How Uganda chose coat  of arms, anthem and flag 

On Friday, Uganda celebrated its 58th Independence anniversary. The day also marked the end of the celebration of what the Busoga College Mwiri Old Boys Association (MOBA) dabbed the ‘Independence Week’, a time when the alumni celebrate the school’s contribution to Independence.
This year, one of the celebrations was about how the school shaped the adoption of the school’s motto as that of the country.

Dr Apollo Milton Obote and William Wilberforce Kadhumbula Nadiope were part of a crop of young politicians who had got their secondary school education at Busoga College Mwiri and were elected to Parliament during the 1958 elections.

Obote had been elected Member of Parliament for Lango North, while Nadiope, who would later on become vice president, was elected MP for Busoga North.
Both Nadiope and Obote were members of the Ugandan National Congress (UNC) under Ignatius Musaazi.

In Parliament, those like William Rwetsiba, George B.K. Magezi, and Mathias Ngobi, who had contested for election as Independent candidates, formed the Uganda People’s Union (UPU), which became a very important political party at the time.

Veteran politician and scholar Frank Nabwiso says the decision by Buganda not to participate in the elections made sections of the UNC membership, led by Obote, to question the relevance of Mr Musaazi in the UNC set up and in the struggle for self-rule.

“Obote felt that Musaazi was no longer a major political personality because he had failed to convince the people of Buganda to participate in the first election,” Dr Nabwiso says.
In 1959 during a conference held in Mbale District, Obote announced that he and some of his supporters had broken away from UNC. 

In March the following year, the Obote faction of UNC merged with UPU. They resolved to adopt the second and third letters of the acronyms of the two parties to form what we now know as the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) with Milton Obote as president, Nadiope as vice president and John Kakonge as secretary general.
UPC lost the next election to DP and Benedicto Kiwanuka was sworn in on March 1, 1962, as the prime minister of self-governing Uganda.

Prior to Kiwanuka taking office, another Mwiri Old Boy, Mr Henry Kyemba, had in March graduated from Makerere University College, then an affiliate of the London University, and passed an interview to join the civil service as a District Officer.

Mr Kyemba was an assistant secretary in the civil service. His ranking was popularly known as G6, with those higher up the ladder like under secretaries ranked as G4s and those at the level of permanent secretary coming in at G4.
As the march towards Independence gained momentum, prime minister Kiwanuka constituted a National Symbols Committee, and charged it with coming up with the symbols by which the soon-to-be independent nation would be identified.

The committee which was headed by the late Prof William Senteza Kajubi, had the Rev Polycarp Kakooza, George Kakoma, Mbabi-Katana and William Nadiope as members. The others were Mr John Moon, a music conductor with the Uganda Police Band, and Prof Todd, a South African national who was teaching Fine Art at Makerere College.
The National Symbols Committee was placed under Mr Kyemba’s schedule.

“My schedule included the very important and urgent matters concerning the national flag, the national anthem, the coat of arms and the national motto. My schedule also included protocol in the Prime Minister’s Office,” Mr Kyemba says.

Procurement
About a year before his death in May 2012, Prof Kajubi had revealed that the committee placed advertisements in Uganda Empya, Uganda Eyogera and The Herald and also placed advertisements on Radio Uganda and Uganda Television in which they invited Ugandans to participate in competitions to design a flag, motto, national anthem and court of arms.
The adverts targeted mostly performing and visual artistes who were asked to submit their work with a promise of pay if their work were picked.

Urgency
The work of the committee gained more urgency following UPC’s electoral victory over DP on April 24, 1962, and the declaration that Apollo Milton Obote would become the first executive prime minister at Uganda’s Independence on October 9, 1962.
“With the new political leadership, guidance was required in all of them very quickly; and decisions had to be made quickly,” Mr Kyemba explains.

Motto
Mr Kyemba, however, says that choosing a motto was a no brainer. “Of all of the matters dealt with, the national motto, was the easiest, as we had one ‘ready made’, the one of Busoga College Mwiri, ‘For God and my Country,” Mr Kyemba explains.
The committee bought the idea. No contention there.

Coat of arms
The coat of arms which was designed by Prof Todd, was also not the subject of any contentions.

The anthem
The national anthem turned out to be one of the biggest sources of contention. 
At the time the spirit of African nationalism and unity was so high that there were suggestions to adopt Nkosi Silikelele (God bless Africa), which had been taken up by most of what were then known as the frontline states in the fight against apartheid, but the idea was rejected.

The possibility of adopting a distinctly Uganda tune was rejected on grounds that it could not be played by the jazz bad. The decision rattled Mbabi-Katana so much that he resigned his position on the committee. The committee settled on George Kakoma’s composition.

The flag 
Prof Kajubi had revealed that the initial idea of a national flag had been one comprising green, blue and yellow stripes, but that the idea was thrown out on the grounds that the colour green easily fades.
With no other proposals coming in, the committee seemed stuck. But Grace Ibingira, who was a visual artist came to the committee’s rescue.

Ibingira picked up the flag of West Germany and took it to Makerere University where Prof Todd tweaked it, replacing the gold in the flag of Germany with yellow. 
They also altered the order of the other colours to make it different form that of Germany.