Heed Churchill’s Call – ‘Concentrate On Uganda’

The Independent (Kampala)

Harold E. Acemah

29 April 2011

opinion

As an artificial state created by the British, we can only build a nation out of the several tribes that make Uganda if we tolerate each other.

Against the background of another round of fraudulent elections and prior to that, towards the end of 2010, events which eerily remind one of the 1966 crisis, it is pertinent to revisit Sir Winston Churchill’s admiration for our land. In 1908 Sir Winton Churchill, then Colonial Secretary of the United Kingdom, published a book My African Journey, which chronicled his visit to several British colonies and protectorates in Africa, including Uganda.

This is what he wrote about the country “gifted by nature”:

“My journey is at an end, the tale is told, and the reader who has followed so faithfully so far has a right to ask what message I bring back. It can be stated in three words: “Concentrate on Uganda”.

But it is alive by itself. It is vital, and in my view, in spite of its insects and its diseases, it ought in the course of time to become the most prosperous of all our East and Central African possessions, and perhaps the “financial driving wheel of all this part of the world”.

My counsel plainly is: Concentrate upon Uganda! Nowhere else in Africa will a little money go so far. Nowhere else will the results be more brilliant, more substantial or more rapidly realized.

Uganda is from end to end one beautiful garden, where the staple food of the people grows almost without labour. Does it not sound like a paradise on earth? “It is the Pearl of Africa”.

Almost 50 years after independence in 1962, has Uganda lived up to this incredible depiction proclaimed by Winston Churchill over a century ago?

Winston Churchill came to then British East Africa by sea and docked at Mombasa. He travelled inland via then Kenya Colony by the “Uganda Railway” up to Port Florence, now Kisumu City. From there he travelled to Kampala via Tororo and Jinja. His final destination was Entebbe, then capital of Uganda Protectorate.

Much of the area Sir Winston Churchill visited was Buganda. He did not certainly visit my West Nile region, which was then part of a colony called, Belgian Congo. I don’t think he visited Mbale, Soroti, Gulu, Mbarara or Kabale. I hardly need tell all and sundry that the very name of our country is derived from Buganda. It is, therefore, painful to all men of goodwill to hear and read a few prominent Ugandans humiliate, denigrate and insult our fellow Baganda brothers and sisters, including the Kabaka, who are bona fide, generous and patriotic Ugandans. One politician from western Uganda even had the audacity to call the Baganda “political condoms”, who have now, I guess, been discarded or flushed, after use. The so-called Kings Bill, which is clearly aimed at Buganda, is not only unnecessary but actually an exercise in futility. I hope this Bill which was hurriedly passed, just before the February 18th elections, by our toothless and rubber-stamp Parliament, will be declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of Uganda.

Buganda has been and will, in the foreseeable future, remain the hub of Uganda and whether we like it or not what Sir Winston Churchill referred to as the “The Pearl of Africa” in his book My African Journey in 1908, was to a large extent Buganda. I sincerely hope that, with effect from 2011, all citizens of Uganda will treat each other with all due respect, which we all deserve as a matter of right and common decency.

As an artificial state created by the British, we can only build a nation out of the several tribes which constitute Uganda if we learn to respect and tolerate each other as fellow citizens. I believe that Ugandans can build unity in diversity and forge the necessary political, economic and social consensus in order to create one nation, with one people and one Parliament, so that the state and nation of Uganda become conterminous. It has happened elsewhere and I firmly believe it can happen in Uganda. I thus agree with Churchill; let us concentrate on building Uganda as a nation-state and the challenge of rising to the status of being the Pearl of Africa can and will be rapidly realised.

The author is a political scientist, retired Uganda’s ambassador and a consultant in international relations.

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