{UAH} Why no ‘big’ presidential aspirants from outside Ankole-Kigezi? Here’s an answer

Why no 'big' presidential aspirants from outside Ankole-Kigezi? Here's an answer

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By Charles Onyango-Obbo 

Posted  Wednesday, October 7   2015 at  01:00

There is something unusual about the forthcoming election.

For the first time in a long while, in terms of what at this stage one might call the "main contenders" come from what, really, is a small corner of western Uganda.
Basically the Ankole-Kigezi belt, and all of Bunyoro, Tooro, and Rwenzori swathes are, like the south, east, north, and West Nile almost onlookers.

Those who like to look at things in ethnic terms would say the election is shaping up to be a sectarian western Uganda race. It is not, the contest is even smaller. If this race were happening in the 1800s, it would be a race between clans.

Also, by the look of things, for the first time since 2001, there is no strong female voice on the frontlines of the campaign, nor indeed a woman, in the race that is unfolding.
What the hell is going on?

The possible absence of women jostling with the men for power might be an indictment of Uganda's politics, a result of the belief that the kind of change they seek can no longer be delivered in the current environment.

They have a point. When you have a female Member of Parliament kneeling before the President to read a petition declaring him sole NRM candidate, you know the game is over.

And for good measure, I saw photographs where some political supplicants were kneeling for Amama Mbabazi and his dear wife Jacqueline.

But that this could be an Ankole-Kigezi scrap tells an even more intriguing story. It suggests that Uganda's regional and tribal politics, might have had the opposite effect – it could have partly detribalised our politics.

Also the NRM's authoritarian politics and early one-party politics, has turned it into the kind of parties – the Democratic Party, the Uganda People's Congress, the Conservative Party (CP) – that it tried so hard to kill. 
To this latter point we shall return in future, for today let's explain the detribalisation idea.

During the NRM's one-party/no-party era, parties were allowed to operate newspapers, have offices, but not conduct any other activity, including running against NRM.

Unable to organise freely nationally, they were confined to the petty politics of the headquarters, and the disgruntled elite around Kampala.
Ugandan politics became an affair between people who knew each, and were even family friends.

The scuffles in UPC involving Cecilia Ogwal and people like James Rwanyarare was a battle between the rump of the UPC politburo that Milton Obote left behind when he fled in 1985 after the coup. These fellows were friends.

Even today, the feud we see in UPC involving Olara Otunnu and Jimmy Akena is nothing but a quarrel in the family compound.
These are all Obote's biological and political children.

In DP, Ssebaana Kizito, Nasser Sebaggala, Erias Lukwago and other party stalwarts is a tussle not just of men from the same Buganda region, but also chaps who have eaten together for a long time. In that sense, DP boss Norbert Mao is a partial outsider.

Now because NRM had used the police, army and law to make it impossible for other parties to organise nationally, it never developed organic (emphasis on organic) party structures to compete against them either. It was happy, as it is today, to use muscle.

But that also meant that the regional fights that you read in history, that happened in "UPC Buganda" and were then introduced inside the UPC as part of the many factional fights, didn't happen inside NRM.

If people couldn't organise freely in Acholi, they couldn't bring the contradiction of Acholi politics inside NRM.
The only "native contradictions" were from the area where NRM had an old social base, because that is where it was most organised during the bush war. And that was in Buganda and the west.
There was an emotional transference in Buganda, following the restoration of the kingdoms, and loyalties were shifted to Kabaka Ronnie Mutebi and allegiances formed around Mengo. 
That left only western Uganda, as the region that was free to cultivate its local politics, and export that to the NRM.
In the tug of wars inside UPC, DP, and NRM, Ugandan politics has been defined in ways that you rarely see in other parts of Africa.

The bitterest wars are not between regions and ethnic groups, but within them, for power.
Having three people from a small part of the west leading the fight for the presidency is not yet a full-blown sign that Ugandans are nationalistic. Rather, that that is something that is familiar.

Good old-fashioned "tribalism" is still a big issue in Uganda, but increasingly we approach it in a wonderfully schizophrenic way – we seem to see it is a distribution problem, not a political one.
And now, I will turn my computer off, and go to sleep.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian AFRICA (mgafrica.com). Twitter:@cobbo3

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Gwokto La'Kitgum

"Even a small dog can piss on a tall Building", Jim Hightower

"But this I know, UPC believed and still believes in

very high education. We can call Obote all bad names we have, but the bottom line remains that he got more scholarships for Buganda than all previous Uganda leaders combined. That includes Sir Edward Mutesa, President Lule, President Binayisa, up to and into Ssabasajja Mutebi. Who all happen to be Baganda leaders." Mulindwa

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