I have crushed on their curvy belles, and my surrogate father and friend—Fountain’s James Tumusiime—is perhaps the smartest Ugandan I have met. Ankole has produced some of the finest minds in academia, politics, media and medicine. This list of consummate cosmopolitans is long.  But there is a chronic streak, a rural ethic, common with Museveni and his peers that needs to be appreciated and understood.

I will return to my friend, Brigadier Ulysses Chuka Kibuuka of Karera, Bugongi, Sheema, in southwestern Uganda. For those who may not know this writing lieutenant—perhaps the most prolific Ugandan novelist in the English language of our time, Brig. Kibuuka has five novels against his name. Most remarkably, his first novel, For the Fairest, won the 1993 Uganda Publishers Associations award (UPABA) for best fiction. 

Others include Of Saints and Scare Crows, A Kampala Murder, and my favourite collection of short stories, Pale Souls Abroad and other Short Stories. He wrote his most recent novel Bukya Baggula Bifulukwa in Luganda (which is testament of the place that Buganda and Luganda hold in our cultural-political milieu—perhaps that will be a story for another day).

As Brig. Kibuuka (and several others contend), Ankole actually feeds Kampala. This is especially true as regards Kampala’s favourite dish, Matooke, and our dairy products such as milk and beef supplies. Most of the animals slaughtered in Kampala are collected from the cattle corridor in Ankole and Bunyoro. As I explained last week—allow me to reiterate here—this should not be reason for Ankole to brag about a privileged position. 

This would be like the loafers in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart who were too lazy to clear their gardens as the planting season came close. When the rains didn’t come that season and all the seeds died in the ground, these lazy fellas went about bragging as gifted with foresight. The rains just didn’t come.

That is the position in which southwestern Uganda finds itself as it so commendably feeds Kampala. While everyone else—especially in Buganda and Busoga—was rushing towards ‘modernity’, leaving the land and learning to find their subsistence in industrial and office work—my father had become a senior weaver in Nytil after 22 years—the people in Ankole had remained on the land. 

It was a backward position, if you like, but this backward position is nowadays one that feeds Uganda. Those who had rushed towards modernity found themselves at a loss after industrialisation and office work was suddenly crushed by Structural Adjustment Programme and privatisation.  These were millions of people—mostly Baganda and Basoga—who started eking out an existence in pitiable jobs. 

After over 20 years in industries and offices, they could not return to the land. Ironically, the man who superintended over the crushing of industrial and office work—working for the coloniser now in designer suits—had only become president and has continued to this day.

While I will continue to hold this against him (whilst acknowledging that IMF and WB were everywhere on the continent), I recently learned to appreciate Museveni and his peers’ vulnerability.  I would like to invite you, dear reader, to explore these vulnerabilities with me because, they actually, deceptively, look things of class, stuff from the modern world. We are in this loop together, even after Museveni is gone.  We need to overcome these deceptive appearances together.

You have seen those glistening pictures of Museveni, in military fatigues or a spotless white shirt, watching over his cows either in Rwakitura or Kisozi. You have seen this man driving himself in his official SUV (not a Land Rover) enjoying the site of the graceful long-horned cattle. Then you have seen his ministers and permanent secretaries doing the same, showing off pictures of herds, or standing in the middle of their lush banana or coffee plantations.

They look really cool, don’t they? Like those Englishmen in the novels on their country farms!  

The problem, however, is this is a deceptive and actually dangerous worldview. These men are not farmers. These men are government officials. They are civil servants, which means, their best skill is civil service—typing letters, doing accountability, debating policy, recruitment, computer work, etcetera. They do not know farming. Theoretically and practically, there’s no “weekend farmer” that makes it in farming.

You cannot spend entire weeks in Kampala, let alone months, and have a successfully operating farm. This is the lie of rural Ankole in Kampala. None of these men and women do farming as a business for it to bring them returns.  But they have learned to inject huge sums of money from their public service jobs into their farms, and these farms look lush and beautiful. (No wonder huge sums of public service money are lost day in, day out).

You cannot be president—a hands-on, and micromanaging president like Mr Museveni—and also do farming successfully. It is a lie. The farmers you see in the UK and across Europe do farming as their business. (There are a few men like that in Ankole and all over Uganda, but these are very few to sustain supplies). 

And you can tell that for the years Museveni and co. “have been” in the cattle business, they have not extended into the next level of the business chain, say, processing milk or slaughtering their animals for export. 

They crudely send their animals to Kampala aboard those rickety Fuso lorries. Because they are not farmers as business. But peasants trapped in the romanticism of rural Ankole (it is romanticist, for sure), but anti-development, as the neoliberal world demands.

So, they can only stop at the “experience with the animals,” “smelling their dried dung”, calling them pet names, and stroking their udders.  You will find cow herding sticks in their cars, as not to miss the herding experience. No wonder, Kenyan president, William Ruto, a businessman at heart, is considering importing cheap milk from Uganda for the local market and processing Kenyan milk for export. Ever wondered why Kenya’s Brookside dairy product compete toe-to-toe with our milk products in Kampala? Now you know.

The trap is that, they have thus created a culture that sees herds and lush plantations as the absolute markers of accomplishment. Surely, after 35 years, Museveni should have peers as serious industrialists, bankers, telecommunication giants, miners, transporters, and agro-processors dominating the region. 

Wherever the UPDF has gone, behind them would be businessmen (not petty traders). Instead, Museveni’s peers are dealers, agents of foreign companies, are content to have enough to grow matoke, send some to Kampala, and spend time on the farm with their animals. It is crippling ethic.

yusufkajura@gmail.com

The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.

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