Nairobi — Uganda is a very religious country. Hardly a decade after the arrival of Christianity, we contributed the largest harvest of martyrs and later, saints that the Catholic church had ever reaped: 22 at ago. These were young men, who as fervent believers, between 1885 and 1886, were burnt to death over their new-found faith.

How appropriate that as we mark 120 years after the great event, we are in the middle of a political campaign that is heavily riddled with religious overtones! We are so passionately religious in this nation that we have even fought wars over faith. We did not fire a shot to demand independence from Britain, but we fought long and bitter wars over religion. The central region of Buganda claims to have a homogenous people, all of whom love their Kabaka, but they killed one another for years over their love for religion. Actually, the Buganda kingdom was divided into administrative units along religious lines.

The Anglicans got the lion's share, followed closely by the Catholics and Muslims at a distant third. We love our God so much that at independence, we decided to write our national motto thus: "For God and My Country." During debates preceding the writing of the 1995 constitution, some Marxist-leaning delegate suggested that the reference to God be deleted from the motto and he was roundly condemned by fellow delegates and the public through the press. Even the first stanza of our national anthem is a pledge to place our future in God's hands. Our God has now taken a concrete role in our politics.

Now that we have entered the most difficult phase of our national politics in two decades, he has picked candidates to support. Ruhama constituency in western Uganda is the first beneficiary, where he has dispatched one of his trusted servants to go and deliver the people from the poor leadership of the current member of parliament. Some doubting Thomases are questioning the candidate's proclamations.

FOR THE first eight years of independence in 1962, the country had strayed from its religious fervour and possibly that is why God got angry and in January 1971, he sent General Idi Amin to overthrow the ungodly regime that had started toying with leftist ideologies and replaced it with one that always invoked his name. "I fear no one, except God," Amin repeatedly proclaimed. The British lovingly called him the "gentle giant."

For the next eight years, the "gentle giant" allegedly received several directives from God, which he implemented accordingly. So close was he to God that he was allegedly informed of the exact day of his death. So he kept reminding those who did not love him not to waste their time plotting his assassination because his date of death was a pact between him and God. Early in 1977, the Anglican archbishop and two Cabinet ministers died in a car crash in Kampala. The driver of their car escaped unhurt.

The international press questioned the coincidence that they died when they were being interrogated over alleged links to anti-government elements. The "gentle giant" and the driver explained to the world that God had weighed the matter and decided that the three suspected conspirators should die. But God has a way of giving tough tests to his faithful servants. In 1979, he allowed invaders from the south to overthrow his trusted servant Amin. But he remembered him a quarter of a century later when he allowed him to die and be buried in Jeddah, which is in the same country as Islam's holy city of Mecca.

Over the past 15 years, Uganda has rediscovered its godliness to unprecedented levels. In a population of 27 million, two million adults are said to be active born-again Christians. If they each were given a target of persuading just one other person to vote for a given candidate, they could easily pick a president of their choice.

Assuming that the voters' register reflects the demography of the country and that four million people is only about half the adults in Uganda. Joachim Buwembo is managing editor of The Monitor of Kampala.