Thread by @IsaacSsemakadde

BOBI WINE’S CONUNDRUM: Whether the SMACK, of 60 y.o. Bro Deodati Aganyira is sufficiently ‘The School’ for his first son Solomon Kampala?

In 1998, the post of HM SMACK opened up after a curious resignation.

Bro Aganyira was passed over for a much younger Bro Edward Bukenya, 32.

Bro Bukenya (pictured), despite a faulty start, went on to score 15 years of phenomenal achievements, making so many envious.

Suddenly, @Educ_SportsUg invoked a dubious policy of arbitrarily transferring long-stay HMs.

Jan 2014: Enter Bro John Ssenkabirwa, from Caltec Academy!

The new transfer policy was resisted by many founding bodies for ‘shaking traditions’, non-consultation, etc.

The church even went to court to restrain gov’t from transferring Bro Bukenya to his alma mater St Edwards SS Bukuumi, @IndependentUG reports.independent.co.ug/teachers-on-th…

In Feb 2014, @Educ_SportsUg accepted certain appeals.

Bro Anthony Lubwama, Bukenya’s former deputy, became acting HM after the Church reportedly also rejected the posting of Bro Deodata Aganyira to SMACK from Bukuumi where he had been HM for 9 years.

So, how did he maneuvre?

In many OB chats at the moment, this comment is prevalent: ‘How Aganyira became HM still baffles me!’

But it shouldn’t be baffling, tbh.

Aganyira—like many corrupt & crooked Ugandans—knew exactly where to go & what to promise, in exchange for coronation/protection as SMACK HM.

@StateHouseUg fully captures SMACK—After much backroom jostling, the founding body compromised & ‘appointed’ Bro Aganyira HM SMACK in May 2015.

They didn’t want to find themselves isolated & unable to shape policy a year later when Janet M7 would become Minister @Educ_SportsUg.

OWN GOAL: So by 2018 when @HEBobiwine sought admission for Mr Kampala at SMACK—undoubtedly with support of the Church—the office of HM SMACK was fully CAPTURED, CO-OPTED & CORRUPTED by forces behind the STATUS QUO. Not the best choice of custodian for the son of CiC #PeoplePower!

But, to be fair, the FASCISM of mission schools predates child-abusing junta cadres, eg SMACK’s Bro Deo Aganyira.

Mission schools were formed as colonial tools for WESTERNIZATION of local people.

In the 60s, they were taken over by local petty bourgeois elite, MERELY FOR SHOW.

Mission schools have always been synonymous with condescension, timidity & elitism. In ‘LONG WALK TO FREEDOM’, Madiba recounts his expulsion from Fort Hare, a mission school he attended:‘At that moment, I saw Dr Kerr less as a benefactor than as a not-altogether-benign DICTATOR.’

Despite their well-documented flaws, mission schools like SMACK have produced #LegalRebel #Atanaaba & many of Uganda’s icons, and are therefore fetishized by all newly arrived elites who seek to partake of their mythical (colonial) education system, instead of challenging it.

This is how we’ve ended up with elites, right from Obote 1 onwards, struggling to force their kids into these ‘mythical’ schools (mostly located in Buganda) once they fall into things. Like Amin who took his kids to Namagunga, M7 elites have flooded Budo et al with their kids.

SCREENING—The concentration of these schools in Buganda, plus the Baganda desire & ability to continue sending kids there, creates a feeling for this regime that ‘there are still too many educated Baganda around.’ Janet isn’t at @Educ_SportsUg, & Bro Aganyira at SMACK by accident

Of the many critical issues raised by @HEBobiwine’s SMACK conundrum, the immediate one is of the regime renting the already existing, essentially dictatorial culture of the mission school enterprise, and its mother organisation (the Church), for its own immediate ends.

Mission schools in present-day Africa are grossly objectionable. They’re fascist enclaves that recruit young Africans into a cowardly & corrupt class-conscious tribe of religious hypocrites, political eunuchs & bureaucratic sycophants. They are the lubricants of grand corruption.

Corruption of the mission school:

Exhibit A—‘Schedule of Donations’, released at the SMACK AGM when @HEBobiwine dressed down the HM.

1. Donations from OBs, OBA & the ‘First Son’ who is also an OB. Why the obvious duplicity?

2. Is ‘First Son’ an actual & official designation?

3. Why are all the rest called ‘donations’, and ‘First Son’ Gen Kainerugaba’s is called a ‘deposit of funds’? So what is the ‘balance’?

4. In any case, in what capacity was he making the donation? UPDF? Or some other public office?

5. Are the ‘other incomes’ also donations?

You can bet none of the above questions were put to Bro Deo at #SMACKAGM, in classic display of the TIMIDITY expected of parents, teachers & students of a mission school.

@HEBobiwine was thus heroic, in defying the arrogance, cowardice & duplicity of the mission school mafia.

The second issue of national concern spotlighted by @HEBobiwine is the longterm strategy of @StateHouseUg to takeover the leadership & mgt of all these mission schools in Buganda, and put them out of reach of the Baganda, who are not necessarily friendly to the regime.

Exhibit B

Bro Aganyira has 34 years’ experience & a master’s degree in Education Leadership at Walsh University walsh.edu/about-walsh.ht…

Clearly he knows the BASIC LAW that youthful indiscretions, eg discipline offences, just like CONFESSIONS, enjoy IRONCLAD SECRECY.

Yet he broke the law.

What could have forced SMACK HM Bro Aganyira to violate his own code of conduct, and endanger the welfare of a child under his care, by divulging matters that are protected by absolute privacy under both Uganda & international law?

‘Order. From. Above.’

IMPUNITY.

Gamba N’ogu.

Let’s pick up where we left off.

These two tweets, in particular, have elicited DOGGED DENIALISM from folks, mostly middle-aged OBs & OGs of the mission school complex who are happily accommodated in the STATUS QUO and clearly out of touch with the reality on the ground.

It is imperative, then, that we go directly inside the intestine.

Available mission school data shows a steady program of victimization & discrimination at staff & leadership levels.

When Bro Aganyira joined SMACK, I was consulted by 25 staff who complained of WESTERNIZATION.

For cynical reasons in mid-2015 or thereabouts, I declined instructions to file an unfair discrimination claim on behalf of 25 staff, against the in-coming HM SMACK Bro Deo Aganyira.

Looking back now, I probably should have believed the staff allegations of a sinister agenda.

OBs report a steady programme of replacing teachers who leave for whatever reason, with westerners.

The teaching of Luganda, singing of the Buganda anthem, participation in activities syncing SMACK to the Kingdom of Buganda, etc have all been scrapped.

It’s denialism galore.

In short, this is the peak of a local regime land grab within the existing system of schools that were created & sustained by the Baganda elites, for education of their children, albeit in service of colonialism. Similar schools outside Buganda are unaffected by this phenomenon.

Founded by missionaries in 1912 to improve education among Ankole girls, Bweranyangi is still accessible for this purpose.

However, a similar vision for Baganda boys was thrown into tatters when SMACK—due to political pressures—became ringfenced for children of regime fat cats.

But to overfocus on all that, is to miss the wider point, and challenges.

The real problem is the nature of the colonial education system itself, and how all newly arrived elites seek to partake of it, instead of challenging it.

So, @HEBobiwine has a lot of rethinking to do.

The mission school system as a whole is a foundation of the colonial project.

Ethno-petty-bourgeois faction fighting aside, the goal of these go-to schools for the local elite is two-fold:

A. To create workers useful to the Neo-colony; &

B. To perpetuate Black-on-Black racism.

FIRST WORLD SCHOOLS

Since the advent of colonialism, the phenomenon of ‘black-on-black’ racism among the people of Africa has been articulated in such a way that it presents parents, teachers, students, OBs & OGs of the mission school as superior to the rest of their kin & folk.

BRAINWASHING

This colonial strategy—of creating a favourite African—entails both mis-presenting the epochal history of coloniality by representing it in terms of liberation instead of subjugation, as well as representing the indigenous African subject as inherently perverse.

‘US vs THEM’

In SMACK JARGON (c. 2005), black-on-black racism is self-evident through special language deployed as a marker of social status that is granted or denied to you depending on access to the ‘Circle’, among other factors for dehumanizing others.archive.observer.ug/specials/schoo…

As the present-day custodians of this black-on-black APARTHEID system, ‘educators’ like Bro Deo have the licence to be DICTATORIAL, since the point of the mission school system has always been to create and maintain a society that thinks DICTATORSHIP (neocolonialism) is NORMAL.

And the ‘middle class’—desperate to get and keep elite connections—have willingly colluded in this travesty. Colonialists laid the foundation for black-on-black racism through the mission school complex, and very little to no efforts have been dedicated to readdressing this.

Bobi’s dilemma is that of every Ugandan parent wanting to provide for their child. Either force them though these psychologically damaging places, hoping for good grades & social contacts; or take them to places that damage through poverty, & give no prospects of social mobility.

On @HEBobiwine’s Ahem at the AGM—was it bcoz the regime had utilised the preexisting oppressive culture to focus on his son, or he was hitherto unaware of Ugandan racism (and where that is created), so that he can now be helped to broaden the range of his policies for liberation?

To put it differently, even if @HEBobiwine had never taken a child to SMACK, the school would still have been busy damaging some other African children.

And even if he was not an opposition figure, the mission school would still have been damaging his kid along with all others.

So, much as it is about @HEBobiwine and Mr Kampala now, it has been, and will continue to be, about all African children being forced through these colonial occupation schools.

#UoT will forever be grateful for this historic thread on #Budo trauma stories.

IN CONCLUSION, this is actually 3 struggles in one:

1. The struggle of the Baganda elite to retain some cultural input & control over the schools they created in colonial conditions, to at least have children competent to manage the new realities brought by colonialism.

This, flawed as it was as a strategy producing mixed results, was progressively eroded by the post-colonial state muscling in on the management of the schools concerned, starting with ‘grants in aid’ of the ’60s.

This dilemma will be familiar to other regions & founding bodies.

2. The struggle to decolonise the schools & make them more genuinely African, free of foreign religious doctrines, authoritarianism & other facets of coloniality.

This focuses on the need to remove the psychological violence & inherent elitism of the school system as a whole.

For example, these schools—fawned over by the local petit bourgeois elite—should be required, perhaps by law, to be equitably open to all the communities in their neighborhoods. Not catering only for rich kids coming from hundreds of miles away.

3. Lastly, the specific struggle to remove current regime capture. This is focused broadly on Baganda culture within schools located in Buganda, and specifically on the instant issue of persecution of children of the opposition. Mr Kampala’s situation is not an isolated incident.

So, this is a cultural struggle, and as a cultural icon known to quote Bob Marley and Malcolm X, @HEBobiwine may perhaps need to be more conscious about the huge debates surrounding the question of the challenge of educating black children in a white-dominated world. #decolonize

“Building church & university;
Deceiving the people continually,
...graduating thieves & murderers.” ~ sings Bob Marley, in BABYLON SYSTEM

“Only a fool would let his enemy educate his children.”~Malcolm X

END OF THREAD.