Prime
I agree with President Museveni: These Baganda are too sectarian!
Author, Gawaya Tegulle. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- I mean, even after all the caffeine we’ve ingested at the coffee shop down the hill, as I explain to them how the President rescued us from Idi Amin, Milton Obote, Tito Okello and the like, these chaps still couldn’t bring themselves to sit down and enjoy, or at least endure, a short, three-hour victory speech of my newly re-elected President.
As one of those who don’t have a television set in the house, I had to walk a dozen houses away to find a home that was watching the President’s victory speech, as all my immediate neighbours (who usually bail me out on such crucial days) insisted on watching cartoons (Thomas and Friends, Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo, etc.) and football replays.
I don’t know how many cups of coffee it will take to convince my difficult neighbours to begin being patriotic. I mean, even after all the caffeine we’ve ingested at the coffee shop down the hill, as I explain to them how the President rescued us from Idi Amin, Milton Obote, Tito Okello and the like, these chaps still couldn’t bring themselves to sit down and enjoy, or at least endure, a short, three-hour victory speech of my newly re-elected President.
To call it a “speech” is really taking great licence with the facts, because it was more a quarrel, tirade, rant or thereabouts. The President, analysing the results of the just-concluded general election in which Buganda overwhelmingly voted his current nightmare –Bobi Wine – called the Baganda sectarian and widely condemned sectarianism in politics.
The Guinness Book of Records should pencil in a new entry: most presidents, world over, when they win an election, come to the podium smiling, and singing victory songs. My President (whom I gave not one, but three ticks in 1996) came up quarrelling and castigating, and warning and throwing invectives. A casual observer, tuning in for the first time, would have been excused for thinking my President had lost the election.
This is a world record! My hosts (who are Baganda) were horrified. Even the baby of the house refused to take her milk. But I was not afraid to agree with my President, just because I was in the house of a Muganda.
Idi Amin, who for the record remains the jolliest, tallest, heaviest and darkest president, and also one with the best teeth and the best laugh, would have said I agreed with him “completely”. The Baganda (who, for the record, are the biggest voting bloc) are simply and unacceptably, sectarian.
A non-Muganda (who has an ancestral backyard of his own elsewhere, where he could have launched a war) comes to Buganda, wages war against an elected government of Uganda, for not one or two days, not one or two years, but for five years, and they welcome him! The government soldiers commit all kinds of atrocities against the population, torture, rape, grisly murders and everything an army can do to make a population capitulate and stop supporting a rebel group, but the Baganda refuse to betray the rebels. That’s pretty sectarian!
Hundreds of child soldiers from Buganda lose out on their education, brave the ordeal of the forest and the pain and horror of war, to help the rebels – as the children of the key rebels are safely tucked away in European capitals, eating sausage, singing nursery rhymes and watching cartoons.
The Baganda, who seem to be made of a material that, the more you beat, the more resilient it becomes, prefer to suffer death than to turn their backs on the rebels! Looks sectarian to me! In the 1996 general election, even at his own polling station, Dr Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere, the icon of Buganda in the presidential race, loses to President Museveni, as Buganda overwhelmingly vote Museveni. I smell sectarianism here!
Buganda (which for hundreds of years has welcomed and integrated people from other places) is perhaps the only place in Uganda where someone from some other tribe – or nation – can walk in and run for political office and no one begins raising issues of origin.
Just look at the Parliament alone! In other places when a ‘foreigner’ or ‘mufuruki’ wins, people riot, threaten to do this and that, and the President runs to the rescue, declares certain positions ‘ring-fenced’ for ‘natives’ and advises the ‘foreigners’ to find their level. These sectarian Baganda!
The west overwhelmingly voted one of their own, Museveni. Buganda overwhelmingly voted one of their own, Bobi. No, no; these Baganda are too sectarian!
Mr Tegulle is an advocate of the High Court of Uganda [email protected]
