Uganda has made headlines this past week for violent clashes in the capital city of Kampala over development, property rights, and the traditional Buganda king. The unrest is unusual for Uganda, but highlights growing discontent with the government of Yoweri Museveni.
The cause of the clashes was a planned trip by the Buganda king, King Ronald Mutebi II, to a neighborhood filled with a rival ethnic group. When police attempted to stop the visit, some Bugandan loyalists burned tires in protest and things quickly spiraled out of control. Several days of violence followed, and while death counts vary it is believed that at least 20 were killed and over 100 wounded in the riots while 600 protestors have been arrested.
Buganda is the largest of the five ancient Ugandan kingdoms and the Baganda people are the largest ethnic group in the country. All kingdoms were abolished under former president Milton Obote in the 1960s, but were reinstated by Museveni after the Ugandan Bush Wars. However the king only has ceremonial powers and is prohibited from interfering or attempting to influence politics. It is this last point that has brought increasing conflict between Museveni and King Mutebi, and by extension between the government and Buganda loyalists.
The primary conflict between the government and Buganda kingdom is over land rights and sovereignty issues, namely the alleged legal obligation that the government has to hand over all Buganda land that was seized by Obote in 1967. Not surprisingly, Museveni has declined to do this. Instead, the government has enacted some very creative laws that appear to be designed to marginalize the Baganda, at least as much as the largest ethnic group in Uganda and a key political base for Museveni can be marginalized. As described in The East African, examples of these reforms include:
Donating Buganda’s land to “investors”; settling non-Baganda newcomers in these areas and then proposing laws to protect the new “tenants”; creating new districts under “decentralisation,” whose “district land boards” then claim and sell Buganda’s land; creating new “kingdoms” out of ethnic minorities within Buganda; using the 1995 constitution-making process to “constitutionally” remove Kampala from Buganda and most recently, tabling a Bill to expand the same Kampala’s boundaries to eat up areas previously constitutionally defined as being within Buganda.
Such abuse of land laws has been reported on in the past but of course much of this has been lost in last week’s rioting. Instead, people appear to have taken advantage of the chaos to express their growing discontent with the government and with Museveni specifically, who has been in power since 1986. Thus the riots ended up being not so much about Buganda as about what Ugandans see for the future of their country.
In this regard, the government’s response is also telling. Hundreds of people have been arrested including a Baganda MP and radio talk show host, while four radio stations have been shut down. Today, he blamed the opposition for fueling the violence. In other words, Museveni has responded with political and military force to show that he has no plans to leave anytime soon, and perhaps hint to what may lie ahead to those who challenge him, regardless of the rights of those who are in his way.
