By Oweyaga Afunadhula

It is Useless to Build Uganda based on Hatred for Buganda…

I have been talking to Prof. Paulo Wangoola this morning. Prof.Wangoola was the man, who in 1980, moved a vote of no confidence in the leadership of Prof. Yusuf Lule under the short-lived hegemony of UNLF/UNLA.

We have agreed that it does not make any sense any more than it did, if it ever did, to build power at the Centre on the basis of hatred for Buganda.

Buganda was the beginning of the colonial construction of the State of Uganda. The centrality of Buganda in the State of Uganda cannot be dismissed. The region must be fully integrated in Uganda for Uganda to manifest as a complete whole. Uganda cannot be Uganda by the Centre resolving to destroy Buganda through hatred for Buganda and it’s land-based culture, which has endured through the centuries.

One thing is true. This is not a plot against only Buganda, but also against the 15 indigenous groups of people that the British Colonialists wove into the artificial Nation of Uganda. But it is also a plot against the kind of Uganda that the forefathers of Uganda agreed with the Colonialists that it should rise out of the ruins of colonialism.

Destroying Buganda and ultimately all the indigenous traditional nations of the original Uganda is a well-conceived plot by forces that never existed at the time Uganda was created but, which have accessed power irregularly and believe they cannot now create their own Uganda or non-Uganda on the basis destruction of what we knew was Uganda.

All Ugandans must know that it is not only Uganda that is threatened by hateful power. We are all threatened. After Buganda has been destroyed all the other areas that, together, formed Uganda,will also be destroyed. The tools being used are legislation and the docility, ignorance and greed of those we elect to represent and protect the public interest, and also the lie of development.

Destroying the land-based culture of Buganda, and ultimately, all the other land-based cultures of indigenous groups of Uganda cannot be development. It is de-development. Culturally-empty development is not development. It is culturally-based development that is development.

Development that disrespects the cultural foundations of our people’s survival cannot be people’s development. It is false development. Setting ourselves on a path of development that disregards culture of our people and only values and preserves the supremacy of the sterile culture of money is anti-people. It enslaves the people on a long-term basis and manifests as a slave-master process in modern times. It marginalises the people and their communities from development.

If our representatives in Parliament endorse such development it will be a 21st catastrophe worse than Covid 19. Far more people will die, just like was the case for the Aborigines of Australia, Red Indians of the Americas, Maoris of New Zealand and Hottentots of South Africa. It will cast Uganda firmly as the only international Bantustan of the World with a new group of people, black in texture, as successors of the racists of South Africa that survived on discrimination, enslavement and exploitation of the indigenous people .

This should not be the case in the 21st Century. It must be resisted by all right-thinking Ugandans in particular and humanity in general. We must learn from past mistakes of humans.