gook makanga <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
By Charles Onyango-Obbo
After Jinja: Tribal chiefs to eat happily ever after
March 17, 2004
The violent break-up of the Pafo seminar by pro-Museveni goons in Jinja a fortnight ago shouldn't have come as a surprise.
Why, you may ask. First, it fits in the way the Movement hardliners have dealt with both its own internal dissidents and the opposition multipartyists from the day Museveni took office in January 1986. Secondly, it was true to the "Standard Five Approaches" with which nearly all past governments and presidents, beginning with Milton Obote in the 1960s and again early 1980s, and Field Marshal Idi Amin in the 1970s dealt with critics - persecution, beating, jail, exile, and killing.
Mr Augustine Ruzindana
What was disturbing about the whipping of Pafo in Jinja was not the violence. Rather it was the REASONS for the beatings. Among them (anticipating that third/fifth critic former first deputy premier Eriya Kategaya would be in attendance) that Kategaya should "go back to Ankole", and that another former Museveni ally MP Augustine Ruzindana should "go back to Rwanda".In other words, these Ugandans shouldn't have been in Busoga, because they are Banyankole. The new message from the Movement hardliners seems to be that every tribe should stay in its local cave.
We shall return to this shortly. First, let me lament the fact that minister of State David Migereko was involved in any way at all in organising the Jinja attacks. In 1979-80, David was one of the heroes of a group of us young fellows then at Makerere University. He was personal assistant to Planning and Economic Development minister Prof. Yoeri Kyesimiira (RIP) in the UNLF government.
To us Migereko, intelligent and promising, represented the "new face" of Uganda after the terrible years of Amin. He went on to the US to study an MA in transport economics, and he was such a hot property he got a scholarship for a PhD.
David, otherwise a well-bred man, has been deteriorating in the years he has been a politician, but he still managed to remain within what you might call the "allowable limits of political excess". To see him linked to goons beating up people within his own party who have a different view on a single issue (third/fifth term) was as if Mother Theresa (RIP) had turned herself into the Butcher of Delhi.
And it indicates the great potential for Uganda to sink very deep in the sewer. One of the things that really gets my goat is this business of labelling Ugandans "foreigners' when one disagrees with them. Amin , for example, was a horrible leader, but it was wrong to label him a Sudanese. After the UNLF kicked him out, and the ouster of its first president Yusuf Lule in June 1979, Godfrey Binaisa landed the job. The pro-Lule supporters, and they were many, denounced Binaisa, saying he was a Tanzanian.
The UPC and other opponents - during the NRA bush war and to this day - carried on a campaign against Museveni, alleging he was a Rwandese. Many Museveni critics claimed Ruzindana was Rwandese when, as IGG, he was chasing down the corrupt. Former Local Government minister Bidandi Ssali, at the height of the campaign for federalism, was denounced as "a Murundi".
When Prime Minister Apollo Nsibambi also turned against Buganda's clamour for a full federal status, he was ejected and labelled a foreigner - from Seychelles. Museveni, generously, consoled him with the premiership.
For that reason, the last placard I was prepared to read about, even at the most degenerate moment of Movement Hardline, was one telling Kategaya to go back to Ankole, or saying Ruzindana has no business telling Museveni to be democratic.
However, to see this incident in isolation is to miss the bigger picture. Since the March 2001 elections, all auxiliary organisations formed to bolster the government effort in every endeavour has been tribal - NOT national.
When the LRA rebels ravaged the northeast, the solution was a tribal Teso militia - the Arrow Boys of "Capt." Mike Mukula and Musa Ecweru; and in Lango the Amuka militia. Then there's Elephant Brigade, the Acholi militia in waiting, and one in Mbale that never took off. For those who have forgotten, when the ADF rebels were rampaging in Kasese and Bundibugyo districts, the government mobilised army veterans and LDUs.
The shift from quasi-state militia to tribal armies seemed to have become an irreversible wave from mid last year. Seeing the kind of "clout" being leaders of tribal militias has given Mukula and Ecweru, it is only logical that we have counterparts in the political wings of these militia where they exist - or the Jinja types where they don't - emerging to cash in on the civilian side.
In Jinja we saw what they look like in the early stage of their evolution. The exclusion of Ugandans from parts of their country on a tribal basis is the rising ideology of these types of organisations.
They serve a purpose that will become crucial to the success of the third/fifth term project, and the presidency-for-life elections in 2006. With Uganda set to move into a multiparty system, it will become difficult to exclude the likes of Pafo, if it becomes a party, from campaigning in Jinja on political grounds.
But it would be easier - and pride the government with a window of deniability - to work up the emotion to bar it if the leader is not a local "tribesman". The only candidate who will not be excluded is the one whom these political wings of tribal militias supported as their candidate in the last elections. It is thus conceivable that, for short-term electoral reasons, one can "give" Buganda "more federo" on condition that Mengo excludes non-Baganda from campaigning "on its soil".
We don't have to look far where this worked effectively. The test case was the expulsion of Bakiga "settlers" by Banyoro militants from Kibale district in 2001/2002. Most government functionaries sided with the Banyoro militants. On a grand scale, though, we have to look to Kenya.
When in the run-up to the 1997 elections Kenya's ruling party KANU was first threatened by the wave that would eventually end its grip on power in 2002, it organised a tribal brutal purge of "anti-Moi tribes" from the vast Rift Valley. And in an epic wave of madness, it cleared Mombasa of "up-country tribes". It also happened, by some sweet coincidence, that those communities were mostly anti-Kanu.
The results in Kenya and Bunyoro make this option very attractive.
The Banyoro got "their" selected lands back and disqualified Bakiga from local government elective office. Moi and Kanu got another five years in office.
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© 2004 The Monitor Publications
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