Alan Tacca
An effort to find Buganda’s Kabaka in Namibia, where the monarch is currently recuperating, ended in tragicomic futility.
The air around the search team, five clan chiefs (bataka), was probably reminiscent of the surrealist atmosphere in Franz Kafka’s novel, The Castle.
So close, and so inaccessible, the Kabaka calmly expressed his ‘spiritual’ power with a subtle finality that eludes many African leaders. Sure of completing their mission in five days, the bataka’s attempt to reach the Kabaka got increasingly desperate, as if by measured command, and finally collapsed after almost two weeks.
Back home in Kampala, location of the Kabaka’s Mengo palace, kingdom officials refused to get excited over the wild goose chase in Namibia.
Heading the kingdom officials is the Katikkiro (prime minister), Peter Mayiga. A hardened administrator, Mayiga is not new to facing hostility as some people think.
Appointed Katikkiro 11 years ago, Mayiga should have been fired in the first year if the Kabaka’s confidence in him was not solid enough.
From the start, the then President Museveni’s press secretary, Tamale Mirundi, attacked Mayiga on grounds that were hard to substantiate, and others that simply smacked of ill-mannered mischief, but repeatedly urged the Kabaka to fire him.
Gifted with a super-charged venomous mouth that President Museveni had probably identified as an asset in a media hatchet man, Mirundi – with or without the President’s nod – for instance attacked Mayiga because the new Katikkiro had at one time been a minor official “opening sodas” for bigger people at the Mengo establishment.
It was a strange criticism, especially coming from a person whose tendency of thought seemed to be against class discrimination and birth-right entitlement to high positions.
His boss, President Museveni, was himself from a relatively modest background. At his appointment, Mayiga was already an advocate partnering in a successful law firm.
In the general frame of things, it should have been praiseworthy that the Kabaka had appointed for his Katikkiro a person with a commoner’s background whose requirement would be competence at the job.
The law forbids traditional leaders and their institutions from getting involved in politics; whatever that means. In this environment, Mayiga has (more successfully than his predecessors) navigated around Uganda’s political minefields and pursued the kingdom’s interests with firmness without being overtly confrontational.
Accused by people who would wish to see the kingdom remain poor that he is bent on making money, his tenure has seen many stalled Buganda-owned and Buganda-inspired projects completed and new ones initiated, with corruption at a much lower level than witnessed in the central government.
Either independently or as agents of other interests, his new critics should be grateful that they have found social media platforms, just as Mirundi often expresses gratitude that he found Pentecostal radio stations, to exhibit their uncouthness.
For content, they seem to have got it in their heads that the Kabaka’s health challenges are because Mayiga and the Mengo officials have neglected him and are busy fighting their turf wars, and that the Kabaka is in Namibia as a kind of exile.
In spite of the Kabaka’s broadcast assurance that this was not the case, the five bataka chose insolence.
Ostensibly to verify the Kabaka’s condition, they headed to Namibia, either on their own, or encouraged by disrupters afraid of a united and progressive kingdom.
To avoid another cycle of mischief, the bataka can benefit greatly from remembering that even before the British came here, our forefathers disapproved of ‘familiarity’, and they had words for the concepts of ‘dignity’ and ‘humility’ in our local languages.
Mr Alan Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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