DP’s founding vision is national: A response to Mulira and Adhola

My recent article argued that the storm in DP’s cup are symptomatic of the cracks in the foundation of our beloved country Uganda. The article has drawn responses from people I hold in the highest esteem.

The first response came from senior lawyer Peter Mulira. He argued correctly that we cannot solely blame colonialism for all our woes. We should take responsibility for our predicament as Africans. I agree.

Mulira also lambasted me for attributing the turmoil in the Democratic Party to sectarianism. Tribalism is not something you can easily pinpoint but once it is there it cannot be mistaken for anything else. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is a duck. The ugly face of sectarianism is unmistakeable. Sectarianism stems from a sense of entitlement. The Italians, particularly those from the Mafia territory of Palermo, call it the “cosa nostra” (our thing) mentality. My view is that the strong position of Buganda in DP should be a strength not a weakness.

But I think Mulira missed my main point. My central argument is that Uganda needs a new consensus. We live in a country where we were simply fenced in together by colonial fiat. If we are to be together, where is the glue that holds us together? When you hear people talk you only hear of tribes. Where are the Ugandans? What is the one thing that can make us rise above the confines of our tribes?

Mulira seems to suggest that tribalism is not a reality. We see the way juicy positions in government and parastatals are apportioned and realise that some communities are favoured. Meritocracy has been thrown overboard. None of us should defend sectarianism or try to sweep it under the carpet. More importantly we should never use sectarianism to fight sectarianism.

This brings me to Yoga Adhola’s article where he distorts history and concludes that DP was custom built for Buganda and the Catholic Church. It is true that when there is oppression, you organise around your identity as the oppressed. For instance, women organise as women to fight for gender equality. Blacks in America organised as Blacks to combat racist policies. Yoga Adhola rightly makes reference to the religious war of Buganda which entrenched Protestant hegemony over the Catholics and Muslims.

If the outcome of that war resulted into an unacceptable status quo, then it is logical that those who felt downtrodden had to organise around their unique identity as the oppressed to liberate themselves and their society.

Many organisations start with a small nucleus. Even Christianity started with a nucleus in the Middle East but it is now a global faith. In the Roman Catholic Church it was difficult at one point to imagine a non-Italian Pope. With time Popes were elected from outside Italy.

The NRM which has dominated Uganda for more than 30 years started as an almost exclusively Bantu affair. They mobilised around an anti-northerners agenda. If you look at the delegations that participated in the Nairobi Peace Talks of 1985, you notice that while Tito Okello’s delegation had a national character, Yoweri Museveni’s delegation was purely Bantu. But now the NRM has embraced people from all over Uganda. The same applies to DP.

The germ of the idea may have sprouted from Buganda and among Catholics but DP eventually became a national party indispensable to Uganda’s democracy. Surely Yoga Adhola should know that the cradle of an organisation should not be its entire destiny. Organisations grow beyond their cradles. In the 80s, Tiberio Okeny mounted an unsuccessful leadership challenge against Ssemogerere. He gathered around him a handful of stalwarts from Acholiland. But it is some senior DP leaders from Acholiland who told him plainly that Ssemogerere is the DP leader and the elected national leaders of the party deserve the full allegiance of members irrespective of tribe or religion.

Okeny’s party did not gain traction. The situation was worsened by the 1985 coup and the Museveni takeover which put parties in limbo for more than 20 years. It will make a big difference if senior DP elders from Buganda tell off the Ssuubi and Truth and Justice elements and disabuse them of their misguided sense of entitlement the same way Acholi leaders intervened to stem the tide of Okeny’s uprising.

The founding vision of DP is national and anybody who undermines the national character of the party does not serve the party vision.
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