DP, UPC clash on new book- Democratic Party view

As Uganda marks 54 years of independence today, the two political parties that dominated the politics leading to independence have long been relegated to the margins and are torn apart by in-fighting.
Another significant fact is that the two parties are currently led by individuals who no one at the time Uganda became independent could ever imagine will get to lead these parties. Norbert Mao, an Acholi Protestant, currently leads DP, which at independence was seen as a party for Baganda Catholics.
On the other hand, Joseph Bossa, a Muganda Catholic, leads UPC, which at the time Uganda became independent was seen as a party for northerners who were Protestant.
As testimony to the infighting referred to earlier, Bossa has yet to occupy the party’s headquarters at Uganda House because Lira Municipality MP Jimmy Akena still occupies it despite a declaration by the High Court that Akena was not validly elected.

What seems not to have changed over the past 54 years, however, is the range of disagreement between DP and UPC. And, perhaps, the reaction to a new book by Prof Samuel Lwanga-Lunyiigo’s titled ‘A History of the Democratic Party of Uganda The First Thirty Years (1954-1984)’ sums up these disagreements.
Bossa, in his review of the book, says the author makes “some grave misrepresentations” about UPC. On this occasion of the 54th independence anniversary, we juxtapose two reviews of the said book, one by Bossa, and another by John Bosco Kakooza, a former member of the DP executive.

Democratic Party view

Barring, or in spite of the profusion of its atrocities, World War II turned out to be a boon to the African people who were by then fighting colonial rule. By weakening those very colonial powers that waged and fought it against one another, the war provided fresh impetus to the independence struggle, in fact accelerated it. That struggle had started immediately following the colonial aggression itself in the 18th Century, but been roundly suppressed.
In Uganda, like almost everywhere else, this renewed struggle resulted in the formation of political parties which were to become the vehicles of independence politics. The first such party in Uganda was the Uganda National Congress (UNC). Unfortunately, it was soon labelled “Communist” when it variously sought and received help, though in a measured way, from China and USSR.
Caught between ideology and nationalism, other people that had been educated at Kisubi and similar schools who took the communist bogey seriously, chose to form a national and nationalist party based on “Christian” values by which to prosecute the independence struggle; Christianity, not as a faith but as an ideology derived from Western civilisation.
The Christian political ideology is today interchangeably referred to as Western or even Capitalist ideology. These are the principles that formed the basis of what is called the First Generation of Rights, compiled in the International Covenant of the Civil and Political Rights, in contrast with the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
It is the ideology into which the Democratic Party of Uganda (DP) was born in 1954. In October this year it will mark 62 years of existence, easily the oldest political party in Africa after ANC of South Africa. Because it was founded on sound ideology, it has survived in spite of its lack of support of the State rather than because of it.
It is the history of this party that is the subject of the book ‘A History of the Democratic Party of Uganda. The First Thirty Years (1954-1984)’ by Prof Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo.
Published in 2015 by Fountain Publishers, the book is an intellectually-engaging account not only of the history of DP but also of Uganda immediately before and after independence.
Prof Lwanga-Lunyiigo taught history at Makerere University before joining President Museveni’s government as a special assistant in the President’s Office. The book dispels the widely-held fallacy that DP was started as a Catholic affair to fight against the marginalisation of Catholics at Mengo as an end of itself. Prof Lwanga-Lunyiigo does this by bringing to the fore hard facts that are sadly missing from the collective memory of even the most politically-active politicians and scholars.
Prof Lwanga-Lunyiigo, himself an Anglican Protestant, digs up and lays bare the rot that religious prejudices, instigated mainly by the Anglican Church of England, visited on our country. For example, he brings out an exchange of letters between Bishop Fischer, then of Canterbury, and the then DP leader Ben Kiwanuka over the question of indirect elections in Buganda in 1962.

Bishop Fischer was exerting immense pressure on the DP leader to give in to the British-sponsored Mengo/UPC stratagem of denying Buganda the direct vote contrived to defeat DP in the imminent national elections.
Kiwanuka wrote back to say he could not relent on the principle of one man, one vote which was “a cardinal principle of democracy”. He ended his letter with a barb to the bishop’s conscience: “Can you, archbishop, support those wicked moves, knowing fully their implications and still feel safe in your conscience?”
According to Lwanga-Lunyiigo, this gibe “rattled” the archbishop, who answered back, “There is no system of election or voting that can claim to be divinely ordered.” He did not answer the question. There may be many systems of elections, but was he at peace with his conscience with this one for Uganda in the circumstances, knowing what he knew?
Archbishop Fischer’s letters, (at least four of them) in his own handwriting to Ben Kiwanuka, though not quite legible, are reproduced in the book as Appendix 1.
Prof Lwanga-Lunyiigo has no kind words for the Mengo establishment of that time. He describes in unsettling detail how Mengo’s hatred for DP led it into an Obote trap that would later destroy the Buganda Kingdom, and alter the trajectory of the country’s politics forever. This phenomenon is the single most important factor that gave the country a false start and denied it an opportunity to take traction up to this day.

Prof Lwanga-Lunyiigo explains with all historical evidence that Kabaka Yekka was formed for the sole purpose of blocking DP’s match to power, and it succeeded, only to close business soon after “Kiwanuka chose to be honest, when being dishonest would have, in the long run, saved Buganda a lot of tears and rivers of blood!”
“It was truly the high price of principles” Lwanga-Lunyiigo writes. He goes on, “The DP played the critical role of the nation’s conscience and paid the full price in the 1962 elections”. The election was brazenly rigged by Britain which was determined not to leave Ben Kiwanuka and DP in power at independence.

Fifty-four years after independence, we have not yet succeeded in ridding ourselves of that election-stealing bug. This bane did not start with the NRM government which today has the unenviable duty of being its host. We brought it along from our pre-independence politics, in much the same way that the proverbial “Walumbe” anecdotally came down with “Kintu and Nambi”.
Lwanga-Lunyiigo writes that DP had wanted to get rid of one RC Peagram who was gleefully planning to steal the elections he had been appointed by governor Walter Coutts to “supervise”. He had perpetrated malpractices in an earlier election.

Governor Coutts resisted Ben Kiwanuka’s attempt to have Peagram removed from the position of election supervisor, obviously because the governor trusted him to block DP. The governor made sure the Queen signed the instrument of appointment for Peagram to be in charge of the 1962 elections which were neither free nor fair, with the disenfranchisement of Buganda in the bargain.
If you want to know about these elections and how the most educated people of that time brought this country to its knees, you will be enthralled by the story this book tells. It will show you that the 1980 election fraud that triggered a five-year guerrilla war that brought the NRM to power was a most logical consequence of this story.
The book is meant to be a revised edition of an earlier one published in 1984 under the title ‘A Short History of the Democratic Party’ that did not circulate much and did not have Lwanga-Lunyiigo as the author. He says he went incognito at that time because he feared the Obote regime. It is tempting to believe him. I read that edition, too.
Unfortunately, after six long chapters of a good story of Uganda’s political history, its author, Lwanga-Lunyiigo ends it in an inexplicable diatribe well encapsulated in the last Chapter titled “Postscript”. This chapter is a sad epilogue to a good scholarly job. He wrote six chapters as a scholar and historian, and wrote the postscript more as an NRM politician.

It is going to be hard for Prof Lwanga-Lunyiigo to explain even to himself what he meant by that terrible tail end of the ‘A History of the Democratic Party’. Put simply, he has a huge task to prove that the author of the postscript is one and the same person that wrote the six long chapters. But the postscript notwithstanding, the book is an unassailable account of the train of events that brought us to where we find ourselves today.

The writer was a legal adviser to the Democratic Party