25 years of royal weddings, and a ‘new’ Uganda with different dreams

There is a group of people who have been perched at the top of the ladder for 26 years, choking off opportunities.

A senior female editor in Nairobi, on looking at the photos of American Christopher Thomas’s wedding to Tooro Princess Ruth Komuntale in the Sunday Monitor told me; “She is easily the most beautiful African woman I have seen.” Now that Princess Komuntale is someone’s wife, it is good, sensible old Ugandan manners not to speak much about her beauty.

Something bigger struck me though; at 23, Princess Komuntale represents the coming of age of a specific group of Ugandans – the “second tier” of the “Museveni era children”.
Though the same president, Yoweri Museveni has ruled Uganda for 26 years, there have been a lot of transitions in that period.

In the first 10 years, we have seen four of them. When the National Resistance Movement (NRM) came to power in 1986 and a year or so after, we had the “war parents”. These were Ugandans who got married in the troubled Obote II and/or during the period of the Okello Military Junta in late 1985, and were having their first, second, or last children in 1986-87. Many of their children have since become parents, and those “war parents” have become “war grandparents”. But we shall tell their current story in the future.

Their children, the “War Children”, as this column noted some months back, became the first tier of the “Museveni era children”. Now there were Ugandans who got hitched in the post-1985-86 marriage boom. Princess Komuntale’s father, King Patrick Kaboyo Olimi III, married Best Kemigisa during that boom, in January 1987.

That marriage, you could say, ushered in what we might call the “restoration period”, because the agitation for a return of the kingdoms (Ebyaffe) started in earnest then, peaked in 1993 with the restoration of the kingdoms and the coronation of, especially, Ronald Mutebi as the king of Buganda. That wave leveled out in 1999 with Kabaka Mutebi’s wedding to Nnaabagereka Sylvia Nagginda.

That span gave us the “restoration children”, the second tier of the “Museveni era” kids. Just to get a sense of how Uganda’s social clock ticks, many of the “restoration parents” are no longer in the childbearing business. We have become (I was in that group), “off layers” to use that pregnant expression from the late Monitor founders and social commentators Richard Tebere and Kevin Aliro.

These restoration parents have children who are old enough to be members of Parliament. Recently-elected MP Proscovia Alengot Oromait, the youngest in Africa at the tender age of 19 (and possibly in the world) is a Restoration Child. This restoration decade, was overlaid with the “Constitution Period”, from 1994 when the new constitution was passed, and 1996 when it was tested (and half-failed) in the first general election of the Museveni regime. The Constitution period, you could say, was tweaked 10 years later in 2005, when the country returned to multiparty politics, and thus we entered the “multiparty terrain”.

However, we are running ahead of the story. So how does Uganda look like to the “war parents” who have become grandparents? If any of them had political ambitions, and were expecting that the NRM honchos would rule for a reasonable 10, even 15 years, and give them space, they must have given up. Good President Museveni and his gift circle are going nowhere.

After all, there was a debate on Tuesday for the three men contesting to replace Dr Kizza Besigye as president of the opposition Forum for Democratic Change. Besigye was the face of modern Uganda opposition politics. Democratic Party leaders Dr Paul Ssemogerere and Sebaana Kizito, were among the old faces of opposition politics. Ssemogerere and Sebaana retired long ago. In an indication of how the ground is shifting, Besigye too is stepping down.

Now both the “war children”, the first tier of the “Museveni era children”, and the “restoration children” are becoming parents, and trying to climb up the ladder, but there is no space.

There is a group of people who have been perched at the top of the ladder for 26 years, choking off opportunities. These new generations are also trying to drink at the national well, but cannot do because the same old group has been squatting around the “eye” of the well, drawing all the clean water for themselves and not letting new blood get a dip.

My own sense is that folks who have been in various positions of national leadership, whether in government, the opposition, and even business, for the last 25 years, cannot nurse the kind of society in which it makes sense for the Komuntales of this world to raise their children.

Even if they tried very hard, and with the best of intentions, they cannot. That’s why their greatest achievement will be figuring out that the time for them to leave is long gone.

*cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com
& twitter@cobbo3