The peril and decline of Buganda Kingdom

From the goings on it appears that even the very vocal pretenders at Mengo actually don’t know the dynamics that has been at play since 1884 when whites first set foot in Buganda with trinkets to hoodwink royalty, and so the grave mistakes persist unabated.

Columnists John Nagenda and Peter Mulira, both, no doubt, loyal to Buganda royalty have recently questioned where Buganda or perhaps more appropriately the current Mengo cultural establishment was heading especially with nostalgic intransigence against the NRM, central government and Uganda as a whole.
From the goings on it appears that even the very vocal pretenders at Mengo actually don’t know the dynamics that has been at play since 1884 when whites first set foot in Buganda with trinkets to hoodwink royalty, and so the grave mistakes persist unabated. And so the squires are rapidly taking Mengo, not Buganda down the slippery slope to destruction unless they are urgently helped, regardless whether they seek such help or not.
In this short quarter of a century rule of the NRM fundamental changes, long prepared and in 1964 not fully matured, have affected the Buganda royal pretenders more gravely than in any other period after Uganda’s independence, leaving on the mind, stamped with the assuredness and stability which had gone before, a foreboding question as to what the future might hold.
Forms and powers have all changed, spirit and outlook even more, and the classical Ganda culture, in which the Mengoists had been nurtured, lost its pride of place. The town and modern commerce has at last finally triumphed over the countryside norms, although the political rules.
Open democracy, which every generation from Ssekabaka Ssuuna to Kabaka Mutebi II had rejected, has made its victory sure because it has challenged their political ideas, tested the institution, and remoulded their policy. But somehow these influences the velocity of which has increased is being masked by the naivety of those whose prestige and survival were attained earlier during the gone by unchallenged feudal exploitative days.
Not politically and economically, Mengo and their Kabaka seem to be living on its capital or shall we say soil, for equal successors who have not replaced the dead giants like Mutesa I, and Mwanga whose works were splendidly done. As for Daudi Chwa, Sir Edward Mutesa II a captain of a colonial army, and now Mutebi -- some elevated quality of spirit seems to have departed for good. Those tendencies which have been gathering momentum since 1900 when Baganda chiefs signed off their declining chiefdom has now rapidly advanced and no amount of nostalgia and sounding of war drums by the likes of Peter Mayega, Medard Lubega Segona, Apollo Makubuya, Nsubuga Nsambu, and Semujju Nganda over ettaka ligenda (land is being grabbed) will do a trick.
Already, Uganda’s population is 30 million of which Baganda don’t even make up one third, and yet within the so-called Buganda the ‘Baganda’ are much less in fraction even if you were to add those who don’t care about the cultural institution at Mengo. Indeed in this generation one of the greatest of all revolutions which has transformed not just this enclave called Buganda but the whole of Uganda have been the rural and urban setting with their economy, arts and letters and political spirit that have grown up, and with them broke the so-called beauty of country and archaic cultures.
The miracle, so long promised since the return of Ebyaffe in 1990 of economic empowerment by Mengo has long passed and Mengo can no longer claim any credibility or objective relevance to its own people except to stand as a merchant political group exploiting society’s ignorance.
Mengo, if it were serious and genuine, should be talking about healthcare, sanitation, agricultural productivity, education, rampant human sacrifice, witchcraft, roads, and markets in rural Buganda where life is bleaker than many of the back of beyond places in Uganda. It should be addressing the fact that since migrant labour of other Ugandans tribes, Banyarwanda, Barundi, Congolese and Luos left Buganda in the early 1980s agricultural productivity simply slumped, and many Baganda now freely sell land to flock what passes for urban centres to moonlight falsely hoping to realise quick gains.

                                                     By Ofwono Opondo