In pursuit of project Uganda-nation

I argued last week that the biggest failure of our 1986 rulers is, by far, the failure to engineer a political community called Uganda, one to which we are attached by dint of a shared sentiment of comradeship and horizontal solidarity. That is what a nation and nationhood mean.

This sense of common belonging and joint fellowship must necessarily transcend our diverse social identities, the different cultural and religious affiliations we identify with, and our varied regional, linguistic and ethnic origins. 

This model of the modern nation-state has inherent flaws and fundamental weaknesses, no doubt, but it has for long been the best from the menu of flawed options available or imaginable and a largely preferred choice in constructing an entity under which a group of people co-exist. 

Historically, the nation-state, or simply the nation, along with its political underwriter, the state as a system for managing people, has been the source of all sorts of deadly and destructive wars, mass violence including genocides and the basis for pitting fellow humans against other human beings. 

In the name of the nation, all sorts of repressive acts have been committed, especially against minority groups. Indigenous institutions, values and beliefs get obliterated or at a minimum denuded at the behest of nation-building projects. One can go on listing the innumerable wrongs associated with the modern nation-state model, but this is only up to a point beyond which one must face up to the question of viable alternatives. 

Today, there are Ugandans who have imbibed the refrain of ‘abolish Uganda’, ostensibly because the project is unviable and must be abandoned henceforth. Abolishing or dismantling what’s in place is pretty easy, even easier as a catchy rhetorical performance; but articulating a rigorous and compelling replacement is the truly tough task.

In a lot of the debates about nations and nation-ness, including in our current context that includes the ‘abolish Uganda’ crew, there is often the mistaken assumption that a return to some pure and pristine past is the ultimate solution to viable nationhood. 

It is a somewhat primordial argument of seeing a supposedly authentic and preferred nation entity that is a natural product that has existed across time from the beginning. The problem is that this kind of nation is myth! It never existed, thus it’s illusory to want to revive it.  Whether invented from the outside or innovated from within, any political community that brings together people with shared cultural, linguistic and socio-political solidarities is necessarily constructed; it is produced through one process or another and by human agency and socio-structural forces.

Traditional values and customary tools on their own do not yield a community as a viable unit in which a people co-exist, rather they provide the building blocks and pillars in a process of building and producing a nation. This is what has happened all around the world historically. It is what many independent African leaders set out to pursue in the years following attainment of sovereign status from our European colonial masters. 

The great Nigerian independence leader, Obafemi Awolowo, famously referred to his country as a mere geographic expression! The same could be said of nearly all African nations at independence in the 1960s, yet there was a realisation that working towards forging viable nations out of the superficial and colonially created entities was a better path forward to the alternative of trying to return to a non-existent past. 

For Kwame Nkrumah, the solution was in the impossible mission of constructing one African nation even as he remained committed to engineering a Ghanaian nation. From this class of independence-time students of the challenge and question of the nation, the easily identifiable success story was Mwalimu Julius Nyerere whose forceful and deliberate strategy of building a Tanzania nation offers arguably the best lessons. 

In the main, however, for most of the continent, more than half-century later the dual-conundrum remains one of how to build a viable nation, on the one hand, and on the other, constructing an effective state that underpins the nation and provides it with the necessary defence and protection.  In Uganda, much of the nationhood progress realised during the so-called bad regimes of the past has been eroded at the behest of current rulers in quite spectacular fashion, and whatever modest achievement in state reconstruction and effectiveness attained under the post-1986 reform efforts has equally fallen on the sword of pursuit of power. 

To rewrite the script for imagining a viable national project will require thoughtful leadership but especially civic determination that converges on a set of shared aspirations. It is impossible to casually predict how this will play out in the future, but the ‘Majority Report’ will attempt some rough outlines of pursuing the path forward, to which I will return.

[email protected]