A very minority view: Why I love Uganda’s tribalists (Pt II)

So here we are, the last part of our conversation about the folly of the arrest of comedians of the Bizonto Comedy Group, for their satirical critique of tribalism (or sectarian or ethnic bias) in appointments to public office in Uganda.

We had argued that this ethnic bias is mostly the manifestation of a deeper structural problem – scarcity of opportunity. Faced with many candidates for a few State jobs, ethnicity becomes the basis on which they are distributed. Also, we argued that there is always a silver lining.

The certainty that, for example, a Japadhola or a Mukonzo will not get a job in a parastatal, is an incentive for them to hustle and invest their energy in private enterprise instead. The sense of victimhood and contempt for the moral deficit of the system that has excluded you, make the pain and humble circumstances that come with the struggle easier to bear.

And so, back to the lowly trench Jopadhola diggers and hustlers from Tororo District who swarmed Kampala from the end of the 1980s, when they couldn’t get on the gravy train. By the beginning of the 2000s, they had become small contractors littered all over Kampala, and some later established themselves, for reasons that remain mysterious, as tailors in Kikuubo and such places.

I have passed through Entebbe Airport enough times to fill a book over the years. By 2010, something “strange” started happening. I couldn’t pass through Entebbe Airport without having to stop to greet a Jap immigration or security official, ENHAS worker, or an attendant. They were so many (relatively), by about 2014, I was getting embarrassed about it.

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There was no Jap Transport minister, Permanent Secretary, big man at CAA, or in ENHAS. These, were the children or grandchildren of the trench diggers. In generational terms, they were the people who got on the lift from the ground floor. Their journey to the top floor is longer. Those favoured by sectarian appointment, get on the lift from the higher floors.

Their ride to the top is shorter. We say all this, however, to make the point that great caution is necessary. It leads to poor understanding of the problem of nepotism and sectarianism in the State, if you take a headline view, namely counting only ministers, parastatal chiefs, security chiefs, and so on.

Former minister, NRM Historical, and East African Community Secretary-General Amanya Mushega is a good friend. He was wont to make the point that tribalism clouds nature. He liked to point out, for example, that in parts of the west, which were supposed to be “eating”, children there were more stunted than those in areas of Uganda that were not represented at the NRM feast.

And that leads to one of the biggest damage a sectarian government does; if your region is supposed to be advantaged, it is harder to campaign against inequalities there. The rest of the country won’t listen, and the local elite uses the noise against tribalism to rally unity against the “others.” So, many remain poor, and only when the regime ends does your pain become evident, as we saw with the north after Milton Obote and Idi Amin. Then the next dangerous series of distortions happen.

First, the honest enterprise of people from so-called “privileged” areas gets diminished by generalisation, because it is seen as having been granted by a sectarian overlord, not justly earned. Second, there are always people who will oppose the local inequalities, but they are seen as “traitors” and face hostility, so the only way they can do it is from an extreme position. In Uganda, you see a bit of this tendency in the Opposition FDC – it is important to understand where it comes from. In Kenya and Nigeria, some of the opponents of their community’s hegemonic politics also tend to be extreme.

It can also then come to shape the general politics. Because you aren’t debating policy or philosophical matters (liberalisation vs State control of the economy) that can be argued with data, but red meat issues of blood, national politics becomes extremely poisoned, because you are drawing on deep emotional grievances of exclusion.

If you go back to the period, especially between 1988 and 2005 before the return to multipartyism, in some areas, the NRM State was more repressive than it is today. However, even where there was war, the political debate wasn’t as visceral as it has become in the last 15 years. Reason? With all its faults, the NRM’s “broad-based politics” was still a counter to runaway parochialism. The Big People might want to look in their old mirrors.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist,
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3