A Timely Warning?

Kabaka and the Beanstalk

I have been following developments relating to the role of various leaders in African political development for some time. Many a diplomat has raised concern that serious tribal vendettas have been providing comfortable opportunities for dictators and military junta to step in and to provide a period of stability. To them the challenge of political development equates to stemming the loss of blood from tribal warfare and other wasteful distractions. They have offered peace and security but cannot be expected to provide democratic political progress. It has been argued that for military rulers, politics and the rule of law are incompatible….

What we may be witnessing in the Buganda homeland is the rebirth of a tiny seedling of the old Baganda political dream … amidst the allegations that some ancient tracts of Baganda owned land are being allocated to other tribes. How can this be possible, the Baganda ask? How much of is this really true, we ask. According to subscribers of “the Baganda dream” the Kabaka, who has been allowed to return to Uganda can surely lead a campaign to recover these homelands. But if Museveni is seeing the plant not as a seedling but as the Kabaka’s beanstalk, there may be serious problems ahead. Remember that Jack, the colonialist who had planted the beanstalk left many years ago. So the bundukis are out and sadly a few Baganda people have been killed while further efforts may also be made to cut the Baganda beanstalk.

Do the Baganda seriously need a beanstalk? And who in their community would actually want one? Should the Baganda not consider having a Kabaka as a figurehead and then work hard to create the framework for the whole tribe to benefit from economic development and a more compromising social policy? There is a rich heritage there, often expressed very creatively in cultural events.

What are the Baganda so anxious about?  In many countries, including India, many minority groups seem to have persistent dreams of regaining what they consider to be their just political and economic heritage.  Prime Minister Nehru displaced the maharajas and President Obote annulled the kingdoms and monarchies, both to replace the older constitutional arrangements with new republican models. It was not easy for the traditional rulers and their followers. How might have both Uganda and India progressed, under different stages of their respective developments, if the traditional rulers had not been removed? There is a book here for someone but let us ask a few exploratory questions.

Whatwould have happened if the Sikhs had tried at the time of political independence and perhaps were to try now to revive Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s monarchy in the Punjab? Could they suffer the same fate as the Baganda, some of who gave their lives a few weeks ago, nearly forty years after their independence?   For the pragmatists, the days of the tribes and monarchs ended a long time ago… and the people who carry the sparks for new fires of a new self-realisation ‘ideal’ are likely to lose out. However there are the ambitious ‘separatists’ and the fervent ‘isolationalists’ who will continue to seek new ways of rekindling those old tribal dreams. If the present governments will be more circumspect and not try to silence them, someone else with stronger anti-monarchy sentiment will.

Shouldn’t someone urge restraint to the Kabaka before people begin to see him as the giant who must fall off Jack’s beanstalk and perish forever?