Your ignorance is complicating matters in Kibaale!

SIR— Your editorial “Avert ethnic cleansing” in The New Vision last Saturday was timely and important. The situation in Kibaale indeed requires a lot of attention. However, your opinion was unfair in the way it took a side against the “indigenous Banyoro”. This is cause for big concern. You sounded like you were doing public relations for “the settlers”. You said, “The Banyoro are peddling lies that non-Banyoro settlers are planning to take over their land and eventually the district. Unfortunately, politicians from Kibaale, including government ministers and MPs are silent. It’s more like a conspiracy of silence to allow a bloodbath.” This is absurd and irresponsible of you as a newspaper. As a newspaper, you have the important role of the selection and interpretation of events and issues around us. Your interpretations become dysfunctional when you perpetuate such stereotypes and enhance conformity with apparent majority views at the expense of our minority opinions and concerns. You haven’t studied the situation carefully. The whole issue in Kibaale rotates around land. Here is a people who have been victims of history. The land that makes up Kibaale district was given to Baganda as a token for their help in the defeat of Kabalega. All the land is divided into mailo land owned by what the Constituent Assembly called absentee landlords. All people in Kibaale are squatters on this land. The Banyoro had to fight to chase away Baganda to claim ownership of some of the land. The 1964 referendum was just about returning the counties to Bunyoro. To date, this land is still legally owned by these landlords. While every successive government has promised to return this land to the rightful ancestral owners, officials instead take this as free empty land where to resettle those who have been peaceful enough to produce out of it. While the Banyoro continue to wait for the Government to pay off so-called landlords to be given the land, settlers continue to come and take land. Now comes in politics. Kibaale was the best example to make our cherished individual merit laughable. Some top government officials from Kabale (Ruhakana Rugunda, BOU man Tumusiime Mutebile, Mwesigwa Rukutana, and co.) are alleged to be encouraging their fellow Bakiga to take over Kibaale. So in short the indigenous people in Kibaale are being indirectly disenfranchised because their votes nolonger matter since they are the minority. The issue of Bakiga settlers, I am sorry to say, is already an international issue. The problem is not only in Kibaale. Not so long ago, a group of them were chased from Tanzania for their mode of voting (against the ruling CCM party). And they still wanted to bring them to Kibaale which the locals greatly resisted. They have a block vote. The same ishappening in Kyenjojo district, Kabarole, Hoima and Kamwenge. So who is the trouble causer, you think? And in Kibaale it is the political language causing problems. When you hear people telling you they are the rightful leaders, the land doesn’t belong to you too, what do you expect the Banyoro to do? When they try to seek for peaceful assembly to demonstrate their grievances, they are denied. Like the MP said, the Banyoro have every right to demonstrate and struggle to re-own their land. Because always the people supposed to pass a favourable decision have been the beneficiaries of the funny situation in Kibaale. Gerald BusingeMakerere University