Kabaka Ronald Mutebi. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
[The View From Uganda]
April 13 is the birthday of the 37th Kabaka of Buganda, Ronald Muwenda Mutebi. He is now 67.
A lot is unknown about this monarch, and why Uganda’s dictator Gen. Yoweri Museveni tries to control his every move. We do know that this former English public schoolboy and Cambridge University student was, for much of the 1980s, a tenant on a housing estate in Hoxton, north London, once notorious for its National Front activities. The National Front is a far-right, fascist political party in the United Kingdom. It is currently led by Tony Martin.
When Mutebi lived in that part of London, a Hoxton neighbor ran for local councillor playing the race card, promising to rid the estate of “all niggers and dogs”. All this politicized Mutebi, who had already seen his fair share of politics from his family living in exile.
While in London, he was a freelance journalist, contributing to British papers such as The Guardian and to many London-based African publications for a modest fee. Yet, his family are the largest private landowners in East Africa, with 350 square miles.
Mutebi recalls how, as a child, he dealt with dictator Gen. Idi Amin. “Amin was very keen to give favors to my family and could be very generous,” Mutebi has said. “This, of course, was part of his plan to obtain legitimacy and popularity. He returned my father’s body from London, where it had been buried since his death in 1969, and he staged a state funeral. My own relationship with him was actually very good. He is a man of considerable charm and, at the age of 16, I found him very easy to talk to. What we didn’t know at the time, of course, was that he had a very brutal and ruthless side to his personality.”
Mutebi was inspired by the late Tom Mboya’s African socialism because “he calls for Africa’s future to be built on the institutions of the past. He somehow legitimized my existence. I could say I had a future.” Mutebi, many do not know, instinctively understands the importance of traditional institutions in nation-building, no matter what Museveni’s propagandists tell us.
He agrees that Buganda kingdom being too powerful presents the problem of a nation within a nation. “The truth of the matter”, Mutebi said, “is that even a national leader from within Buganda would find the Kabakaship difficult”.
However, he’s clearsighted enough to know that there must be some equilibrium between the traditional and the modern, the kingdom and the nation, subjects and citizens, otherwise dictatorship will continue to reign, as it does in today’s Uganda. A strong kingdom can thus serve as an effective bulwark of civil society, a counterbalance to the Museveni junta and this is precisely why dictator Museveni prefers a weakened Buganda.
“Look,” Kabaka Mutebi said, in 2001, “This is Africa. The problems afflicting us are life and death ones. It is not enough to be in power. How do you leave power? What do you leave behind? Too much of the continent’s politics is based on personalities. As soon as those personalities leave, for whatever reason, chaos follows. We have simply got to put the right structures, the right laws, in place for the future. We cannot afford to leave it to personalities. Take all this talk of an African renaissance, a rebirth of the African continent and things African. Militarism still rules. Until we have civil institutions that can resolve conflicts peacefully, the African renaissance remains an aspiration.”
On his 67th birthday, we can appreciate that when the above words were spoken, the Kabaka was sounding a warning to his fellow Ugandans and, indeed, all Africans.
The Ugandan state today is in the hands of personalities, centered around one individual: Gen. Museveni.
On Kabaka Mutebi’s birthday, we must reflect on how farsighted a message he had for us in the past and borrow from it the insight that comes with looking back with the 20/20 vision of hindsight in order to rid ourselves of Museveni’s personal, highly militarized rule.
Columnist Matogo can be reached via [email protected]
