Ear To The Ground: How Binaisa and folks like Sam Odaka became strange creatures

Former president Godfrey Binaisa passed on, and has been interred. May his soul rest in peace. I will not write about Binaisa the man; rather what he represented. As Attorney General, Binaisa was among the first generation of leaders who held office after independence. This was the “nation building” phase of Uganda’s history.

What was unique about this period? Well, with independence for the first time one tribe had to submit to be ruled by another voluntarily. When the colonialists arrived, the Baganda had their king, the Batooro theirs, the Banyankole theirs, and you had other chieftains that were homogenous. The only way other tribes had ruled each other before the colonialists arrived was primarily through conquest.

When the British left, it was the first time one group of “natives” was governing another without having won the right to do so in a battlefield. We cannot underestimate how strange that was both for the leaders and the led. It was an exercise that was more likely to go wrong, than right. And it went horribly wrong.

The leaders then went about working on the structures that would allow these previously independent communities to live together voluntarily; this is what “nation building” is all about. It is making it worthwhile for these groups to accept that the government need not be led by one of their own, because the “foreigner” will still govern them like their own king or chief would have.

All Ugandan leaders have failed in this last endeavour of “nation building”, and today the government does not even bother. However, Binaisa and others like Milton Obote, had an experience no other group of leaders in Uganda ever will – being the first group of indigenous people to lead the new construct called Uganda.

After a combined force of Ugandan exile rebel groups and the Tanzanian army ousted military strongman Idi Amin in April 1979, Prof. Yusuf Lule became president and lasted only 68 days. Binaisa became president after him. Lule was a sophisticated and, generally, good man whom you would love to appoint to chair a prestigious trust.

He failed because he, and very many other people, didn’t understand what Obote 1; the attack on Kabaka Freddie Mutesa’s Lubiri in 1966; the Amin tyranny; and the war that it took to remove him, had done.

What had happened is that the independence deal in which other tribes accepted to be governed by others who weren’t their own, was dead. Instead the dominant view was that you could not trust a fellow from another tribe to lead you and treat you fairly, and not destroy what is dear to you.

So, in 1979 various political groups and tribes were not yet quite willing to submit to the rule of others. There was a draw.

Though he was an accidental president in every way, Binaisa understood that indeed Uganda was at a deadlock. Lule didn’t and tried to rule like nothing had changed. He lost power very quickly. Any leader, who expected to last, needed to convince each of these groups to vest in the Uganda project and give up power to him.

There were so many competing interests, and no one had enough power to run things on his own, so we had states within the state, governments within the government, armies within the army. This situation was the very opposite in every way from what Binaisa had been through in the 1960s.

It also represented the last time we had this balance of power between various contending groups, with none able to bully the other into submission. It was the “castrated state” or “limbo state” phase.

Because there was no big man who had all the power, this phase was also the freest in Uganda’s history in terms of freedom of expression and political activity. But also there was no one with a big stick, it was also largely lawless, with armed men (who went for soldiers those days) murdering and robbing at will.

Binaisa lost power about 15 months later in 1980 precisely because he tried to break the deadlock, and exercise his power by, among other things, shuffling people like Yoweri Museveni from the position of minister of Defence to that of Regional Cooperation.

Could anyone else have done better than Binaisa? We shall never know. Still, it was a miracle of sorts, that he lasted as long as he did.