The Politics Of Common Sense: Philosophical and Blunt Reflections on Uganda & Yonder

By David Mpanga

In several short essays written for the Daily Monitor between 2006 and 2016, Mpanga offered small doses of sagacious and provocative writing entitled "The Politics Of Common Sense".

Such was the popularity of his work that it has now been consolidated in a single volume "The Politics Of Common Sense: Philosophical and Blunt Reflections on Uganda and Yonder" covering a diversity of issues from life to death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AMPRSND
• Release date: Nov 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9789970943708

David Mpanga

Native. Son. Brother. Husband. Father. Friend. Lawyer. Anti-clockwise thinker.

Book preview

Dedication

To my parents, most especially my mother, Mrs Joyce Rovincer Mpanga, for giving me the grounding in history, politics, reading and writing. Without their efforts and my mother’s unstinting belief in my ability, I would not be the man that I am today.

To my children, Alexis, Miles and Amy as well as to their generation. It is my sincere hope that this book will help you solve some of the issues that we are faced with today so that you may enjoy a more abundant life tomorrow.

Foreword

In giving us this book, David Mpanga becomes the principal proponent of the art of reasonable argument. And an object lesson on how to relocate a whole set of native cultural values into another language, and still make your argument work.

I am yet to be entirely persuaded as to the wisdom of this approach. There is a case to be made for the offering of rough language to those who have made it a mission to torment us Africans.

That is a (perhaps well mannered) debate between us for another place and time.

Arguing is risky. Doing so in the language of another, is even more so.

However, Uganda, and Africans of all kinds, are challenged here to face up to the problem of the crisis of public discourse. After three decades of a language of officialdom rooted in abuse and ridicule from on high, which followed on from five years of violent diction, nine years of the naked threats, and another five of racist abuse again before all that, there exists a gap between what needs to be said (and how) and what passes for reflection and discussion about the things that should concern us as a nation.

This produced three historical responses: to pay back in kind, often from the safety of exile, or to raise an equalising level of violence (or at least attempt to do so), or to doggedly pursue the path of reasoned debate.

In this collection of essays, Mpanga brings together his record of pursuing the third option. In fact, he shows as something of a family tradition, as he includes even previously little-seen reflections from his father, the late Mr Frederick Mpanga.

The essays explore the geography of the limitations on our thinking and imaginations, as imposed by history, the possibilities that still exist, and what all that implies and portends.

The incisive and often blunt but heartfelt observations show a universal vision rooted in the particular native consciousness of Buganda.

This is not a matter limited to Buganda, Uganda or Africa. The world as a whole is faced with crises, or the aftermath of crises, that could have been resolved in a very different way, had reason, and the assumption of good faith behind it, prevailed.

The Middle East, for example, has suffered decades of war, repression, and communal violence simply due to one fact: an incomplete and unprincipled process of decolonisation. The Turkish Empire there was defeated by the European powers, who then created their own imperial order in the Levant that ended when Europe, exhausted by two world wars, basically relinquished its dominance to an emerging American empire after 1945.

All the institutions, from the modern states downwards, set up in the Middle East as a result of these processes, are now in crisis. What has been almost completely lost, however, is a capacity for reason in finding solutions; a politics of common sense.

Countries are not governed by their government alone. Governance of any modern country is made of the sum total of all the minds that sit not just in the top levels of the three branches of state, but also every Board (private and public), health committee, corporate manager and even family head. What, and how, they think, is what the country will end up looking like.

There are several concepts of discourse and deliberation. As natives, the four that we can look at from Buganda are: okuteesa, okukaayana, okuttunkana, and okuyomba. Translation can be risky, but the last one means basically to quarrel. The second last is to polemicise back and forth, sometimes even bickering, but trying to keep it within the frame of a debate. The second is to engage in argument in an open-ended, sometimes even circular, wandering and sometimes even still bickering, manner. The first is very focused debate done formally, using calm reasoned tones, referencing allegory, history, a defusing humour, and proverbs.

Okuteesa can even involve the practice of holding a small twig or piece of wood, and breaking off a piece each time a new point is made, then placing them to make up a row in the space between the participants. This should be the origin of the common debating term "Okukakumenyelamu (to break it down for you", as an American would say). The other person in the debate is expected to respond by addressing each point as laid out, and whatever is resolved is removed from the row.

I suspect that the root of the term "kuteesa, is kuteeka" (to put), as the word kuteesa can literally mean to cause to be put. In debating, each participant is causing the other to put their points on the floor in an organised, systematic way. This can only lead to common-sense conclusions and solutions. It is the highest form of reasoning.

As for okukaayana, this is also not always encouraged. There is even the belief that food crops planted while those doing the planting keep arguing, will taste sour ("okukaawa", another possible joint root word) at harvest.

Okuttunkana can be acceptable in perhaps political and judicial circumstances, while okuyomba is effectively a degeneration arising from a failure to adhere to the first three (or maybe just a result of a poor quality upbringing), and is frowned upon.

In all this, language clearly matters. Whatever language in use must be effectively put to the service of bringing out the ideas being advanced. Real thinking is universal in the application of the principles that lie beneath the language in use.

Unfortunately, our colonial heritage has given us a very complicated relationship to the English language. Some confuse it with accent. Others assume it to be an indication of intelligence. In both cases, the message can get lost in the medium.

Language indeed matters. But the nature of our education system increasingly produces half-baked minds that can neither think clearly in their native languages, nor express thought clearly, in English.

This is not an accidental process, but a deliberate programme of the slow erosion of the civic capacity to think and reason. The objective is obvious: a confused person is easily robbed, and a person that cannot reason cannot make the case for the reclamation of their property.

I once found myself privy to a somewhat internal discourse, in the form of a private broadcast to a social media group. A prominent Ugandan military General had died suddenly, and a very senior member of staff at a major parastatal, was eulogising him, to other senior staff. In her message, she extolled the man’s apparent humility and simplicity, based on a personal encounter in which she had seen him sleep on a upcountry hotel counter top, and eat a meal using his fingers, during a somewhat arduous official field trip together. Forks delayed to be brought... was her description as to why the General had used his hands.

Here is the problem. English remains the language of official communication in this neo-colony. Therefore, those running the neo-colony are expected to be able to use it in a manner sufficient to avoid legal misunderstanding and policy miscommunications. This is basic requirement. And one of construction, not spoken accent.

But that is the damage from the past impacting the present. Our concerns, which Mpanga reaches for, are about what impact the damage of the present may have on the future, if we do not radically address how we think and therefore talk, about things.

From the mid-1890s, the great shift by the then world powers from coal- fired steam to oil, as a strategic source of energy, is what sealed the fate of the Middle East, and brought it to ruin, in the length of the last century. A legacy of venal despots, extractive polities, and stagnated cultures has eventually led to endless warlordism and failed states.

That is our possible future, as the global powers of today (if they last long enough), shift again away from oil, to portable electrical energy. This means batteries, which means copper, lithium, gold, and Coltan. This means Congo, and therefore the whole Great Lakes Region. This means us.

Africa is the second largest continent, and possibly the wealthiest one, just about. It is also the most lightly populated, divided up and poorly defended. For example, over five of the world’s powers have military bases and detachments deployed somewhere on the continent. Yet there is not a single other part of the world where troops from any African country are stationed as independent policy. If the rivalry between those powers over access to the new emerging strategic energy resource were to intensify as was the case with Arabian oil over one hundred years ago, then Africa, and specifically the Nile Basin, could easily become the new Middle East. Believe me, the utter carnage and plunder we have seen over the last two decades in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, will then be just a foretaste of what could be a much wider new normal.

We need careful and deep thinking.

How can the wealth of the continent be secured for the future generations of Africans? How can we avoid damage from war, in the form of famines, and further losses of human brains and muscle power to societies in other parts of the world? What will protect us?

The tragedy of our times is to have become saddled at such a critical moment, with a managerial class made up of people so intellectually handicapped that they are left regurgitating clichés, but with a forks delayed to be brought approach to their chosen language, in which they will now even confer the power of will and possibly animation, on inanimate objects.

This book, however, is not about language. Language in itself does not create thought. It is merely a tool. However, without that tool, can thoughts be developed, recorded, interrogated, and shared?

Mpanga’s argument for the necessity of what he deceptively calls common sense is not a simple assertion. It is a demand for the return to principle, and honour, in how anything of public concern is thought about and managed.

It is not a widely acknowledged fact that the nature and scope of debate on public matters is much richer, eloquent and informed when conducted in native languages within native institutions here, than in English. The pitfalls of badly managed English often prevent those advantages making their way to the country’s official language. And if they do, it is at the expense of the native values and principles that make debate valuable. Collectively we can actually think well in our languages, but know only to abuse and threaten, when governing in English.

Good manners are a form of power, my own late father used to say (sometimes quite irritably) to me, his sometimes wayward son, and this collection shows us that. Luganda public discourse is well-known for the speakers’ ability to say the most deeply cutting and frankly insulting things in the most reasonable and polite manner, thereby disarming authority.

I have seen this before only in my time as an organiser among the Uganda refugee community in Europe, where the many Acholi activists I worked with could fashion linguistic weapons out of an icy politeness.

Mpanga is looking at the whole world from a view anchored in a native consciousness. What he has achieved here, is the transposing of valuable native thought into the new language, while calling for a fundamental reset.

The essential challenge we face as Africans, is not poverty, health vulnerability, or underdevelopment (whatever that even means. Because having lived and studied among European people for many years, I found them to be among some of the most intellectually clumsy, and emotionally primitive people alive today. A perfect example is the American politician Donald Trump, in that neo-European space called the United States. This too, is a form of underdevelopment), or any particular ism. These are universal problems, in fact.

The real question is: how can we become capable of talking about these things in a principled, mutually respectful, and therefore productive manner? Because if we cannot reason for and between ourselves, then we have no future.

But what of rudeness? There is still the case for that. We have the proverb: If you cannot speak plainly to the hunchback sharing your bed, you will have to do without your share of the blanket.

Not with Daudi Mpanga, I suspect. The common sense he explores here would have him ask if you had thought to work towards either secession, by cutting the blanket in two, or federating the bed by getting a second blanket.

Read this book. Explore the arguments. Accept the invitation to think. Most of all; enjoy it.

Kalundi Serumaga, Kampala,

August, 2020

Introduction

This book is a labour of love. It has been several years in writing, largely because I never set out to write a book. It started off life as a couple of op- ed pieces placed in the Daily Monitor, one of the national dailies in Uganda, under what was termed The Panel of Experts. This was between 2006 and 2010.

In 2011, I was formally invited by David Spire Sseppuuya to contribute a regular column to the Saturday Monitor. David was brilliant in the way that he suggested this. He used flattery, saying that I had something to say and that it was worth putting down and publishing every week. I was given a limit of 800 words and told I could write anything that came to my mind. I was also given liberty to give my column a title. I chose the title The Politics of Common Sense.

I saved the columns, in chronological order, in one folder on my computer. I rarely went back to read a column once I had written and submitted it. Some pieces were very popular and went viral on social media. Over the years, I learnt how to choose a topic every week and frame a thought or thoughts that I wanted to put across in each successive week. Ironically, some of the pieces that I crafted with the most love and attention received no traction with the general readership, whilst others that I knocked together in a rush to beat the Thursday evening submission deadline turned out to be very popular and often got cited or quoted back to me.

The Daily Monitor was true to its word. They let me write whatever crossed my mind and never once suggested that I should write about a particular subject or suggest to me that I take a particular line in respect of any topic. I was free to write whatever I wanted and I largely did so. But, as they say, with freedom comes responsibility. Not only did I have to advise myself on legal considerations such as libel and plagiarism but also had to reflect on how my opinion would be received in various quarters.

According to the Internet, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada once said: There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech. I am not sure if Amin actually said this. However, several decades since his ouster,the situation in Uganda has improved tremendously. Nonetheless, although much latitude is given to people to express themselves, freedom after speech is not always guaranteed.

So even though I was given free rein to write, I also had to tread carefully so as not to be misunderstood by or even to alienate different sections of society. Some would call this self-censorship but I think I would term it real life. Although we all have freedom of expression, we always have to carefully weigh up what we say; how; and to whom we say it. There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech and a person who has no edit function between their thought and speech functions soon finds themselves in social, political and even legal trouble.

The writing was fun and the research that I often had to do to ensure accuracy or to get useful illustrations was mind-expanding for me. But after writing for five years or so, fatigue set in. My legal practice was getting busier and my Buganda Kingdom docket began to weigh heavier on me in terms of time and constraints on what I could comment upon and how. The deadlines became harder for me to beat and the work product was beginning to suffer. It was around this time that my wife, Dr Phiona Muhwezi Mpanga, made a comment that sparked off the thought process which led to this book.

Whilst I used to get a lot of praise and adulation for my writing from the general readership of the Daily Monitor, Phiona was always a guarded critic. She would read my pieces but reserve comment for a couple of days. She would then point out flaws in reasoning or areas where I could improve my writing style and avoid clichéd expression.

So, one day, having read my weekly column earlier, Phiona said she had observed that my pieces were delivering the same series of messages but using different examples or illustrations. I contemplated on this for a while and went back through my folder to see whether it was true. The contention was not so much that I was beginning to get monotonous or boring. Rather, that I should explore the possibility of putting my writings over time together but in a different way, which would bring out the key themes that I had been trying to put across in different ways every week.

There are only seven solfa notes but they can be arranged in endless combination to make an infinite number of songs. I could have continued to write more pieces, using different weekly events as a peg to hang a particular set of thoughts on or as a launch pad for an invitation to the readership to contemplate on something. However, I realised that perhaps it was time to take a break and try to extract a bigger message from the pieces that I was writing for my weekly column.

Throughout my writing, I always aimed to provoke thought. I weighed words very carefully, guided by logician Professor John Kozy’s admonition, The careless use of language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts! Thoughts guide and inform action. There is nothing worse, in my view, than thoughtless action, yet, as Kwame Nkrumah observed, thought without practice is empty; like a day dream. A lot of the trouble that we see around us is grounded in thoughtless action or thought that is devoid of meaningful follow up in terms of action.

However, thought alone is not enough because it can be foolish or irrational. Also, action for action’s sake can be as destructive as the lack of action that I complain about above. My aim in this, without sounding conceited, was always to provoke rational analysis and constructive thoughts that would lead to positive and sustained engagement by citizens in the political world around them.

So, I penned a farewell piece and set about trying to get my thoughts together and write a book. I must say that I found myself in a bind. I had let go of the weekly deadline; the dynamo which used to drive my production every week; and found myself staring at a blank computer screen without any guidance or urgency. I then got a severe bout of writer’s block. I could not get myself to sit down for a few hours to write anything and when I sat down to write, nothing meaningful came out. When I finally got to write something, I found it to be too deep and theoretical even for my own liking.

Through this barren section I was encouraged by Phiona, whose experience in writing a PhD thesis gave her a very good idea of the discipline and skills needed to write. I was also constantly prodded about my progress by a friend, Jacqueline Asiimwe; a Ugandan activist and fellow lawyer. Never one to accept any excuse, she periodically asked after my progress and although my answers were never the whole truth, I am proud to say that I never lied to her. I am grateful for her persistent inquiries because they spurred me on.

Another person who never gave up on the possibility of this book is Nicholas Opiyo; a Ugandan human rights activist, social critic and fellow lawyer. A man of thought and measured expression, Nicholas would always inquire about my progress in much the same way as somebody asks after a much loved friend’s health. He always seemed encouraged when I responded that I was working on the book, as if I had said that the friend, though constrained by a bout of ill health, would make it through.

I was also greatly inspired in this project by the Katikkiro (Prime Minister of Buganda Kingdom) Owekitiibwa Charles Peter Mayiga who, seemingly with little effort, wrote and published a book titled Uganda 7-Key Transformation Idea even as he undertook the punishing Ttofaali Tour around Buganda. The said tour was premised on a poignant need for attitudinal change; to expunge self-pity, which was rife among our people, and to usher in a collective spirit of self-reliance, without waiting for hand-outs from the Central Government or foreign donors.

He encouraged me to write and never to let ‘the perfect’ be the enemy of ‘the good’. The key, he said, was to start; and once I started, not to stop until I had finished. Owekitiibwa Apollo Nelson Makubuya, another fellow lawyer and a Minister in the Buganda Kingdom, was also inspirational to me in this journey. He, too, researched and wrote an incisive history book, Protection, Patronage or Plunder? British Machinations and (B) Uganda’s Struggle for Independence, in the middle of a hectic schedule; showing me that it could be done. I am eternally grateful to these elder brothers of mine for having guided me in this endeavour by perfect example.

Finally, serendipity also played its part. In 2018, I was invited to make a brief presentation at a conference on the regulation of blockchain technology held at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Kampala. I was a little late and arrived as the Guest of Honour was delivering the keynote address. So, as I tried to get into the hall with a minimum of fuss, I took the first available seat nearest to me and sat next to a kind-looking gentleman. During the coffee break, I learned that his name was Sam Obbo and that he was a retired journalist who now eked a living as a media consultant. Among other beats, he was helping organisations write and edit their publicity material. We got chatting about many things but relevant to this preamble is the fact that he agreed to work with me on producing this book. Sam took all my material and having read it, assured me that it made sense (I was still plagued with self-doubt and questions around whether there could be any takes or a book that defies simple definition) and could be crafted into something worth publishing. This book is very much a result of my labour as of Sam’s wise and brilliant editing and guidance. Soon after assisting me package this book, Sam was head-hunted, interviewed and appointed Principal Press Secretary to the Speaker of Parliament.

This book is a mixture of published and unpublished material thematically organised under ten chapters. Some pieces have been modified a little to help the reader understand what was happening at the time as well as in light of subsequent developments. The aim of the book is to take those pieces which carry a timeless theme and enable the reader to understand the underlying message.

The two pieces in Chapter 10 were not written by me but by my late father, Owekitiibwa Andrew Frederick Kimeze Mpanga. One of them is a poignant piece on a theme that was close to his heart and remains close to mine – the nation state in Africa. He was exiled at the time and although he was a qualified barrister, the politics of the day meant that he could not practice law in England and so he was earning a living as a writer. In fact, my birth certificate states my father’s occupation as being a journalist. I found the two previously unpublished pieces in a small briefcase that my mother, Mrs Joyce Rovincer Mpanga, carefully preserved for over 40 years after my father’s death and passed on to me.

Snapshot of Uganda, Africa and the World

"I’m sitting on the dock of the bay Watchin the tide roll away, ooh

I’m just sitting on the dock of the bay Wastin’ time."

Otis Redding

"Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in eternity which is Here and Now."

James Broughton

"Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change the more they stay the same)

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Although the stated intention of this book is to get the reader contemplating and thinking about the timeless themes which the individual pieces brought out using examples or illustrations from the given week, a broad summary of the events that were happening between 2011 and 2016 is useful; to get the context in which the original pieces were written.

There are many views on the passage of time and human achievement. The most common perception of time is that of an imaginary arrow being shot from a bow into a space continuum in which there is no gravity or friction. The arrow moves in a straight line, ever forward and at the same speed; so that if you were sitting on the dock of a bay outside the Universe with Otis Redding, as it were, you could literally watch time roll away in one direction. This perception informs common expressions like the passage of time; we imagine time moving, flowing inexorably in one direction like a river.

However, in 2015, Dr Bradford Skow, an associate professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posited a counterintuitive theory of time. He argued that instead of imagining time moving unidirectionally, like an arrow or like a ship on a river, we should understand time to be merely one dimension of the Universe. If we understand time to be part of the fabric of the Universe, then we would agree that time cannot be in motion. Dr Skow argues that time does not move forward or backward. So, if we sat on the dock of the bay outside the Universe, we would not see time rolling away in any single direction. Rather we would observe time spreading out in all directions and eventually turning back onto itself to form an ever-present block. This is more in keeping with poet Jim Broughton’s imagination of the past, present and future; happening in eternity which is here and now!

If we were to go back to the beginning of my own life in 1970, Uganda had been independent of British colonial rule for eight years. She had already experienced its first bout of constitutional instability with the Independence Constitution violently being abrogated in 1966 and the first President, Maj. Gen. Sir Edward Frederick Walugembe Luwangula Mutesa II, who was also the 35th Kabaka (King) of Buganda, being exiled to England, for the second time in his reign. He died in exile on 21st November of 1969, a year before my birth. Uganda, then, was grappling with the place of native African state formations, such as Buganda, in the new colonial Westphalian state set up and the friction between the two laid the foundation for years of conflict and instability, about which many eminent scholars have written in detail.

In 1966 my exiled father, who had been the Attorney General of Buganda and an adviser to Ssekabaka¹ Mutesa II, gave an interview on the situation in Buganda and Uganda to a young writer called Robert Bellarmino Serumaga. They discussed the echoes of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that they saw in the political situation that pertained in Uganda at the time. A recording of the interview was archived by the BBC. Serumaga wrote absurdist plays and then later took up arms against the dictatorships of Gen. Idi Amin and Milton Obote. He died in mysterious circumstances in 1980.

¹- Ssekabaka connotes a deceased Kabaka and literally means father of the Kabaka because that office never dies.

Serumaga’s son, Robert Kalundi Serumaga, grew up to be a writer, broadcaster and social-political critic. In 2009 a Nigerian journalist friend of his found the recording of the interview and shared it with him. Kalundi is a very good friend of mine as is his brother Kizito. Kalundi, Kizito and I had spent endless hours talking about the friction that there was between the Central Government and the Kingdom of Buganda, in the lead up to the so-called Kayunga Riots of September 2009. I also represented Kalundi when he was initially kidnapped and taken to a safe house for brutalisation after he had made remarks that left some powerful people less than pleased, during a TV political talk show that was analysing the said riots. So, listening to our dead fathers talking about political instability in Uganda, caused by a clash between Buganda and the Central Government of