{UAH} NRM's clever politics leads to fire on the mountains - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
|
12:10 PM |
No comments |
NRM's clever politics leads to fire on the mountains - Comment
The recent bloody events leading to a reported 90 deaths across three districts straddling the Rwenzori mountain range of southwestern Uganda are now well known.
The worst-case scenario is that we face an ethnic uprising backed by a few rebel groups operating on both sides of the locally invisible Uganda/DRC border. Apart from the souls who perished, over 20 military rifles were also stolen.
President Yoweri Museveni's subsequent broadside against "chauvinism" only obscured the issues surrounding the deadly unrest, and set off a war of words with one Wesley Mumbere, leader of the numerically dominant Konzo ethnic group whom the president basically accused of attempted ethnic cleansing. Angry denials soon followed, and have been followed by threats of arrest.
However, given that the raiders reportedly targeted army and police positions, there exists scepticism of the governments' attempts to frame the crisis as "tribal clashes."
Others take the longer view that the president has brought all this on himself by letting the kingdoms genie out of the bottle in which it has been sealed since 1967, starting with the 1993 concession to demands from the south-central Kingdom of Buganda that the terms of the war-time pact that created Museveni's National Resistance Movement be honoured.
To the outside observer, these kingdoms may indeed seem an outdated oddity. But this is in fact a discourse about the future, much as it seems framed in the language of the past.
Despite periodic bouts of electoral theatre, Uganda has not held one single free and fair general election, right from Independence in 1962, to date.
In such an absence of conventional democratic traditions, many issues that would have been grist to the mill of some NGO in Kenya, for example, are instead voiced through native institutions.
The attraction is obvious: Beyond being born into it, there is no membership qualification, and so they offer the possibility of wide civic access.
In that context, a real throne does actually serve an important political function.
The actual problem is that NRM leaders have never met a valid political idea that they did not then try to corrupt by trying to co-opt it into the service of their own ends.
History Professor Mwambutsya Ndebesa blames the "mystery of the Rwenzori attacks" on Uganda's "politics of patronage."
"The NRM has been constructing political support, through recognising new kingdoms whose leaders are given big cars and a monthly stipend.," he explains. "Those who receive gifts are expected to be clients of the regime."
This is only part of the story. I have argued elsewhere and at my peril, that through reviving old conflicts, exacerbating existing ones, and also inventing wholly new ones between the various communities, there is a deeper purpose aimed at debasing the authenticity of native voices.
Uganda was birthed by the extended collapse of the Bunyoro Empire, a process only accelerated by the aggressive British imperialist Captain Frederick Lugard, whose conquests of various nationalities here culminated in Bunyoro's military destruction in 1899.
As the fires on what was once Bunyoro's southern mountain province called Tooro show, the consequences of that collapse still reverberate today.
Centred on the lake now called Albert, Bunyoro's distinct ethnic regions were governed militarily, enabling ambitious governing princes to contemplate secession.
An 1896 Tooro succession dispute provided Lugard with the perfect excuse for invading Bunyoro in "defence" of what today would be claimed as Tooro's democracy. By thus inventing Uganda, he also became, in effect, its first president.
Today, from the probable site of Lugard's first fort, now known as Kampala State House, President Museveni faithfully follows his predecessor's doctrine.
In 2009, the president endorsed Mumbere's breaking of the Konzo away from Tooro. Not surprisingly, a subsequent presidential endorsement in May this year of one Martin Kamya as the "king" of the Mba, a minority now demanding separate territorial recognition from the Konzo, has left the freshly minted King Mumbere as annoyed as the Kingdom of Tooro was when the NRM government smiled upon him, and no doubt as annoyed as Bunyoro's Emperor Kabalega was when his chief in Tooro was ousted by Lugard.
There is nothing new here. The real questions are: Why are all these conflicts flaring up now and why only in particular places? The most likely answer comes in one word: Oil.
Lugard's interest was land. By also opportunistically inserting himself into domestic governance matters, the current president continues the Lugardist tradition, but this time so as to get to the wealth underneath.
If one were to overlay a map of where Uganda's oil deposits are found and suspected to be, on to a map of the "new throne" areas, one would be struck by the extent to which they match up.
Simply put, the ruling party has spent the past decade cynically misusing the argument for cultural representation to try to balkanise the oil-bearing areas of the countryside so as to confound genuine native claims to mineral rights.
With these outbreaks of violence, it would appear that this game — mistaken for clever politics by some analysts —is finally catching up with them.
Kalundi Serumanga is a social and political commentator based in Kampala.
0 comments:
Post a Comment