I am grateful to the editorial team at The Observer for having granted me this space to express my view on Uganda’s constitutional trajectory (past, present and future), on a weekly basis. It is an honour and a privilege, which I do not take for granted.
For my part, my commitment to sharing my views in this format is informed by five main considerations. I try to elaborate each of these below.
In the first place, I think of the idea, expressed in the biblical Luke 12:48, as follows: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”
I was lucky to have been one of the around 100 or so persons in my year who studied both the Bachelor of Laws at Makerere University and the postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice at the Law Development Centre as a government scholar. I also had the subsequent luck, thereafter, to pursue more advanced legal education, and to be employed by my alma mater from 2009 to date.
I have been given much – certainly more than many Ugandans of my generation. I am not necessarily any more deserving of that good fortune than they were. The least I can do is to give back, in some way, to a country which has given me so much.
Secondly, it appears that much of Uganda’s public space has lately been overrun by persons who can only charitably be described as charlatans.
There was a time when public debate was truly illuminating and genuinely edifying. Even if one did not necessarily agree with the views being expressed, it was clear that those views were genuinely held and that they were informed by a good-faith search for truth.
More recently, it seems that as good men and women recede into silence – for whatever reasons, ranging from fatigue to disillusionment – the space they formerly occupied is being taken over by persons more interesting in fomenting discord than fostering dialogue. There is no benefit, for anyone, from such a situation.
Third, I genuinely feel that there is a burden on my generation to do our part in ‘building our nation’ (however grandiose that sounds, and fully recollecting the stinging critique by Henry Barlow of any purely elitist ‘nation-building’ pretensions). A number of senior citizens now in or approaching retirement, from various shades of the political spectrum, cannot be begrudged their well-earned rest.
Whether we like it to not, it is now our turn to carry the burden which for a long time they shielded us from. I was powerfully confronted by this reality when the issue of the leadership of Makerere School of Law’s Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC) arose at the close of last year.
I honestly wanted to spend a few more years as a pure academic – engaged in teaching, research and, particularly, writing. However, during the meeting in which my colleagues nominated me to the position, I looked around the room and realized that everyone else had either already made their contribution in this regard, or was serving the university in some other capacity.
There are times when to refuse to accept one’s obligation is to be irresponsible – perhaps even selfish.
Fourth, this is in some ways a response to the challenge posed by Dr Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, in a piece – published in these very pages on March 23, 2022 – entitled ‘Between silence and speaking out’. In it, he bemoaned the fact that Ugandan academics “ha[d] been turned into a selfish class that [wa]s comfortable with its financial privileges and echoes of exclusive jargon, classroom work, playing into ‘international’ scholarly traditions of self-importance, and carefully avoiding popular media” and further critiqued our “self-exemption and indifference” in the context of national struggles for good governance.
He was right, of course. In some ways, he echoed an earlier critique sounded by Prof Issa Shivji in a piece – published on the Pambazuka News website on November 2, 2017 – entitled ‘Metamorphosis of the revolutionary intellectual.’
Shivji referenced a category of academics who choose to be ‘fence- sitters’, noting that: “As fence-sitters, they are vulnerable; inevitably they roll over to the side of domination, their neutrality notwithstanding.”
Finally, this column is in part an extension of what I consider to be two of my most important roles on earth – fatherhood and teaching.
In the first place, as we all contend with our mortality (a powerful reminder of which was presented by the Covid-19 pandemic) it constitutes a general and continuing letter to my children – Agaba, Amara and Asasira – for them to better understand my thoughts on a variety of topics which at present might not be of as much interest to them as, for instance, the results of the English Premier League or the Barbie movie franchise.
This Uganda is theirs, and will be theirs for quite a while after my own generation is gone. We must attempt to invite them and other young Ugandans to imagine and believe in a better, more egalitarian and just society than that which they have grown up seeing.
They must be reminded that, aside from that one grandfather apparently determined to claim all Ugandans as his bazzukulu and to craft one narrative of our historical trajectory and constituent truth, are other equally – if not more – legitimate grandfathers and grandmothers from whom we can learn our national story.
Secondly, the column provides an additional forum for me to refine my thoughts and articulate them for the benefit of my students at the School of Law, Makerere University. Certainly, I also understand, and heartily welcome, the possibility that it might be found to be of some use by law students in other institutions of learning in Uganda.
Having set out my motivations for writing this column, I wish to stipulate one principle by which I hope to be guided in the weeks and months ahead – a commitment to engage in civil discourse rather than vitriol and invective.
As the late United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted in a 2008 interview: “I attack ideas, I don’t attack people – and some very good people have some very bad ideas.”
As such, any reference to persons will only be in so far as those individuals, by their positions or actions, are such an inextricable part of the narrative that the analysis would be incomplete without a mention of them.
I acknowledge that this might make for some dull reading, and I will, of course, fully understand if this approach causes the editors to re-assess their decision to run this column.
Until that happens, I do look forward to the opportunity of sharing with you, my fellow citizens, some thoughts around Uganda’s efforts – historical and contemporary – towards achieving that high aspiration expressed in the preamble to the 1995 Constitution, that is, to say: “a socio-economic and political order … based on the principles of unity, peace, equality, democracy, freedom, social justice and progress”.
The writer is senior lecturer and acting director of the Human Rights and Peace Centre at the School of Law, Makerere University, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Legal Philosophy.
