East MP.
semugs@yahoo.com