Prime
A case for project Uganda
Moses Khisa
What you need to know:
The Uganda we want, the nation we aspire to have or do not want to have cannot be wished into existence...
Nations are contested creations. They are often products of painful processes and protracted struggles. National identity too has historically been a source of controversy and conflict. People have been willing to die for their national identity as much as kill in name of the nation.
Constructing viable nations is a messy business, and the African continent has since the dawn of formal independence faced the daunting challenge of articulating and resolving the national question.
Today, the national question in Uganda remains vexed. The quest for a project that embodies the aspirations and desires of the totality of all individuals and groups occupying the land mass called Uganda is as elusive today as ever, in fact far more acutely problematic than it was 60 years ago.
But this is scarcely a problem germane to Uganda, or for that matter unique to Africa only that considering the enormity of the broad spectrum of our problems, socioeconomic and political, the question of the nation gets more pronounced and unnerving across Africa than elsewhere around the world.
Fashioning and sustaining a viable nation requires clear-headed leadership and a purposive approach that recognises both the uniting forces and the fissures that pull in the opposite direction.
Nations are never pristine or natural entities, they must be necessarily imagined and built through both ideational and material tools, both persuasively and coercively. This is one of the biggest failures of our 1986 rulers in Uganda. Big on rhetoric, poor on praxis.
They loudly denounce sectarianism, a buzzword, but engage in precisely the kinds of ethnic-favouritism and nativist behaviour they purport to distaste. They speak one thing and practice the other.
The nepotism they practice is such a huge turnoff for many Ugandans. Their shameless siphoning of financial and material resources, including commandeering public properties especially land, all at the expense of the public and collective good, does great harm to building and sustaining a shared commitment to the national project.
The assaults and violations against citizens, the blatant disregard of due process and decent treatment of those they disagree with politically mean that the Uganda identity gets relegated in the imagination of the public. When the state is viciously used against citizens, as we witness all the time, the stain on the nation is palpable and any sense of shared national identity is imperilled.
From the wide-ranging behaviour and actions of the rulers, the key issue is one of power and domination by a small cabal; it is not about the public good and the interests of the wider society. Yet, without delivery of basic social services that impact people’s lives and livelihoods, it is impossible for citizens to buy into a sense of common belonging and shared identity.
But the failings and flaws of today’s rulers should not compel us to throw the baby with the bathwater. After all the current rulers won’t be here forever, while the Uganda project will remain a long-term undertaking.
What is more, fantasies about ‘abolishing the nation’ may sound fanciful, and the call to discard a supposed colonial contraption called Uganda might seem sound, but one has to face up to the reality of what alternatives to look to.
Sections of the academia in the so-called former colonised world, including in countries like India, have long looked at the nation as a primary target for ridicule and denunciation. It is easy to denounce project Uganda because it is a colonial creation (just as other countless aspects of our lives and existence), the harder task though is to articulate an alternative.
But it is also a failure to appreciate the imperfect nature of the real world away from stylised and abstracted imaginations. No ideal nation exists anywhere.
The utopia of a flawless nation, which some analysts appear to equate with a kind of native and ‘back to the roots’ imagination, may make for fascinating intellectual arguments. The real world of nations and national belonging, however, is far more complicated and not reducible to the search for some unique or at any rate natural magic to be found in a pristine past.
The Uganda we want, the nation we aspire to have or do not want to have cannot be wished into existence; it will come from our collective national endeavours and rugged efforts. It has to be negotiated and strived for.
For all its inherent inadequacies and inefficiencies, the idea of Uganda and the nation that it can promise to all citizens is our very best bet in the quest for a homeland that accommodates all our varied ethnicities and unique sociocultural backgrounds.
To be making this argument in 2022 is perhaps testimony to the bad place we are in today, six decades after we were told by our colonial rulers that we were henceforth an independent nation!
