Omusinga Mumbere: His kingdom, a prince and a republican emperor

Minority report

At 10.36pm on Sunday, June 16, I received a call from a member of the top hierarchy of the UPDF. He asked me why the Omusinga Mumbere didn’t attend the burial of his mother in Budibugyo.

I told him he would attend a funeral service organised in Kasese and later perform some death-related rituals according to the customs of the Bakonzo.

Thinking quick, I even hazarded a programme. The king would be flown into Kasese and lodged at Mweya Safari Lodge on Sunday, June 23, 2019. On Monday, he would meet members of his privy council and the ministerial commission.

On Tuesday, he would attend a church-organised funeral service in Kasese Town. On Wednesday he would privately perform the rituals related to the death of his mother. On Thursday, he would return to Kampala. This was my personal idea that I had not even shared with the privy council and ministerial commission.

But all the time I spoke, the UPPF general was so quiet I even thought he could have switched off his phone. He eventually responded. ‘This is a thorough progamme but...’ I interjected: ‘Your people can pick it from there…’

‘But’, he continued, ‘I am afraid that programme would be hard sell for us… You see, if the king had gone to Bundibugyo, you would have made a stronger case. But now…; I can’t deceive you. This thing may not fly.’

Since I was merely sharing my personal ideas, I immediately called a member of the privy council in Kasese. They told me they had been assured Omusinga Mumbere would be in Kasese the next day. Now, my challenge was: How do I deliver the negative message I had just picked from the UPDF general (without causing a heart attack to this excited human being)?

I advised them to manage public excitement over the Omusinga Mumbere’s return. I told them that I had a strong premonition that ‘Omusinga Mumbere may not travel to Kasese tomorrow’. I think they didn’t take my ‘sense of apprehension’ seriously; because the ministerial commission later ran announcements on radio about the king’s homecoming.

After talking to the member of the privy council, I sent the UPDF general a message: “Hello. As per our phone conversation, 1) I called Kasese; 2) Was told the Omusinga will go to Kasese tomorrow for some funeral rituals. Please advise.”

Unfortunately, about midnight, my breathing condition kicked in and I suffered a seizure. I was immobilised. I was checked in a hospital and was ‘forced’ to rest (without my phone). I was released from this ‘hospital arrest’ at 7pm on Monday just in time to catch the day’s TV news: Omusinga Mumbere didn’t travel to Kasese. Gosh!

Mine is a cameo role in this saga. The main cast has the king, a prince and an imperial republican ‘Emperor Maxima’ Yoweri Museveni. The setting is Museveni’s Shangri-La vassal kingdom in the snow mountain of the Rwenzori.

Can an ‘untrained person’ understand the animated act Christopher Kibanzanga delivered at the burial of his dear mother? But I ask: How many times (in the last two months before her death), did the said Kibanzanga visit her dear mother? Everything one needs to know about this saga lies in Kibanzanga’s response to that question.

This incident is a game changer to me. Now we know the Mumbere question is more complicated than we had hitherto thought; and may not be resolved by the reconciliation process some of us have been promoting and associated with.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how else it can be resolved without an anticlimactic tragedy (like Morsy of Cairo). I have a strong premonition the Mumbere Question could be the waterloo for those of us involved in it.

Mr Bisiika is the executive editor of
East African Flagpost.
[email protected]

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Majority report
For the record, I do not support monarchism – the practice of vesting power and ultimate authority in one individual whose primary qualification is being born to his/her parents and belonging to a certain family lineage.

I am from Bugisu where the idea of a king is anathema. The initiation ritual of male circumcision bestows upon male persons unfettered independence and freedom not to be under the tutelage and direction of another person. It is, therefore, somewhat bewildering that the media refers to Bob Mushikori as the ‘king’ of Bagisu/Bamasaba. He is not and can never be.

There are millions of Ugandans who espouse monarchy. The Baganda fervently love their Kabaka. They are tenaciously tied to their political identity as subjects of a kingdom with an illustrious history. I respect their preference. But in the same vein, there are millions other Ugandans, perhaps the majority, who either don’t care or have no interest in where real power is ultimately vested:
All they want is a system of public management that delivers basic, but critical public goods and services. Is monarchy the solution? Hardly.

Uganda is a republic, at least on paper. This means we cannot have a monarch with executive authority although the ruler based in Entebbe rules like an imperial president – not that different from a king. We are a republic, but we need to acknowledge our history and accommodate our diversity. The daunting question has always been how to reconcile centuries’ old institutions like the kingships of Bunyoro and Buganda with the democratic standards expected of a republicanism.

The installation of Prince Ronald Mutebi as the King of Buganda in 1993 effectively re-established formal traditional institutions that had been unilaterally abolished following the 1966 standoff between premier Milton Obote and the Buganda leadership. This decision by the Army Council sitting in Gulu became constitutionalised in 1995.

Since then, we have had a crescendo: Demands for recognition of ‘kings’ shot through the roof even where they never existed before. Which brings me to the matter of King Charles Wesley Mumbere, the ostensible ruler of the Rwenzururu Kingdom in Rwenzori region. It is instructive that Mumbere and the Rwenzururu Kingdom came out of a long history of revolt and resistance against monarchical dominance! Mumbere has been under defacto imprisonment since the bloody events of November 2016 when the Ugandan armed forces assaulted his palace occasioning enormous tragedy. Last week, he faced a grave personal loss: His mother passed on.

But he couldn’t oversee preparations for sending off his dear mum because he is barred from leaving Kampala as part of the conditions for his court bail, so he had to seek court clearance to travel to ‘his kingdom.’ He got the requisite permission to travel to Kasese, the supposed seat of his rule.

Then came his young brother, Christopher Kibazanga, former senior member of the Opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), who defected and is firmly ensconced in the ruling class as State minister for Agriculture. In a Facebook post, Kibazanga literally threw his elder brother, the king, under the bus defying the latter’s directives and questioning his wisdom and judgement. In the final analysis, it appears that it is not King Mumbere, but minister Kibazanga who wields power.

The Mumbere saga underlines what is at stake: Power. The litany of ‘kingdoms’ both pseudo and real that have proliferated in the last decade or so are not so much because people love to have monarchs; they are struggles for accessing State power.

On his part, Museveni has used these clamours to recruit clients that are appended to his wide patronage network. Those who show recalcitrance as Mumbere did (or Kabaka Mutebi earlier) are humiliated and showed that they have crowns without power.

Keeping alive our different cultural heritages and leveraging traditional norms and customs to inform solutions to today’s problems are no doubt worthy aspirations. Doing so in circumstances where the real issue is not so much culture as power is problematic.

Dr Khisa is assistant professor at
North Carolina State University (USA).
[email protected]