Northern Uganda Messenger Post

Sometime last year, President Yoweri Museveni reprised the ethnographic genealogies of Uganda’s ruling monarchies. In his adversarial stand-off with the Buganda monarchy, he derisively dismissed the Tooro, Bunyoro, and Buganda ruling houses as “Luo”. Gen. Museveni sounded to use “Luo”, derogatorily. As if anticipating spirited Ganda denials, the president pre-emptively challenged them to contradict him on whether “Wang Kac”, a clearly Lwo phrase, imprinted at the entrance to ancient Buganda palace gate, was in Luganda. Apparently, unlike the Christian God, and the Chosen Galilean Son, who has been “blind”, “deaf,” and has “absconded” for two thousand and nine years, the Luo Gods were not asleep when President Museveni spoke. Suddenly, a national, regional and international constellation of “Luo Stars”, which would include Kabaka Mutebi of Buganda, began to align in ways that has thrown a gauntlet to President Museveni’s 23 years of unbroken autocracy. Even moderate, perennially neutral...

In the wake of the Kabaka riots, the Banyoro-Bafuriki controversy, and the perception that our country has been splintered a thousand folds along ethnic crevices since the NRM came to power, I would like to identify and discuss three broad political tendencies and their contributions to the national debate on a post-museveni society. These are the democratic centrist reformers; the federalist right; and the democratic left. Each of these groups draws its membership from across a wide spectrum of organised Ugandan political, civic, professional and religious organisations. They are as ideologically eclectic as their political characteristics, boundaries and strategies are diffused. Since the Kabaka Riots over Kayunga, their respective leading ideologues have been soul-searching for some magic-glue like national habits, which could be used to firmly sew up and keep fast, the seams on the patchworks of our multi-nationality state. For the democratic reformers, which include opposition p...

A New Vision article by Edward Mulindwa attacked Olara Otunnu for serving the 1985 Military Council government. According to Mr. Mulindwa, it is unacceptable to serve your country under military regimes. It is clear Mr. Mulindwa and others view realities from the same frame and stock of divide and rule, and exclusionary politics that has been perfected for the last 23 years by Yoweri Museveni. Divisions along regional, ethnic, historical , and who served what government; who fled and who remained in the country; who fought and did not fight what regime, which have been used too long, as a basis to exclude, marginalise and legitimise injustices. In the rush to label, condemn and exclude, such proponents confuse the conceptual distinctions between a state and government. The NRM, UPC, FDC, DP and any other party or clique of army generals may form a government; through elections or military putsch. Such regimes or governments, will come and go, but the Ugandan state remains. Civ...