MENGO remains adamant on the issue of CBS. Buganda’s attorney general, Apollo Makubuya, does not see any wrong committed by the Buganda-kingdom owned radio station. Instead, he wants the Government to apologise for what he calls breach of the Constitution and the loss of lives.

Makubuya is old enough to know the key role played by Radio Mille Collines in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for which its founder received life imprisonment by the UN tribunal.

General Romeo Dallaire, the then commander of the UN peacekeeping operation, testified that jamming its broadcasts would have had a significant impact on the course of events.

Makubuya is also intelligent enough to see the similarities between the messages disseminated by CBS and Mille Collines’ racist propaganda.
CBS told its listeners that the enemy, identified as “people with long noses”, was invading their territory, threatening to kill them and take away the source of their wealth — land —; and called upon the Baganda to take action.

The radio accused the Government of a hidden agenda of killing Baganda and grabbing their land. “People are sliced to death in Buganda.”

It called for a boycott against millet porridge and matooke from Western Uganda, and supermarkets owned by people from the west.

“When you engage in a battle, you have to engage in it conclusively,” said Evelyn Nakiryowa in one of the talkshows.

“If we realise that the battle is not progressing, we will blacklist all the Baganda who got married to those people (Banyankole), and those who married them, and also work on them.”

Three days before the riots, CBS told the Baganda to “chase away people who they think betray Buganda; such people should not go back and be safe in their homes.”

And on September 10, the day the riots broke out, the radio called upon Baganda to escort the Kabaka “prepared to engage the enemy”.

Makubuya must also have noticed how CBS broadcasts mobilised the youth to erect road blocks within hours in different parts of Buganda, where people who looked like westerners or could not sing the Buganda anthem were beaten up. Mengo should recognise these facts, which are on record, and learn from history.