Planning agriculture revolution

Jan 30, 2012

After last week’s column, I have been inundated by demands to give more details about the nature, and even workability, of my proposals attempting to save this country from a coming resources doom.

By John Nagenda

After last week’s column, I have been inundated by demands to give more details about the nature, and even workability, of my proposals attempting to save this country from a coming resources doom.

No doubt that sounds fairly presumptuous, and I might not have fully described the extensive reach of the tiger being unleashed—and not talking about the Far East ones like Singapore or “Malaysia, truly Asia”.

Ours is a native-born tiger, in WilliamBlake’s poem: “burning bright in the forests of the night”. And our own, not being an imitation of others but built on what we already own—one of the most fertile lands on God’s earth.

Arise and shine! If we are seriously intent on radically changing Uganda’s future to be based, first, foremost and for the foreseeable future on Agriculture, on farming in its widest sense, and everything flowing from that, then this is not an undertaking for the faint-hearted.

The planning involved will task the most imaginative of our people in all their various fields of human endeavour. If you think of the Israeli kibbutzim, and mix it with the National services of many countries in the developed nations which compulsorily train young adults, all these and more can be melded to reboot our nation, which is reaching stagnation point.

Where necessary we must invite suitable foreigners to help. The idea has been sown; now must follow detailed planning. I know “canvassing usually disqualifies”, but(how to put it?) in this case I like to think a job would be created at sufficiently elevated level for the proposer of this Revolution. After all, show me a single country where this doesn’t happen. As for Age, isn’t it just a Number? Enough said!

Those who receive a publication called filtre through their emails will know what venomously strong language is employed in its attack on the Uganda Government. Its heart may sometimes be in the right place, but, dear me, it is often intensely abusive beyond reason or rhyme.

Why this is, one can only surmise, but its convener (or whatever title he holds) Richard Kikonyogo, must have a massive bee in his bonnet.He is son of my late and dear friend Charles Kikonyogo, twice Governor of the Bank of Uganda, and before that of Botswana. (Hardly ever do African nations appoint fellow Africans to this office!) Kikonyogo was always carefully articulated, although his views were firm and principled. As Governor, unlike some, no scandal ever tarnished his name.

I could go on about him until the cows come home. But his son’s view and language must sometimes have had Charles, a strong supporter of the Movement government, a-turning in his grave.

The young man, whom I still like, has kept his most lurid abuse for Government on behalf of the New Forestry Company, Sugar worth millions of shillings belonging to justice minister Kahinda Otafiire has been destroyed in Mombasa which he accuses the government of having mistreated. The NFC has been accused of throwing out thousands of local families from their customary lands.

Is the NFC employed by the government to do this? In that case why is its CEO, Julian Ozanne, previously a journalist, newly endowed with a US $35 million paper fortune through Carbon credits? Should that not go to Uganda, or at the very least be shared? The NFC, in a huff, has announced its suspension of operations forthwith.Does my old friend Ozanne get to keep his fortune? It is a fascinating tale still in the unravelling, and methinks young Richard might well find he should have kept his poison unspent.

Since the announcement this week of Ssabasajja Kabaka (King) Mutebi II’s son of the Nsenene (Grasshopper) clan, which occurred last July, many have given their opinions on what happens next.

Religion rears its head: can the son of a mother not married to the reigning Kabaka in church in fact succeed to the kabakaship? Clergy, when asked, have almost to a man been exceedingly tight-lipped, passing on the burning ember to others, who have done the same.

How different from my uncle, Canon Disani Mukasa (himself no complete saint!) who half a century ago fearlessly refused Holy Communion to Mutebi’s mother, although she was kneeling at the altar? Your fearless columnist, no church leader, opens his mouth wide to say two things.

First that the dwelling of the Kabaka’s parents-in-law seems eminently modest, which further goes to prove what we Baganda always knew: our kings are never far from the common herd, not only “can a cat look at a king” but can, as it were, be closely related. To prove it further, the king-to-be takes the mother’s, not the father’s, clan, meaning that all the 52 clans of Buganda have a mathematical chance of bearing a king: very democratic.

Second, when Ssekabaka Mutesa II (whom Mutebi succeeded) took the throne instead of his elder, and frankly more physically imposing, brother, Prince George Mawanda, it was mostly because the former’s mother had been married in church to Kabaka Chwa II; Mawanda’s mother had not.

This was when the Anglican (Protestant) church was firmly in the grip of the Whites and their (Christian) ways, but had already been set aside in the present monarch’s case! As the percipient say: When one door shuts, another one opens, or in this case re-opens!

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