How to live the reality of independence

By Kansiime Onesmus

The hypothesis of Independence is a mosaic of principles and tenets but clearly noted is as aged as mankind i.e since the Adamite era. But it was in 1962, on such a day that the theory was reincarnated in Uganda as a birth to modern welding. In the parenthesized words of Thomas Jefferson ,"the God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time".

Therefore the proclamation of Independence was on the day God breathed life into the clay mould sculpted by His own hands. It is/was therefore ungodly to take away individual and people's freedoms.

Therefore the disease of liberty appears to be infectious and contagious throughout generations. 56 years ago, Uganda conceived in revolution to bear a baby named nurtured liberty to groom her to mature democracy guided by the statutes and ordinances.. For all logic, it is apt and deserving to bow to our Constitution for it stresses not only the independence to individual liberty but the interdependence on the indivisible liberty for all.

After 1884-85 the Berlin conference organised by Germany's then Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck for the scramble and partition, the dining Western powers on the table of the African sumptuous dish found trickery on how they could have the African Empires and chieftaincies host them peacefully since the past explorers like Henry Morton Stanley who asserted with unclear conscience to taint Africa as a dark continent with cultures and way of life they mistakenly referred to as archaic forgetting they are our both tangible and mythological heritages.

In this we shan't forget their fore mind play, they laughed at our god, and we converted to their God thinking we had been submitting to a lesser God before. In this, they changed the hostile heart of the African warrior to defend his land. As Bishop Desmond Tutu put it "we had the land and they had the Bible, they told us to close our eyes and pray, by the time we opened them, they had the land we had the Bible".

Subsequently, with the soft hearts we had, they laughed at our clothes and names and we quickly got ashamed of our own history and adopted theirs; soon they started telling and characterising our own story. I bet the next generations won't know the original names of the lakes like Victoria, Edward and George etc. With such adopted nomenclature, they shall soon forget our history, heritage and what we had embraced for the future.

We remember the 1958 All African people's conference in Accra Ghana hosted by the late Nkwame Nkrumah to foster the ideology of Pan Africanism. This conference gained the reputation as a peace maker for decolonization in Africa and in the West Indies. It made significant advance for the Pan-African cause. One of the demands was to end colonial rule and end racial discrimination, against imperialism and it demanded human rights and equality of economic opportunity.

After that conference, the African liberators after joining the Ngungi's "Siriana" mission, wrestled with the horrors of fellow Africans' mindset, tore their mouths till they bled, tired their little brains to a dropping sweat in the iron curb of reason for it manhandled them with its mythical logic of how their fellow Africans were comfortable in the imposition of rule by a foreign catapult into the muscle of the African pride.

with the companionship under the River between Kiambus, the cruel fate such as imprisonment, death and an unfortunate links on the chain of circumstances they encountered forces history to sometimes be shy and silent in describing the tortures of their bereaved souls in uniting the antagonistic ridges of the contented and the uncontented.

After all those events that look hullabaloos to those who have gotten the freedom on a silver platter, Africa especially Uganda got free in 1962 welcoming the reign of Sir Edward Muteesa II and his counterpart Milton Obote after the UPC- Kabaka Yekka conglomerate: we did say farewell to Uganda's last governor Sir Walter Fleming Coutts.

In appreciating the blood shed by our liberators to wring a country of the citizens' pride, we honor to the highest pinnacle of regard the onus of all citizens to safeguard the symbols emblematic of our independence which include; democracy, peace, freedom, prosperity, sovereignty et al. To write, speak and act on this is our opportunity and obligation mindful of the task bestowed by our forbearers.

On the fall of the union jack, both differences and dissent were designed that on the rise of the Ugandan flag, the checks and balances would be flapped to resurrect the breeze of the rights of an individual and the locality against the imposition of non primitive agenda void of the battle seeking the country's fate.

The first flag raised by Ikanuti Akorimo, that I predict a fading parchment in any site not harbouring the vultures of history, is still a revolutionary cloth that prevented us from the coldness of imperialism and warmed us at the hearth of the compatriots' pride.

To raise the national flag and sing the national Anthem on quotidian regularity is emblematic of the heroes' trumpet call as we hurt for freedom of all staked in the experiment of wilderness of a wealthy woodland entrusted to the thinning and pruning of both the nobles and wananchi as equal citizens.

On this day of the 56th anniversary, we must admit to the cruel truth that we are not entirely free though we are making haste and effort. Not free from the fangs of poisonous illiteracy, youth unemployment, high infant mortality rates that are being chequered, tramping of media freedoms, kidnapping, dying cultures and fading local languages, an education system that does not well address Uganda's interests etcetera. But with the loom, warp and weft we need to weave from all this tangled papyrus of zigzag democracy and with the niddle of patriotism sew from the threads of a common populace to a cloth of a people's mindset proper to disagree and agree on the future of our nation.

As novices and infants in the art of statesmanship, our forbearers who were unknowingly summoned to the table of trickery committed some heinous atrocities such as the post independence wars and violence (1960 to 1986) due to the thirst-faceted struggle for power. Nonetheless we must appreciate the fact that they committed their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to the goal of Independence. let us agree that the period from 1986 is a peaceful one though quite unfortunately amidst constitutional wars as we stab its valve for a subsequent backflow to the personal interest scam of the pre-enlightenment era.

It is our dire role to protect the Constitution for if the Constitution loses its independence we lose our dependence on it and subsequently we lose our independence.

To simply put it, we are the executors to the testament of a prophecy wrought and handed down by the Lancaster house soothsaying delegates who paved a trail to independence that we may as their successors expand to the highway of entire individual and national freedom and sovereignty spotless of the symptoms and signs of neocolonialism, dominance, reparation, violation and submissivess against constitutional conscience and national obligation:

Sad to note is that a huge proportion of the independence vision has not yet been transplanted from the nursery bed of promissory note to the garden of execution and implementation.

Compatriots, we were entrusted with the fate and future of our country, we should now renew our vows to do our part and lift this country's weight and drown it's unnecessary burdens from the shoulders of all in to the sea of our own sweat and the tears of love for her.

Preserve the culture, improve education, provide the basic and fundamental needs, emancipate the feminine to the masculine, promote peace and freedom emblematic of the nuncius on the shields of the court of arms.

Happy Independence Day. For God And My Country