By Aggrey Baba
The bitter ethnic, religious and regional divisions in Uganda are not accidents of history, but a product of decades of political manipulation, power struggles and competition for national resources, a major political study authored by Professor Ogenga Otunnu in collaboration with Museveni’s brother Caleb Akandwanaho (Salim Saleh) has revealed.
The paper, which the two authors named Consociational Democracy Agreement: Addressing the Root Causes and Consequences of Sectarianism, Exclusion, Marginalization and Conflicts in Uganda, takes readers through a painful historical journey, tracing how divisions that began taking political shape in nineteenth-century Buganda were deepened by colonial rule, inherited by post-independence governments and repeatedly exploited by successive political regimes.
Its central argument is that Uganda’s political problem has never simply been its religion and ethnic diversity, but the repeated manipulation of that diversity by politicians competing for power, resources and opportunities.
The study traces the origins of some of Uganda’s most deeply rooted religious and political divisions to the mid-nineteenth century, when violent struggles for religious and political power triggered the rapid sectarianization of Buganda.
The British colonial administration did not heal these divisions. Instead, Saleh says through its institutions, leadership and political, economic and administrative policies, it created new fault lines, politicized existing ones and entrenched divisions that would later shape the country’s post-independence politics.
And when colonial rule ended, the new political order largely inherited the same divisive state structures and contradictions.
In the document, Gen Saleh examines how successive governments attempted to manage these divisions through political alliances, broad-based cabinets and negotiated cooperation, only for many of those arrangements to fall short of delivering lasting national integration.
It takes readers through the UPC-Kabaka Yekka alliance under Milton Obote, Idi Amin’s shifting political mobilization, the coalition born out of the Moshi Unity Conference that produced the Uganda National Liberation Front, and the broad-based governance arrangements and political cooperation pursued under President Yoweri Museveni.
But Gen Saleh identifies a recurring weakness running through these different political experiments, that leaders negotiated among themselves while ordinary members of the communities and political constituencies they claimed to represent remained outside the equation.
Some arrangements deliberately excluded particular groups, while others failed to translate political agreements into government policies, institutional reforms and properly funded programmes capable of confronting the grievances beneath the political divisions.
In effect, the country repeatedly changed political arrangements without fully dismantling the structures and grievances that kept producing exclusion.
The study is particularly critical of attempts to deal with sectarianism through suppression and administrative bans, arguing that such measures have historically failed to eliminate the divisions they were meant to address.
It cites the banning of Kabaka Yekka in 1964 and the proscription of religious organizations under Amin as examples of interventions that drove opposition underground and, in some cases, radicalized rather than resolved political differences.
Still in the document, Gen Saleh and his co-author, also hos personal assistant, make a distinction between Uganda’s diversity and the political weaponization of that diversity. Tribal, religious, linguistic and regional identities are not, in themselves, the enemy, but the danger arises when political actors turn those identities into instruments for fighting over state power, national resources and opportunities.
The paper nevertheless gives the Museveni administration credit for achievements it says have created a stronger foundation for a more inclusive political settlement than existed under his predecessors.
These include restoring security across much of the country, establishing grassroots democratic structures, introducing Universal Primary and Secondary Education, restoring cultural institutions, negotiating peace settlements with armed groups and rolling out socio-economic transformation programmes such as the Parish Development Model.
But Saleh is equally clear that these achievements have not eliminated the country’s structural problems.
Electoral credibility concerns, unresolved land grievances, youth unemployment, unequal access to quality education, poor public service delivery and the opacity of political cooperation arrangements remain among the challenges capable of sustaining exclusion and political resentment.
It is against this historical record that Saleh advances the proposed Consociational Democracy Agreement, arguing that Uganda must abandon the recurring practice of elite political accommodation that leaves ordinary citizens and their grievances outside the settlement.
The proposed arrangement is therefore presented not merely as another political deal among leaders, but as an attempt to confront the historical causes of sectarianism through wider participation, transparent cooperation, institutional reforms and practical socio-economic interventions.
Saleh warns that Uganda cannot keep recycling political alliances, changing the faces around the negotiating table and declaring national unity while leaving the same grievances untouched.
According to the paper, the answer is to confront the country’s historical wounds instead of allowing successive generations of politicians to inherit, exploit and reproduce them.
