Uganda has a problem - but there’s hope

On the weekend political scientist and scholar Fred Golooba-Mutebi posted that:

Imagine what would happen in Uganda if:

1) All officials, civilian and military, who are doing business were retired so they go into business.

2) New officials are appointed to serve the government full time, are prohibited from doing business.

3) A new, strict asset declaration came in.

 I struggled to resist the half a dozen naughty and satirical comments one could make, and pondered instead why Uganda isn’t the kind of country Golooba-Mutebi is challenging us to imagine. 

 The wrinkle is in the very conflicted distribution/redistribution logic that sits at the very foundation of (colonial and post-colonial) Uganda.   Put crudely, the first goes that British colonialism favoured the south (Buganda), and the region got the most and best schools, investment in infrastructure, and was made the hub of the national economy, giving the people of the area an “unfair” advantage over the rest of Uganda.  To this day in Ugandan-politicalspeak, when people say they are “nationalists”, somewhere in there it is understood they are committed to righting that “wrong”, to limiting the distribution of the fat of the land to the south, and giving a bigger share of it to the rest of the country. 

 If you take away all the other trappings, the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) was the party founded to do that. 

 However, from independence with Milton Obote as the country’s leader, to the coup and rule by Field Marshal Idi Amin, to Obote II, and the ill-fated short Military Council rule of the two Okellos, power in the country was dominated by strongmen from the north.   They didn’t redistribute much to the north as a region, but lined their pockets. And that redistribution wasn’t done gently. It was through aggressive nationalisation policy, but mostly via crude theft and pillage. 

 By January 1986 when President Yoweri Museveni and the ruling National Resistance Movement took power, in their ranks there was a strong sense that some kind of reparations to the south for “northern domination” and plunder of its wealth was critical.  However, just as the case of redistributing wealth from the south was presented as “nationalism”, reparations for northern transgressions were also delicately hidden in references to “building a national economy”, “the correct line”, and a characterisation of northern counter-claims as “backward politics”. 

 There are other elements to this, but perhaps the main third one that needs to be highlighted, is the perspective from what you might call the Catholic Establishment. Strong in parts of the west, Masaka, former Bukedi district, and the Acholi region, it held that Britain as a Protestant power created Uganda in its image, and privileged the Protestants, excluding the Catholics (and the Muslims, although the Catholics didn’t really spend much time concerning themselves with Muslim marginalisation).

 This Catholic Establishment, however, didn’t frame its claims around politics, but the economy. It championed the free market, because through quirks of religious history, its social base was settled on the fertile lands, and dominated agriculture, and so they wanted to keep their profits to themselves, and not have the government take them away in higher taxes or nationalisation (as Obote 1 did with his pretender socialist “Move to the Left”).  

 The fight for power, liberation, and arguments over models of development in Uganda in their DNA still have those three competing interests. Coming into office in our country, is still not a pure neutral bureaucratic or governance occupation. Your function is primarily economic. You are a warrior brought in to seize or redistribute to one of those three spectrums in Uganda. For most state officials, and of course political leaders, divorce from business not only becomes near-impossible, but there would also be no other reason for the government of the day to exist. 

 There are, of course, many Ugandans who do, and have challenged this set up. Some argue that the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) under Godfrey Binaisa for a few months tried, but we all know how that ended.

 Many leftist and centrist intellectuals, and a smattering of left-leaning politicians also challenge it. On the opposite side, big business, conservative long distance traders, and adventurous migrant citizens who want an open market and country for them to thrive, and an increasingly cosmopolitan youthful population, also reject this narrow economic redistributive logic on which Uganda has been built.

 The problem this unwieldly group has is exactly  that; it is all over the place and not organised. The old Uganda order is still in power and strong, and as we saw recently in the strange battle for Parliament Speaker that ousted Rebecca Kadaga and handed victory to Jacob Oulanyah, we seem to have entered a new phase of northern reparations for the ravages inflicted on the region by the long war there.

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

Twitter: @cobbo3