POLITICAL ELITE OF UGANDA: THINK OR YOU WILL SINK!

[Sabiiti Mutengesa, July 2008]

Land, and the use to which it shall be put to move Uganda from the middle ages - where we are
currently stuck - to the modern era; land, ettaka, dongo, eitaka, ngom…. is the most critical issue
facing Uganda today, however much we may struggle to prioritize tribalist hysteria. The land question,
and particularly how it relates to agricultural productivity and our quest to become an industrial nation
is an all important issue for us, a country that has the same proportion of peasants as England in 1381
at the end of 100 yrs war, a country with a GDP per capita of $900, depending on donor crumbs to the
tune of 53% of the recurrent budget; a country with industrial production as a proportion of total
production at 24%, like England in 1649; a country with a dependency ratio of 111: 100, the highest in
the world; a country with a median age of 14.9 yrs, the lowest in the world; a country where only 2% of
the population are above the age of 65 years, the lowest in the world, and so on.

What we should all be debating now, is the means of compelling our fractious and petty elite to forge
some consensus on how the land question should be disposed of, urging them to do so in the
direction of causing Uganda to effect the compulsory transition from medievalism to modernity.

I want to point out to you that, the NRM’s current approach as we ‘To inaugurate the Plan for
Modernization of Agriculture
see it in form of the Land Bill and the action of launching ‘bibanja (PMA), and also promulgate
associations’ clearly sets the organisation onto the path of being legislation that entrenches
peasants, squatters and micro-
extremely reactionary; and a potential obstacle to the country’s holders on productive land is as
ludicrous as buying a baby cot
future progress, and indeed, to the future of the country. The
and then going for vasectomy’
reactionary proclivities of the NRM’s hecklers at Mengo are as
excusable as they are expected; but it would also serve them better if for once they realised their own
potential power and more importantly, what they stand to gain by not resigning themselves to being a
whale that wishes to reside in a pond. It is ironical though that, on the progressiveness-reaction
continuum, Mengo perceptions on land-related matters may be more progressive (or rather, less
reactionary) than those of the NRM and this is in itself a matter of serious concern. What ever the
case, both groups ought to place in their sights the challenge of moving the country from relying on
low intensity, subsistence agriculture (a mere ‘gamble in the rains’, as Barrington Moore would put it in
his ‘The social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship’), to modern farming, based on consolidated
ownership of land. One keeps hoping that the country’s political elite, particularly the NRM will start
considering the fact that, we can never meet that challenge by entrenching small holders, squatters,

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and little peasants on productive land, however much we relish their vote and however much we
sympathize with their plight. I talk of ‘considering’, because I recognise that the NRM leadership, and
particularly Mr Museveni, very well knows that preservation of a peasant class is not the way to build
and sustain a nation, let alone a modern one.

The point here is, as a country, we simply have to find the final solution to the peasant question. Time
is not on our side. Entrenching peasants on productive land only makes it more daunting for us to
effect the historically critical and compulsory transition from subsistence agriculture to modern farming,
conceived with economies of scale in mind. We cannot inaugurate the ‘Plan for Modernization of
Agriculture’ (PMA) and then promulgate a law that entrenches peasants and squatters. That is like
buying a baby cot and then going for vasectomy.

The Illusion of peasant omnipotence

We tried peasant produce for barter trade in the 1980s and we all know what happened. One peasant
would bring a ddebe of a mixture of yellow, pink, black and purple beans still with the ashes used to
ward off weevils, yet another one would bring a basket of weevil-infested ‘kawula’ liberally mixed with
goat pellets, while another one would bring half a sac of 50% dry ‘kanyebwa’ mixed with castor beans,
and so on. We could not standardise that kind of produce and therefore, it could not meet the rigorous
requirements of the outside market into which, we so much aspire to make inroads. What we chose to

‘Historically, peasants have only ignore was the fact that, peasants produce for subsistence and
been known to metamorphose into never for the market.
wage labourers and never into
capitalists as we are trying to
imagine we can do in Uganda; just
as if crow eggs could hatch into The renowned processed-food company, Heinz will place a
parrots’. demand for 10,000 tonnes of haricot beans, all of a certain size,
all with the same moisture content, delivered on a certain date by a single supplier. Such standards of
quantity, quality and timeliness can only be met by large-scale mechanised farming, supported by on-
site, high standard post-harvest management facilities. We should never hope to achieve such
standards with peasant production, even if we set up our own local equivalents of Heinz. And yes,
hordes of peasants armed with a mixture of instruments of violence: G3s, AK 47s, SARs, SLRs, bows
and arrows and bare hands when organised well, can produce sufficient momentum to dispose of a tin
pot dictator. However, when such variety is extrapolated to modern production, it will not give us
sufficient momentum to banish our bitter and biting backwardness.

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Historically, peasants have only been known to metamorphose into wage labourers and never into
capitalists as we are trying to imagine we can do in Uganda. Compatriots, whether we like it or not,
we also must proleterianize our peasants, however much we love them. They have to get off the land
and create room for commercial agriculture, managed by large-scale farmers using scientific methods
of production. Opportunistic conservation of the peasant class is reactionary, just as it is traitorous.
Those peasants shall have to become workers on commercial farms, consolidated from the mini-plots
they occupied in a previous era. Some will become employees of agro-industrial establishments that
will inevitably emerge as an offshoot of the enlargement of the scale of agriculture. The offspring of
the former peasants will have to lubricate the sectors that shall be the spin-off of that initial radical
move over which we are now pussyfooting. The labourers will Democracy is not just good
manners, as some would wish to
have to live in labour lines constructed for them around the large
make us believe. It is the tight
commercial farms and industrial establishments where they will corner in which revenue-thirsty
political elites get trapped when
work. They will be paid a wage, which can then be taxed; they they are attracted or compelled to
will attend schools and health facilities built around their labour rely on the wealth created by their
own populations to finance their
camps; when they pass on, they will be buried not in ‘ebiggya’ (the elite) projects.
strewn all around the countryside, but in communal cemeteries. They will be effectively policed
because their addresses will become knowable. The countryside will cease to be bandit country,
because you cannot hide in an avocado plantation, or a 10 sq km bogoya or sunflower or maize farm
or an extensive bean or peanut farm, or a 100 square kilometre cotton estate; just like you cannot find
shelter in a five square kilometre pineapple plantation: rural banditry a la Kony is a function of a
peasant socio-economic set up.

You will have to irrigate those large-scale farms, so your defence and foreign policy will now be
focusing on the implications of Anwar El Sadat’s declaration at Camp David that Egypt’s next war will
be over water. The former peasants, now wage labourers will have piped water and electricity
because, then, the populist or rather ‘popularist’ elite will have quit the indiscretion of hallucinating that
you can provide such services to peasant populations scattered all over the rural countryside, miles
apart from each other, living in foliage-thatched shacks, in inaccessible villages; because not even the
richest country would undertake such a service-provision venture. The peasants of yesteryear, now
labourers, will demand for those services, and rightfully so given that you will be taxing their wages.

And then, there is the fantasy of ‘bbona bagagawale’: let everybody be a tycoon. Instead of atomising
financial resources into micro credit or ‘ntandikwa’, we should be thinking of consolidating such
resources into macro credit and giving it to promising commercial farmers who should be required to

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use it to pay off the squatters and peasants, whether crop farmers or pastoralists. Our future as a
country that is yearning for a macro-transformation does not lie in micro-projects, and microfinance,
and microcredit, microenterprise, micro this and micro that. That will only yield a micro ideology, micro
statecraft, a micro vision, micro results and a micro future. In the context of Uganda’s colossal
development challenge, succumbing to micro approaches to our problems only amounts to an attempt
to slim an elephant.
‘Lecturing the political elite of an
aid-dependent country like
The fact is that, we are not an industrial nation that is attempting to
Uganda on the merits of
democratic accountability is as create safety nets for those who due to some misfortunes are
misguided as hectoring an
intravenously fed patient about falling through the gaps. We are a preindustrial country trying to
the virtues of mastication’. cross over to being industrial. Our historical task is to construct a
safety net for a whole polity and not merely for a handful of unfortunate individuals. If we are to
register any success in that endeavour, we have to strip ourselves of any trace of ‘microism’. Instead
of giving microcredit to a peasant who will buy a bicycle, marry another lady to oppress and use the
rest to buy tekwe brew or is it kwete, and then fail to pay back, we should lump everything up and give
macrocredit to a General Oketta or a Brigadier Otema or any other aspiring land baron currently
gracing the headlines, to handsomely pay off the squatters that are pestering him. Once the land has
been consolidated, give the owners the confidence that it is their private property, with all
accompanying legal backup. Just as swiftly, enact a law that sets the minimum acreage of land that
can be registered under a landowner in zones of agricultural production, and for that matter,
everywhere else. Soon afterwards, by force of law, cause the land baron to pay property tax on that
land: so many millions of shillings per so many hectares of land per annum. That will discourage him
from using the land as an object of speculation and force him to put it to productive use. If he employs
a threshold of 500 labourers on his 40 square miles farm, and provides them with affordable
accommodation and other amenities, waive the property tax in his favour. One could go on and on for
days, about the plausible and indeed, positive dominoes of swallowing the bitter pill of eradicating the
squatter and peasant class. Springing from that, there are countless implied tasks for the policy
maker in every domain of national management, be it in health, social security and employment,
education, infrastructure, housing policy, law and order or whatever else.

I made brief reference to taxation above. We know that while the subsistence producer - the peasant -
cannot be taxed, the wage labourer can. Beyond meeting his subsistence needs, the peasant’s level
of production leaves little or nothing to be appropriated as tax, unless one is intent on wringing blood
out of a boulder. This is why it is neither an accident, nor an act of magnanimity that graduated tax

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has been called off in Uganda. But even as we are forced to adopt such a ‘policy’, we need to bear in
mind that, widespread taxation marks the birth of a fiscal contract between the political class and their
constituents.

Since the taxpayer will always want to know how the deductions from his or her hard-earned wages
are put to use, taxation and with it, the fiscal contract is the most infallible foundation for negotiation,
bargain or parley (hence, ‘parliament’) between the political class and the populations. It is that parley
that furnishes the content of organic, as opposed to mechanically imposed and hollow democracy.
Democracy is not just good manners, or a sign of culture or sophistication or refinement as some
would want to make us believe. Democracy is nothing but the tight corner in which revenue-thirsty
political elites find themselves when they are compelled, or even attracted to rely on their own
populations to finance their (the elite) projects. Democracy is the fishing hook that catches the political
class and the bait on that hook is tax. If you do not have that bait, you will not catch the fish. But most
importantly however, tax is the citizenry’s subscription fee for membership to civil society. The point
here is that, finding the final solution to the peasant question also has a bearing on whether or not
Uganda will ever become a democratic country.

The causal link between finding a solution to the peasant IN BRITAIN, …

• 70% of the land is owned by 1% of
question and the inevitability of true democracy is clear. The the population.
flipside of a subsistence economic base is an abysmal • 60 million people live in 24 million
"dwellings", and these 24 million
revenue base. An abysmal revenue base forces the political dwellings sit on approx 4.4 million
acres (7.7% of the land).
elite to scrounge around for unearned income, such as so-
• 77% of the population of 60 million
called aid. It is naïve to expect a political class that is live on only 5.8% of the land, about
3.5 million acres (total 60 million).
dependent on such unearned income as ‘donor’ aid to be ( http://www.progress.org/revwob.htm)
accountable to its population. In such instances, the populace simply do not owe that kind of political
class a living: you cannot call the tune when you do not pay the piper. Equally so, you cannot hope for
accountability from a political class you do not bank roll. To expect aid-dependent political elites to be
accountable to domestic constituencies is as clueless as feeding someone through a stomach tube
and also giving him lectures on mastication.

Learning from the experience of our (tor)mentors

We are not Britain, but like Britain in the middle ages, we are a society whose population is made up
of hand-to-mouth or subsistence producers. We are a country in the middle ages, however much we
may wish to pretend otherwise. In order for Britain to exit from the penury of the mediaeval era, her

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leadership did not opt for paternalism, or populism or even democracy. Land was enclosed and
peasants relocated to the IDP camps called cities. Then, and only then, was the stage set for the
‘Program for Modernization of Agriculture’ (PMA), and subsequently, industrialisation.

‘Just like Stuart agrarian policy Speaking of ‘IDPisation’, from 1871 to 1901 the population of
precipitated the English civil war in the IDP called Middlesbrough grew from 154 to 91,032 souls;
the mid 1600s, NRM agrarian policy
will surely precipitate one in Uganda, a 60,000 per cent jump in three decades. Much of that
especially if the landowners that are
being hobbled by squatters disabuse growth came from the ‘displacement’ called ‘parliamentary
themselves of tribalism and organise enclosures’. In primary school, we were taught that
as a united political front’.
Manchester became ‘Cottonpolis’. In our case, why should
Uganda’s cotton belt centres, Kasese, Lira or Soroti not become cottonpolises? In the Second Term
of Primary Six, we used to be taught that, in Wales, ‘sheep ate men’ enabling Britain to become the
world’s wool producer. How did those sheep become carnivorous? The answer is simple: final
solution to the peasant question. In fact the process started much earlier than the modern era to
which most reference is made: thousands of small estates were combined into less than two hundred
major lordships as far back as 1070, in the early Norman days. The challenge for Uganda now is,
unlike Britain then, we lack some ‘new world’ - Australia, New Zealand or North America - where to
offload our ‘surplus’ population: we shall have to rearrange our socioeconomic base and still
accommodate all-and-sundry that will be redeployed in the process. Time is not on our side:
demographic redeployment has to be crafted into every aspect of the cycle of key national policy. As
a national population, we are given to doubling every two decades. Come 2050, we shall be close to
150 million. If redeployment is going to wait to be managed as a crisis, then we shall have a massive
mess that will consume us.

That Britain I am referring to in the foregoing passage also had her days of indecisiveness over how,
and even whether to implement the final solution to the peasant question. One of the factors that
brought ‘President’ Cromwell of the ‘Republic of England’ to prominence was the vacillation of the
Stuarts - the royals that ruled England from 1603-1714 – over whether land was going to remain in the
hands of peasants, or whether it was going to be consolidated in fewer hands. For those who imagine
that military dictatorship is a preserve of the global South, England had her 15 months of a ‘Military
commission’ during those heady days: ‘The rule of the Major Generals’ from 1655-1657. At that time,
Stuart agrarian policy precipitated the English Civil War, just like NRM agrarian policy will surely
precipitate one in Uganda, especially if the beleaguered landowners make up their minds to
emancipate themselves from petty tribalism and present their case as a single phalanx. Of course,

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Uganda’s parliament today is dissimilar to Stuart England’s legislature that was nothing but a
‘committee of the landlords’. Landlords, why can’t you contest for parliamentary seats and dominate
the legislative process? But even then, the way things are now, Uganda’s controversial Land Bill is no
different from King Charles 1’s ‘Star Chamber’ and the ‘Court of Requests’ that served, partly to
protect peasants against evictions spawned by the enclosure process. In the fullness of time, those
two populist devices were quashed. For his inability to know that it was daft to go against the grain of
history, King Charles 1, the chief proponent of pro-peasant policies was subjected to the ultimate
emotional experience.

Those days there was no Amnesty International to ooze about human rights, and of course peasants
were not voters so that the political elite did not have to handle them delicately. It was not an accident
that they did not vote. If they had been given the vote before the enclosure process had been fully
accomplished, Britain would never have become a power and would quite certainly have been
haunted by the same ugly APE that plagued modernisation’s late comers, Germany and Italy. Britain
inoculated herself against that APE: Agrarian Patriotic Extremism, or fascism, by pulling the rug from
below its feet. The solution had long been implemented through the eradication of the peasant class,
the usual junior partners in the fascism project.

Britain’s electoral reform bill of 1832 could only take place because the peasants did not have any
thing important left to vote on: they were off their land. Why ‘Britain’s electoral reform bill of 1832
could only take place because the
should Uganda be hobbled by broadening participation before
peasants did not have any thing
she sorts out the more fundamental question of distribution? important left to vote on: they were
off their land. In fact there were none
Of course, even after Britain’s electoral reforms, the number of left. Why should Uganda allow
voters increased from 2% to only 4% of those eligible, not herself to be hobbled by the need to
broaden participation before she
100%. The percentage of adults eligible to vote in England sorts out the more fundamental
question of distribution?’
reached 97% only in 1928, 1042 years after Alfred the Great
defeated the Danes and set off to turn England into a political unit. Uganda, at age zero, was
expected to effectively run an electoral system where 100+% of eligible adults cast their vote! On
every occasion, this grievous self-deception always comes around to stare us in our faces.

The fact is, if you want to love a butterfly, you care for caterpillars. However, you do not care for
caterpillars by being captivated by the flamboyance of butterflies; because then you will be tempted to
clip the wings of some senile, 1,042 years-old butterfly and glue them on the caterpillars and hope that
the unwieldy larvae will fly. They will not fly: they do not have the musculature for flight. They will

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continue to waggle and wriggle, wobble and wiggle: that way, they perform their locomotion. They are
the nutritive and growth stage, period. Their business is to eat, twice their own weight of food per day,
and grow. If Uganda is to grow, what should we be prioritizing? Why do we get our hands tied when
we have very critical transitions to effect; transitions which those that love to hector us made
unencumbered, centuries ago? The problem seems to be that, our political vision and our economic
aspirations are operating at cross-purposes. It is for this very reason that some footling Mengo
retainers end up being wrapped around the axles of those that should leave themselves no option
other than operating above the fray.

Some comments on our pseudo-Prussia

The Buganda landed elite should be advancing their cause in modern terms; the terms of enhancing
their status from being beneficiaries of the spoils, to being a productive middle class: Mulwana
multiplied by a million. They should be campaigning for big loans that would enable them to buy off
squatters. They should be gunning for laws that can enable them to own tracts of land anywhere in
the country - Acholi, Lango, Karamoja, Ngom Orom, Bunyoro, Toro..., with full protection against
tribalist harassment; and with the pledge to put such consolidated land to productive use, and to pay
property tax on it, and provide employment to those seeking to be wage labourers etc. Instead, they
are now clamouring for 9,000 square miles (the dubious ‘kenda’) when the rest of the country has land
to the tune of 80,000 square miles which they should be eying. Are they not hankering for a squirrel
when there is an elephant up for grabs? Have the Mengo elite never heard about the Junkers, the
landed elite of Prussia who pioneered the consolidation of Germany into a solid power, or the English
lords, who pushed for laws to own land in Wales, Scotland and
‘If you love butterflies, you care for
Ireland whatever cost this process imposed on the inhabitants of
caterpillars. You do not care for
those lands? Have they heard about the four great Japanese
caterpillars by being a hostage to
the flamboyance of butterflies’
Zaibatsu: Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda? Did the
Zaibatsu galvanise their entrepreneurial might by being nostalgic
about the glory of the Tokugawa era? Did they consolidate their power by arm-twisting the deliverers
of the Meiji epoch? The fact is that, the Zaibatsu were very clear about the borderline between
yesterday and tomorrow.

What some of the tragically injudicious Buganda elite never seem to grasp is that, they were born with
a silver spoon in their mouths: when German territories were unified around the Prussian core, the
new country was not called Prussia, nor was Britain called England when, Scotland, Wales and part of
Ireland were consolidated around the English domains. In our case, our country was branded the

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Swahili name ‘Uganda’ which means ‘the land of the Ganda’ even when it encompasses the Banyoro,
Acholi and Langi, Itesot, etc etc. As we all know, the Swahili speakers refer to America as Umarekani,
the land of Americans; or England as Uingeleza, the land of the English, what in Bantu dialects
including Luganda is called ‘Bungereza’. The fact is that, Swahili lacks the ‘B’ noun class causing that
letter to be dropped from names of places. So, why should everyone in the country accept to be
called a Ganda even when they all have their own communal names; and then you go ahead to
constantly claim that they have not accepted you, hence the ‘badugudugu’, ‘banamawanga’, ‘balalo’,
‘biddeyo ewabwe’, ‘twabikowa’: you rabble, go back to your own tribal lands. What blindness!

What if one argued (and they would be perfectly in order) that

If the colonialists had made their
the label ‘Uganda’ is a disgusting symbol of the flippancy of the incursion into this area through
Bushenyi or Bukonzo or Kigezi or
colonialists and it is the embodiment of the passiveness of the
Bugisu, would everyone have been
people of Bunyoro, Toro, Acholi, Alurland, Nkore, and others content with ‘Ushenyi’ or ‘Ukonzo’
or ‘Ukiga ‘ or ‘Ugisu’ as the name
who have curiously come to accept themselves as Ganda, even for our country? If not, why must
when they have their own ethnic labels? What would have been ‘Uganda’ be acceptable?

the view of the Scottish or Welsh if what we know today as Britain - part of which they are - had
instead been frivolously christened as ‘England’, whether in Gaelic, Flemish, Frankish, Viking lingo or
any other equivalent of Swahili? If the colonialists had made their incursion through Bushenyi or
Bukonjo or Kigezi or Bugisu, would everyone else have accepted Ushenyi or Ukonjo or Ukiga or Ugisu
as the country’s name? What if sections of the citizenry of our short-fused polity demanded that the
country’s name should be changed to ‘South Nile Republic’, or any other label that is everything but
the lousily thought-out and perpetually mispronounced Swahili word ‘Uganda’, which also means
Buganda? And why should someone, somewhere, not make that demand anyway?

Compatriots, let us shape up.