WHOSE INDEPENDENCE?
LESSONS ON 45 YEARS OF SELF–RULE
October 10, 2007
Daily Monitor
On October 9, 1962, the Union Jack was lowered and the Uganda flag raised and the country Uganda was born. Below Timothy Kalyegira analyses lessons arising from the 45 years of independence
The first lesson points to our glaring unpreparedness for self-rule. There was a strong general feeling that enough was enough and that time had come for Africans to assert their identity and presences on the world stage
What history shows us is how little they had grasped what they were getting into. They didn’t understand the intensity of the immediate post World War II “Cold war” rivalry and how, in just a matter of time, they would be drawn unwittingly into it. Or put it another way, they didn’t foresee that upon resisting and escaping the grasp of traditional European colonial powers (Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany) they would more or less immediately become colonies of two emerging superpowers, the United States and Soviet Union.
African countries had to choose which bloc to align with, the Soviet bloc or the Western Alliance. Uganda chose to face east, in the 1960`s embarked on an aggressive socialist economy and political path---with the results that in 1971, there came a British and Israeli backed coup that topped the government of President Milton Obote, who had lead Uganda to independence and replaced him with his army commander, Major General Idi Amin.
Amin, like Obote, struggled to maintain Uganda’s stand against Western “imperialism”. What that brought for Amin when he turned onto British Israeli economics and military interests in Uganda, was a sudden hostile media campaign from the Western world that left him with a world-infamous reputation as a murder of 500,000 Ugandans, a claim that these days is proving increasingly and embarrassingly impossible to substantiate
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Had these and other Ugandan leaders understood the extent to which their countries were, in reality, helpless entities in a world dominated by powerful Western and East bloc forces, they would have approached independence with much better planning and preparation, and perhaps projected it much further forward into the future, say, in the 1990s.
Uganda lost a great deal of time through the political instability that came from attempting to challenge these international interests from the position of ignorance,
ill-preparation, and naivety. The state of being ill-equipped in real terms to govern ourselves continues to plague Uganda to this day. A latter-day head of state, Yoweri Museveni understood the reality of the western world dominance and for him over the last over 21 year in power he has had to make every compromise known to politics. He dropped his Marxist political beliefs in1987 and adopted the free-wheeling Western capitalist polices so that today, nearly every parastatal corporation that the NRM government found in existence in 1986, has been sold off. Uganda has been reduced to a shell, with people without identity in their own land, owing nothing worth mentioning and subjected to humiliating Western world control.
Uganda’s foreign policy since the early1990s has been dictated by the British and, especially Americans.
Uganda’s support for the Rwandan Patriotic Front-RPF (a rebel, Tutsi dominated force that, in turn was heavily patronized and subsidized by the United states) from 1990-94; interventions in Zaire in 1996, support for SPLA of South Sudan in 1990s and on, and the intervention in Somalia in 2006 all show Uganda as a servant doing the bidding of her master, whose broad intentions the Ugandan government has no clue about. The case of country with only external symbols of independence but in reality controlled by London and Washington is the first lesson of the illusion of independence.
The second lesson concerns Ugandans themselves. Wars have been fought; government has been supported at first and then hated later, political parties have been formed, supported, then hated; leaders that meant well for the country have been rejected while conmen have been welcomed as heroes and liberators; certain tribes have been reduced to a stigma and despised status, while others have been falsely elevated and regarded as crucial to the political equation-all based on ignorance.
Because independent Uganda did not write sufficient number of books, because they didn’t orient themselves to research, rigorous debate, to keeping and updating records they (Ugandans) existed for 45 years in a sea of ignorance They thus become easy to manipulate, to be used as a pawns by cunning political leaders, and for most of the past 45 years, there has been a great disappointment, all from never having known what was what, who was who, and most of the 45 years are a wasted period in politics. In a related way 45 years after independence Ugandans remain, perhaps even more strongly today than 40 years ago, fixated with the West. Their primary sense of identity is drawn from how closely they reflect the west. There is a large Ugandan “Diaspora” that lives in the Western world, studies there and at the most basic level, regards residency in Western countries, possession of Western passports and “green cards”, education from Western universities as prestigious, much more than relating to anything at home in Uganda. Conventions organized by the Uganda North America Association in the United States carry about them in an air of prestige that far outweighs even the most high profile political conventions on Ugandan soil. The British High Commission and the US Embassy in Kampala embody greater hopes; carry greater feel of importance and urgency than even the State house, in minds of most Ugandans. The frantic efforts and preparation made from 2005 to 2007 for the Commonwealth summit in Kampala were undertaken entirely because they had to please the guest, not embarrass the Uganda government before the guest, and see to it that a favorable impression of the NRM government was made on the guests. Commonwealth heads of government meeting (Chogm) was primarily, aimed on guests (to put it bluntly, the white guests). Society was unable to notice the irony billboards that proclaimed that a city that declared itself, along with its leading personality ready for Chogm, as though Ugandan citizenry was not entitled to good roads, traffic lights, and close circuit security cameras, was not a city of an independent country.
From these two main stands of 45 years, governments that had to contend, unprepared, to deal with the Western world infinitely more sophisticated and powerful than their own, and a society that was ignorant of its own history and still looked pride to the west for its own sense of image, identify, security, all politics of the past four and half decades has played out.
For the same reason, it’s not difficult to forecast what the next 20 or even 45 years will be like. It will be and remain a Uganda where the “elite” will struggle to attain state power in order to live the luxurious and privileged life that they secretly admired in the white Western colonial masters land and which stirred up the ambition to gain that lifestyle under the guise of self-rule. Around his quest for a Western lifestyle, the question of power, control of state resources and privilege will continue to be argued.