Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
This year’s Independence Day, celebrated yesterday, is more special than usual. Although the British declared Buganda a protectorate of the crown in 1894, it was not until the defeat of Omukama Kabalega of Bunyoro in 1899 that a tipping point in the subjugation of the existing pre-colonial power centres was reached.
Thus if 1899 marked the fall of the last major traditional power centre, the signing of the Buganda Agreement in 1900 was the start of the colonial period, proper.
This year thus comes with an important marker; we have now been independent for as long as we were under British colonial rule: from 1900 to 1962, and from 1962 to 2024.It is as good a time as any to reflect on how well we have governed ourselves, and how far we have gone in forging a nation out of a collection of tribes. Yes, we were dealt a weak hand from the start.
The Buganda Question, for instance, was left unanswered and would contribute to different aspects of what has become the Uganda Question.
There were many more systemic problems: a poorly trained army and police force built to persecute natives; a colonial economy designed to produce raw materials for export and import back finished goods with only minimal industry; an education system that was decoupled from the real needs of the society and in many parts designed to produce clerks and civil servants; and so on.
Meddling by foreign interests specifically in the rise of Idi Amin and later the NRA, for instance, and generally throughout the Cold War often undermined local efforts to answer these solutions or find organic settlements. We could go on and on and on, but a time has come for us to draw a line on the colonial error and start forging a new national consensus and elite bargain.
At least three major areas should preoccupy us. First, independence gave us some self-determination politically but did not resolve the economic undercurrents that had fuelled strikes, boycotts and the rise of the nationalist movement in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
This is the elephant in the room that Milton Obote tried to address with his policy shift to the left, and Amin with his nationalising efforts, which history seems to have reduced to the expulsion of Asians who opted not to take Ugandan citizenship.
The NRA/M’s economic liberalisation policy has created decades of growth and lifted all boats, but the need in the present-day to ring fence a portion of economic activity to “local content” is a sign of an unresolved problem, not a solution to one.
Ensuring meaningful local ownership, contestation and participation in the economy should be a national policy and political priority. As complex as it is to execute, it is relatively easy to explain: you need the economy to grow to pay the bills; then you need to ensure that mass citizen contestation, not just participation, in the economy; and then you need good governance to ensure sound policy making, social cohesion, and the rule of law.
The second related and unresolved question is leadership that subordinates individual ambition to nation building and public service. We have seen that skillful jockeying can create long-term relative stability but eventually the tiger must be dismounted. Our current national unease is due to uncertainty about what the tiger will do when the current rider falls off.
Certain safeguards, like term limits, are relatively easy to bring back into play. Others, like returning the military to the barracks, decommercializing elective politics, and upending the patrimonial state will take a lot more time and a lot heavier lifting – if not revolution.
The key here, and for the economic question above, is to generate enough consensus to break some eggs. That would require the third task, of a new grand bargain. This is perhaps the hardest and yet most important, for it determines the direction of travel for the economy and the politics.
How do we reform the political class to bring back value and values? Do we even appreciate the need to? How do we roll back the balkanisation of the country and build a national identity out of the fragments of our ethnic sub-identities? How do we depersonalise our foreign policy and rebuild it on mutual interests in the region, on the continent, and internationally – not on mercenary military adventurism and black-market transactionalism?
At the end of the colonial period and in the few sunset years that followed, Makerere University was a world-class institution. The best doctors were trained and worked at Mulago Hospital. Today anyone who can afford to seeks health care and sends their children to study abroad. That is not independence.
We must be mindful of and work to counter neocolonial systems and structures, but this is a good time to stop blaming the colonial era. It is time to own our destiny, by ending our self-sabotage and perennial victimhood. To go forward, we must stop looking back in anger, stop the excuses, and start building a nation that works for all its citizens.
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
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X: @Kalinaki
