Daniel, Allan Omara

I have read the first chapters of Gen. Saleh and Prof. Ogenga Otunnu's "Consociational Democracy Agreement." It rightly names the central question: how to end political exclusion along ethnic and tribal lines. Then it ducks the answer. The NRM is presented as the cure, never the cause. Our history is told from the colonial "divide and rule" through Amin and Obote, and the NRM arrives in 1986 as "a sustained, if incomplete, effort" to fix it. Forty years on, sectarianism is more pronounced than ever. The NRM has multiplied the problem and now presents itself as the solution. The elephant in the room is left out. Under "What Remains Unresolved" the paper lists the Electoral Commission, money in elections, Buganda's land, youth unemployment and education. There is not one word on the dominance of one ethnic group in strategic positions in the army, intelligence, civil service, parastatals, oil and all public spaces. That is the main sectarian cleavage of our time. A paper on sectarianism that cannot name it, co-authored by a man at the top of that patronage system, cannot be credible. The paper says "let me be clear and honest about what the NRM period has achieved," but is silent on Obote I's achievements. It even finds room to praise Gen. Saleh's own land mediation in Kapeeka as "a model." Honesty that applies only to one side is not honesty. The paper gets the history right: Amin's expulsion of the Asians was "a calculated appeal to genuine economic grievances" and "broadly popular." Today's populist war on corruption plays the same game. As the paper itself warns, "using sectarian cleavages for short-term political gain destroys the long-term conditions for national unity." "When legitimacy is ethnic rather than institutional, no institution can function." Correct. That describes Uganda today, where loyalty to tribe and patron outranks loyalty to the State and the Constitution. The irony: the paper condemns NRM–DP and NRM–UPC deals as "backroom deals between elites… negotiated in private, without the knowledge or consent of party members." So how was this document developed? It reads as the work of two men, asking all of us to accept it as the prescription for our problems. National unity cannot be built on a history that absolves the regime holding the pen. More tomorrow...