Digest This

Sunday September 6, 2009

Its 11:30 am on a Sunday morning, am in the office going through my routine duties when a colleague, my second boss actually, walks in with a news paper and as he flips through the pages a caption picks my interest. It goes thus, “The influx of Bakiga into Kibaale is well coordinated…They want to out vote the Banyoro and take all the political posts”. The article in itself is a very in depth, one can add passionate, analysis about the land and political issues in Bunyoro, particularly in Kibaale District, in Uganda. My mind then wonders to a number of other similar issues making a beat in Uganda. There is the historical cry for federo by the Baganda, while the Banyala want to de recognized as distinct from the Baganda, the steps to curve out more districts from Tororo district, only this time along tribal lines etc etc, the list is endless.

A similar thread in all these stories is the fight for public office. Certain groups find themselves locked out of public office in their “home” districts and they feel they are not in charge. Others, whose numbers make them “minorities” in certain districts, see a break away into a different district as a way to get public jobs. The under lying issue here is unemployment and the government being the biggest employer. Regimes of present and past leaders nurtured this syndrome by giving the majority of public offices to people from their tribes and regions. Or did the British colonialists give birth to this by divide and rule? Independence probably did not come at a time when Africans where ready to be governed by a single authority but similar ethnicities where still grappling away at each others throats. The colonialists should have first built a stable equilibrium among the different tribes, economically and politically, before leaving us to “manage” our selves. A people are not civilized enough if public leaders still feel they need to favour their kinsmen with resources of the state, forgetting that they are custodians of resources pooled nationally, through taxation and money borrowed internationally but whose collateral is tagged to the country and not the regime. Our (Uganda) brand of democracy is such that heads of local governments are elected at district level and even county level way down to village LCI seats (decentralization). People thus see an opportunity to get a bite of the national cake through agitating for more districts (read more public offices). This strategy gets threatened when people from other parts of the country migrate to the district and being citizens, are permitted by the constitution to elect and be elected into public offices in their new places of residence. These migrations would not disturb the peace until people begin to interpret them as a deliberate political maneuver as has been the case in the fore mentioned Bunyoro saga and the Balaalo incidences some months back. Like I said earlier, the root problem is unemployment and government being seen as the key to employment. If the private sector was highly developed, these cases would not have arisen because governments worldwide are famous for paltry pay unlike private businesses that are looking for profits and are willing to make risky but very profitable investments. It’s sad that most of the private businesses that thrive in Uganda have the direct hand of highly placed government officials.