Peasantry politics and the crisis of allegiance

PEASANTRY POLITICS

Recently Hon. Ojara Martin Mapenduzi dominated the national news headlines over his decision to cooperate with the National Resistance Movement (NRM) - the hegemonic ruling party. Martin was elected to represent Bardege-Layibi Constituency as an independent, having quit his membership in FDC. Martin's decision to quit FDC also caused a brouhaha, albeit, a tremor compared to this one.

This article is not about justifying the fact that Martin's move seems to have irritated a number of people. In Uganda, there still exist people who believe in allegiance to cause and frown upon flip-flops. I find the public response to Martin's shift of allegiance to be rather strange. A trend to hemorrhage opposition from Northern Uganda into NRM was long established.

The late Rt. Hon. Jacob Oulanyah (RIP) started the trend in Acholi. He once went to bed wearing a red pajama (UPC) and woke up the next day in a yellow one. People reacted with mixed emotions and they eventually settled for the status quo. At his death, Jacob was the most senior government official from the region, a position he would never have obtained had he remained in UPC.  His meteoric rise thereafter to become a speaker and northern Uganda NRM vice-chair got cemented.

A few days after Jacob's death, Hon. Norbert Mao jumped into the yellow bus.  Mao even dragged the residual DP membership he had in his hand to the signing of this same MoU as Martin - to cooperate with the NRM. Mao was appointed a minister and assigned the task of babysitting a Muhoozi project and chasing a whirlwind of political transition that will never become. That Martin has followed suit is not a novelty because many others are on the way. I am hearing a cacophony that his Gulu East counterpart - Fr Onen may have been harnessed and initiated already into the yellow fold.

Uganda is undergoing rapid socio-political changes where those in power have really concentrated power and wealth in their hands. Being a large peasantry economy, as designed by the British, Uganda actually has very little room for a meaningful opposition contribution.

The relationship between the state and the people has remained between masters and subjects. The British, in constructing the colonial state, excluded indigenous Ugandans from the colonial state spheres.  The colonial state considered the white settlers or farmers as citizens and Africans as subjects.

In that sense, citizenship rights were denied to the indigenous population. We have seen comparative studies of colonial social policies and found similar patterns of deprivation, distancing, canceling, and segregation. The Ugandan state under Museveni has retained most of these qualities that privilege foreigners over us.

Ugandan opposition is treated as state enemies - mistreated, disrespected, cajoled, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. The same way the colonial state responded to African nationalist insurrections or liberation struggles.

Often, the contribution from the opposition is never taken seriously, with the current speaker of Parliament showing even more intolerance and greatest contempt for the opposition with their contribution. You recall their mob mistreatment of Hon. Zaake and the contemptuous dismissal of Hon. Joel Ssenyonyi 's committee reports on abuses of public office. Recently, I read with much amusement how the visit by the Leader of the Opposition to government hospitals riled the Prime Minister. There is filth everywhere in public service, most of which results from the government's dereliction of duty, negligence, incompetence, corruption, and contempt for the peasantry population.

On the side of the opposition, their response to state intolerance is terse. They have to keep a stronghold on their numbers in Parliament where they are severely outnumbered. I have seen the opposition often responding bitterly and at times applying uncharitable phrases to dismiss the impact of losing a member.

The truth is, the NRM government no longer has viable ideas or credible persons to develop the country alongside these fishermen's mentalities. Museveni has retired in power while the entire government operates on the principle of appeasement to stay put as placeholders. Martin is an intelligent person whose true potential would never materialize in the opposition. His commanding knowledge and experience of local government should have afforded him a full ministerial docket.

End.

Why Europe should pay royalties to Africa.

 

EUROPEAN PATRONAGE

Recently, President Emmanuel Macron hosted leaders from the global South in Paris to moot a global agenda to address climate financing, post-pandemic economic recovery, and the debt burden stalling the economies of the global South.

The 2023 Paris meeting was as patronizing as previous such talk shops. African leaders, notably Ruto William of Kenya and Cyril Rwamaphosa of South Africa were the most outstanding. President Ruta advocated for an equity-driven global financial infrastructure, while Cyril boldly reminded Macron that Africans should not be treated as beggars when seeking development funds.

I expected African leaders to assert to Macron that Africa’s destiny will not be shaped by a poor Europe.

We Africans allow the West to dictate our development terms. In the process, we permit them to rob us of our natural wealth and health.

 It is extremely stressful that African leaders attend such meetings when it is Europe that should present its economic case before African leaders. This mind game that inverts the global reality needs changing.  

Why should Africa perpetuate European patronage? Europe needs to keep her hands to herself.

As a matter of fact, African leaders should get accustomed to reminding their European counterparts that it is Europe that is resource poor - not Africa.

Incidentally, globalization and the resurgence of neoliberal economic policies have crafted market spaces in which Africans could evolve authoritatively with a new socioeconomic identity as a unified market with one currency. Africa must take control of its resources by any means necessary.

The West has scored so far in ensuring discordance among Africans. However, both Franco and Anglo Africa now realize the substance of their subjugation, “periphelity” and marginalization within the world order. The socio-cultural divide is now superficial and needs scraping off the skin of Africa to become a unified market force.

Neo-Pan Africanism rejects any notion of divisions along colonial legacies and coloniality that afford the West unabetted control over Africa.

Far from mineral resources and rich arable land, Africa has a young population with an average age of about 30 years compared to 55 years across Europe. The socioeconomic inequalities between these continents, however, make obsolete the advantages Africa could harness from its young population.

In its strategic discourse framing, Western legitimating institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, et cetra, problematize Africa’s young and rapid population growth They convince us that Africa remains poor because of its high population growth – and not their loot. Why is Europe not poor because of its elderly population?

The young population of Africa is her greatest asset besides its other natural endowments. Thus, whatever asset Africa has, the West devalues and undermines it, only to find reinvent its worth for their economy. Whatever the West problematizes for Africa benefits them.

European wealth and infrastructure arose from its exploitation of young African manpower through centuries of slavery. European gold and diamond reserves can be traced to African mines. The extraction of cash crops, minerals, and free labour from colonies sustained European civilization.  European multinational corporations and individuals continue to rob Africa of billions of dollars through tax evasion and illicit financial hemorrhaging.

Without Africa, the so-called European civilization could stall.

Europe must do more for Africa - respect and compensate Africa for the horrendous crimes against humanity committed and continues to date through illicit profit appropriation, slavery, colonialism/neo-colonialism, stocking conflicts/genocides, abetting corruption, etc., – all are criminal in their constructs and intents. In fact, Europe’s continued hold on Africa through military and trade control mechanisms is the device for Africa’s underdevelopment.

Thus, Africans need to assert themselves firmly in the new world order because Europe will extract resources needed for its post-pandemic economic recovery in one way or another, by robbing Africa.

Europe needs to remit monthly compensation to Africa for looting the continent of its resources – To this date, Europe has robbed and dispossessed about 90% of African cultural heritage – artifacts and objects - that generate for them enormous revenues annually  (Owolabi, Tife, 2022) – many of which may never be returned to their indigenous bases.

The works of African decoloniality advocate and historian, Clement Emeka Akpang, highlight the depth of Europe's robbery of valuable African artifacts and objects from the colonies. Akpang estimates that a museum in France - the Musee du Quai Branly, holds nearly 70,000 African objects. The British Museum has about 69,000, the Austrian Welt Museum holds 37,000 African arts, about 75,000 in Germany, and a whopping 180,000 at the Belgian Musee royal de l' Afrique centrale, and additional 3,000 in Budapest’s Neprajzi Muzeum.

Imagine how many more are in other cities across Europe together with those in private hands and Foundations! Most of which were acquired irregularly - through coercion, deception, undervalue-purchases, self-gifts, etc.

Europe has not only stolen from Africa. They have turned Africa into a heist scene. Through unity for purpose, they have constrained Africa and turned a rich continent into a “hell-house”.

Emerging African leaders should demand, conscientiously, that Europe transforms African debts into reparation and compel Europe to remit a monthly payment of royalties to Africa for both possession of African artifacts/objects, and historical/current wrongs committed in the continent.

End.

Leaders should fall ill often and seek care in public hospitals

ILL-HEALTH

I do not know when stigma started getting attached to illness, but it is such a long tradition. Our societies have always been inclined towards celebrating health and casting out ill health, mostly due to the burden illness brings to society. African societies have a largely underdeveloped concept of illness such that they tend to cluster afflictions of the body and mind in the mystic realms. Diseases and illness are explained away as bad air, curses, spells, works of witchcraft, or displeasure from the hereafter – spirits of the dead. Typically, illnesses have been treated with herbs, sometimes with fresh air and often death from preventable conditions formed the continuum of care.

For Museveni, like most strong men who have ruled spaces and places before him, his health or wellbeing have been for a long time, equated with strength – physical and mental strength - his power and control.

Through those turbulent times of HIV/AIDS, I recall Mr. Museveni rebuking the population for living recklessly. One day in the 90s, just after Philly Bongoley Lutaaya (RIP) announced his serostatus to the world, Mr. Museveni went on TV and blamed Ugandans for pocking their fingers in some holes in the ground, well knowing that snakes and other harmful elements resided in those holes. I think this is a Kinyankore proverb or local scene.

Mr. Museveni cut himself a public image of perfectionism, being frugal, careful, and healthy. He was infallible, indispensable, near immortal. In the middle of the pandemic, when his forces cruelly locked up Ugandans in slums and mizigos, a beaming Museveni jogged and pushed up in the large reception space of the statehouse.

It is such public image and persona that makes the population get mixed reactions when Museveni says he is eventually unwell. Many have shown concern about his left hand which seems to be in a bad state, but he often downplays it.

I think it is alright for our leaders to fall sick and recover. Leaders who do not experience ill health tend not to have a full range of the daily experiences of their subjects. You hardly hear Museveni visit a hospital in Uganda if he is not commissioning a building. Museveni has never condemned the failing state of the public healthcare system or the horrible experiences that Ugandans get in these hospitals.

Museveni and his family for sure get ill occasionally. Even if they keep it away from the public eye, I am sure that someone in their circle gets ill. It is also a common practice that they may prefer to fly abroad to give birth or treat their ailments. All, in masking that they are never indisposed.

I have spent many years studying healthcare systems around the world, and I can still state without a contradiction that the architectural setup of Uganda’s healthcare system is one of the most elaborate that I know. It is how the government operates or allows the system to be run down, that attests to the attitude our privileged and financially secured leaders afford to matters of our health. They evade the system by pretending not to get ill.

If our leaders felt sick more often and sought treatment in Uganda, or in their constituencies, we could have agreed by now, to adopt a first-class universal healthcare system. The body breaks down quite often in the pursuit of survival in this modern capitalist economy. The state should commit to supporting its citizens to recuperate back into the economy once broken down with afflictions. There are more advantages of a universal healthcare system that we should explore.

A healthy population is the greatest asset of any nation. Of course, I am always quick to elaborate on the difference between health and healthcare. While I privilege health above all, healthcare access is a right that all citizens including our leaders, must access when needed.

End.

Why more Ugandans prefer witchcraft than hospitals

 

 HEALTHCARE FAILURES

 

I read Dr. Diana Atwine's speech in the Daily Monitor on May 9, 2023, about the prevalence of Tuberculosis and Leprosy in Uganda. Dr. Atwine is the Permanent Secretary of the Health Ministry. The Health Ministry is a very critical public institution whose role in helping Ugandans cope with ill health and health-related threats is complementary to Uganda's national development goals.

 

In the referenced DM article, Dr. Atwine advised Ugandans that TB and Leprosy were not witchcraft-related diseases. By that statement, Dr. Atwine invites Ugandans plagued with TB and Leprosy to seek healthcare services for proper assessment and management of the diseases.

The problem is, Ugandans fear Dr. Atwine's public healthcare system!

 

In Uganda, the explanations of the causation of "unwellness" have strong roots in personal and cultural health beliefs. Many Ugandans are still semi-illiterate and broke (poor); even those who are learned, health services consumption behaviors are strongly influenced by costs.

The cost and stress of encountering Dr. Atwine's public healthcare system are itself pathogenic.

 

Dr. Atwine and her team must be knowing that witchcraft practices increase in Uganda when the healthcare services run short.

 

The glamorous buildings that emerge randomly to define our skylines during economic hardship like now, probably belong to witch doctors, their intermediaries, and certainly corrupt government officials.

People have turned to traditional beliefs and practices due to fear of confronting the ever-money-sucking healthcare workers, poor services (attitude and skills), high costs associated with buying hospital supplies and drugs that government should provide, and poor outcomes (rigor mortis/frequent deaths) in government hospitals.

 

The health care system, itself a key determinant of health, is simply inaccessible to many Ugandans in the moments of their urgent needs.

 

However, the health ministry is doing some great investments – rehabilitating and refurbishing hospitals, healthcare centers, and so forth. However, a colorful hospital building is not what makes a hospital a hospital. It is the sum total of socialization therein – ethical socialization - to be precise, that makes a hospital a hospital. And, this basic element is grossly missing.

 

The quality of care in government hospitals and health centers is seriously wanting. The unethical conduct within these institutions needs immediate attention if sick Ugandans including Leprosy and TB patients are to seek treatment there.

 

The hospital, however, is a place of extortion that begins for most Ugandans at the gate with the Askaris. Patients and caregivers are milked right from the point of registration to the most sophisticated professional. It is like the government only pays the basic salaries of these health workers such that the ill Ugandan must pay out-of-pocket for supplies and drugs. This is not even cost-sharing as we once knew it!

Most times, you find poor people being charged for gauze, cotton wool, a pint of blood, etc, including a piece of paper to document their care or else their patients are left to die or unattended. What happened to medical ethics and Hippocratic Oath that we once swore with pride?

 

While the fiscal constraints with which the health ministry operates are worthy of our empathy, the idea is to let the care process be functional with some proactive oversights.  Uganda currently allocates a paltry 6.1% of its national budget to health (See DM editorial of May 12, 2023). This is not for the lack of money, given the high cost of public administration. This, precisely, is a neoliberal policy strategy to renege on the state's role in healthcare provision for a perpetually cash-poor population.

 

Further, the poor service delivery at the local government level attests to the collapse of local government functions, and least to the lack of donor support to the health sector. The purpose of decentralization was to bring services closer to the people and empower people to seek direct accountability for these services.

 

Right now, the services are alienating the very people and no one dares provide accountability for the pathetically awful healthcare services.

 

The health ministry itself snubs citizens' attempts at providing direct feedback on these horrendous encounters. Empowering the population means that end-users of the healthcare facilities should provide direct feedback for you to acknowledge and respond to.

 

If the Ministry feels that it cannot accept feedback from the everyday users of the healthcare system, or those rebuffed by the horrible experiences in the system, then why should a local government-run health center be accountable to the people? The Ministry should not shut out civic engagement that empowers its service users else people drift to witchcraft.

 

In sum, Ugandans are turning to witchcraft to "treat" their frustrations and ailments, including TB, Leprosy, HIV, mental illness, and so forth because witch doctors are more accessible, affordable, professional, accountable, and provide some form of psychotherapy, however deceitful to the poor, than our educated experts. People now know that government hospitals are places where their poor loved ones go to die.

End

The Uganda National Examination Board Exam results often alert us to our social inequities

SOCIAL INEQUITIES

The Uganda National Examination Board, commonly known by its acronym UNEB is the statutory body that sets and marks national schools’ examinations at Primary, Ordinary, and Advanced levels of education in Uganda. UNEB filters much of the workforce or tertiary institutions-trained manpower in Uganda. For students, passing the UNEB exam is critical as failing it may also consign one as a societal failure in a culture where a white-collar job is the singular most crucial measure of success.

 The idea of standardized national examinations wouldn't be bad, and it has not been. The real problem is that UNEB exam outcomes have become one of the most reliable measures of social inequality in Uganda. It is also a profoundly reliable predictor of widening gender inequality.

 Children of the rich attend elite schools and pass UNEB exams by any means possible. Children of the poor attend not-so-great schools and fail UNEB exams, with, of course, a few exceptions who may defy the odds to perform well. This pattern of performance in UNEB exams has been the standardized script for decades.

 The aforementioned is not the problem of UNEB.

 UNEB is only a prism through which we are able to observe and analyze social inequities in our country. There are many other robust prisms to measure the materiality of our social inequities, whether in accumulated wealth, income source, employment opportunities, or the patterns of distribution of cultural, social, political, and economic resources.

 Thus, UNEB examination results often remind us that there is a profound endemic societal problem arising from the structuring of our society under this hegemonic social order under the NRM.

 Three decades ago, when UNEB released its examination results, newspaper headlines blossomed with success stories - individually and groups.  Every newspaper would rush to publish reports of best-performing students and schools from around the country. Then the inequities intensified and for two decades, the best-performing schools and candidates were from elite schools where the rich people send their children, in central and western Uganda.

 The best candidates from elite schools filled our front pages and the best performers from remote centers were celebrated as a footnote. Overall, the beaming faces of parents hugging their successful children and celebrating with them often captured the imagination of the nation.

 Until the high school fees' moments come beckoning, of course!

 But now things have changed.

 These days, newspaper headlines scream with the proportion of those students who flanked their UNEB exams in large numbers. 

 Something else caught my attention. For the first time in nearly thirty years, a newspaper headline now revealed to the nation that boys have performed better than girls. 

 Another observation of interest is that Ugandan newspapers are reporting on an exceedingly high number of students whose results were held on suspicion of cheating UNEB exams or being involved in examination malpractices. Leaking exams demonstrate how the fear of failing UNEB makes candidates and parents equally nervous!

 A standardized national exam, however, must have integrity.

 In Uganda's case, failing S4 and S6 defines the life course of many citizens. It is worst for those at the lower socioeconomic margins.  In other countries, there are options for adult education and various arrangements for one to redevelop a career after flanking regular schooling. In Uganda, failing UNEB exams endears one to the bottom of society.  Most progressive societies have abandoned national exams because not all those who fail UNEB are not good. We can agree also that UNEB has excluded some of the most brilliant brains in Uganda from achieving their full potential.

 It is also in Uganda where one has to produce their PLE, UCE, and UACE results even for a lowly automobile driver job or managing director of an organization. UNEB is still very critical and so must its integrity. 

Pay the high cost of school fees while government dances the liberal market trot dance

REGULATIONS

Before 1990, schools in Uganda were affordable. Parents had the means to educate their children through elementary and secondary education, while the government took the responsibility to educate the best-performing students in Universities and other tertiary institutions.

Then that changed when the liberalization of the economy took place. The government sold every asset it had and folded its hands in providing social services under the new socioeconomic formation - the market economy. The government scaled down on its obligation in all spheres of the social life of the citizens and strengthened its military muscles to protect the market.

Private schools started appearing to absorb excess students that the government was no longer paying for. Those students whose academic performances were not good enough for government sponsorship at high institutes of education also got absorbed. The advantage was that every child eventually had hopes of somehow attending school at a cost. The government embarked on withdrawing its full support to public schools and universities completely until the UN Millenium Development Goals convinced us that Universal Primary and Secondary Education are still critical for our civilization.

The street fights of the 1990s with Makerere University over the boom epitomised this radical departure of NRM from its initial ideas. The introduction of cost-sharing in tertiary institutions followed suit. These abrupt changes were nightmarish because most students who could not qualify for government sponsorship at a public university were actually smart kids. Most had studied in humbly remote schools and under very strenuous circumstances. Tertiary institutions were their hub and a stepping stone to rise to better future opportunities. In fact, if you wished to understand how the ordinary Uganda child struggled for success, spending time in teachers' colleges, allied health colleges, business colleges, etc would affirm such. You could see that most of these students were oriented to their facts with a unified vision to exceed the predicament.

Why are we now in this confusion where the government can no longer regulate school fees and standards of education?

Often, we are told to put our mouths where we put our money!

The appealing ideological cornerstones of the NRM faded and became stale somewhere about 1996. At that time, Ugandans had experienced a fundamental change in the NRM character.

Uganda’s resentment of him was the 1996 Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere (RIP), running alongside Hon. Cecilia Ogwal. Clearly, Museveni was at an ideological crossroads which he fully understood but had no shame to relent. He had abandoned his original Pro-Africa or Pan-African economic policies stance and hobnobbed in bed with the West. He had swallowed the neoliberal marketization seed.

We say that there is a forest in every seed. The neoliberal economic policies that Museveni swallowed in 1989 have now produced the forest of inadequacies, corruption, extreme social inequalities, and inequities of contemporary Uganda.

If the government can regulate your life, and even take it away, how can it possibly fail to regulate school fees? The response is that Museveni and his government are trapped in the web of an exploitative global neoliberal economy – the mobile and exploitative phase of capitalism that commands an unhinged liberal market and a reduced influence of government (anti-statism) in the affairs of the market.

For the avoidance of doubt, when the government reduces its funding to schools, most schools fail to meet their basic operational costs. As such, they must charge students more to be able to operate and perform. With the ongoing post-COVID-19 inflation, schools – public or private – will demand more from parents and the government will continue to do the neoliberal trot dance while looking the other way.

Government is helpless and indeed, cannot effectively regulate any sector if it cannot control inflation or doll-out tax-payer money to subsidize gaps in school expenditures. The high burden of school fees is one sign that we, the people of Uganda, are on our own. It affirms further that the government is not the government of the people anymore; it is the government of the liberal market economy. Thus, it is the market economy that regulates it and not vice versa.

END

The Balaalo Surge: Debunking anti-Acholi land appropriation discourses

     ACHOLI LAND GRAB

Acholi land issues are thorny and contentious largely because of many falsehoods or distorted public discourses inspired by sinister motives of aggrandizement. According to M. Foucault, a “discourse” is a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning.  Discourses transmit, produce, and reinforce power – but also can expose and undermine it.

There have been several discourses sustained about Acholi and Acholi land specifically. For this article, two discourses need urgent redressing; a) that the Acholi land is free and unused; and b) that the Acholi people are sectarian for resisting the surge of Balaalo pastoralists and land grabbers. These two discourses require urgent debunking!

There are opportunistic Ugandans who assume to have better ideas of how to use Acholi land which they consider free and unused and go about propagating discourses to justify land appropriation. These discourses, therefore, afford them the reprieve to appropriate and annex Acholi land as was the case in 2021 with the annexation of Apaa to Adjumani.

Acholi land is not “unused”, “free” or “available” for grabs. Period! Historical facts dispute this discourse and illuminate a plot to perpetrate economic annihilation of the Acholi. For the record, the Acholi people capably preserved and managed their land communally and productively before 1986.  This Acholi region was once wealthy –produced a variety of high-quality food crops twice a year, and cash crops such as cotton and coffee throughout the year. Acholi people are hard-working farmers, hunters, and entrepreneurs like every other group in Uganda.

The pre-Museveni Acholi land relied on cattle, goats, sheep, fowls, and farming for their livelihood. Every Acholi who lived outside Acholiland would return home during public holidays to replenish their own food stocks.  The two decades of war in northern Uganda profoundly disrupted this trend of economic growth and stability. The dispossession of cattle from Acholi and the internment of nearly 1.7 million Acholi people from their homesteads should be prominently illuminated to debunk this discourse. The enduring effects of that war cannot be underwritten in countering this discourse, either.

Honest Ugandans and the Balaalo have no basis to sustain the discourse that Acholi is sectarian. Recently, the surge of Balaalo into the Acholi region gained traction and is generating a lot of tension. The Balaalo are nomadic pastoralists previously known to Acholi in their capacity as kraal attendants – before 1986. Even with their questionable origins, privileges, and consciousness, the Balaalo should be respectful of Acholi and show courtesy. Unfortunately, the forceful ones are university graduates, armed, and most rear their cattle remotely via cell phones.

Key characteristics of this group that are resentful, include indiscipline, arrogance, violence, and a strange sense of entitlement to Acholi land.

Most of the pre-NRM/A Balaalos were paupers who were propertyless with no claim to Acholiland, except for their excessive affinity and care skills for cows as their competency. Most were employees – cattle keepers - that Acholi families treated very well. The short-horned cattle in Acholiland were commonplace and plentifully entrusted to the Balaalos. Every Acholi who owned cattle also employed Balaalos and paid them by agreement, mainly in gallons of milk. This arrangement was amicable as the Balaalo made more money from selling milk than if they were paid monthly wages. They were housed and given land to cultivate food. Some were even married wives and settled as part of Acholi families.

I know this because my father had lots of herds of cattle in Pajule, and my grandfather had almost 250 cows that lurked gracefully at the foot of Atoo hills in Aswa county. There never was a problem of trust or misunderstanding between Acholi families that own cattle and their Balaalo employees. I stand to be corrected on this. On a few occasions, however, some Balaalo tried to accumulate their stock by stealing calves. I never heard of a Mulaalo being mistreated over such, however, we know that most became NRA spies in the heat towards 1986.

Thus, the correct counter-discourse should be such that, Acholi land was dispossessed of cattle and its socioeconomic life potential by means of war, de-stocking, and mass displacement. As such, the NRM/A junta mistreated Acholi on many fronts. The dispossession of its livestock is only one of those, economic annihilation and subsequent protracted violence against the people need to be comprehensively redressed and not perpetrated.

The ongoing surge of the Balaalo with their cattle, however, reminds the Acholi of how treacherous it is to trust your former employees who turned against you, ransacked your home, killed and humiliated your people, and interned your population in squalor. Acholi needs breathing space to recover from the long-term effects of that “social transformation” that Museveni curated for them.

It is shameful that the Balaalo are now returning to grab Acholi land, which they know its potential quite well. In that equation, how will the Acholi person benefit from Balaalo harassment and land appropriation?

It is important to note that, while the Acholi are now caught defending their dispossessed land, there has not been a genuine effort on the side of the government to properly restock the region.

Where you live and work determines your health

MIGRATIONS

Where we are born, grow, play, work, retire and die determines our health. Place, according to the World Health Organization, is a determinant of health and this explains why a built environment is also a determinant of our health. Place matters in everything we do. Place reinforces and validates our identities, and values, and shapes the context of our perspectives.

This article is an abridged version of a speech that View Global Services Inc provided to newcomers in Canada recently. The theme of the event was to motivate and inspire newcomers to make sense of their new immigration status in their new place - Canada.

As we know, it is extremely difficult for ordinary Ugandans to get the coveted Canadian visa, and more so, harder even for those who apply and are denied. Those who make it to Canada, however, have opportunities to succeed in building for themselves a meaningful life through hard work and accepting integration in the multicultural place that Canada offers.

The lesson learned in legal immigration is that changing places has numerous advantages. A person may have limited opportunities and skills to thrive in one place, and yet in the next place, these opportunities become boundlessly useful. Migration is the benefit of globalization.

An analogy using a bottle of packaged water illustrates how value changes from place to place. “The water bottle is probably 20 cents in a Costco supermarket,” he said. When you buy the same water bottle in a convenience store, it is probably $2.00. For the same water bottle brand, you pay probably $5.00 in a restaurant and pay $10 for the same bottle of water on a plane or a five-star hotel. The lesson is that our values change from place to place like that water bottle. It is up to us to find the place where we are valued the most.

Place matters. My high school physics teacher, Mr. Kijjambu, once challenged us to travel around the world to complement our learning – to expand our horizons. He always rebuked those who found themselves born in one place, lived, studied, worked, and died in that same place. Mr. Kijjambu cautioned, such as an unexamined life, and warned us about falling into the grip of poverty. He reminded us that poverty has a way of constraining one’s hands and legs and closing both their mind and eyes to prospects in this world.

Arguably, many people are afraid of change. Migration is energy and resource-consuming. Stability, and settling in a familiar place where one has an established social network and a routinized way of life provide safety and comfort. That, too, is undeniable. Valid. Legitimate.

The limit of such thinking, though, is saturation and stasis. When ideas in society become saturated, such a society can develop. The lack of development also limits prospects leading to a scarcity of resources. How the societal resources in such a situation get distributed or shared among the people becomes unequal leading to conflicts and poor health.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the place one lives matters. Africans and the poorer communities were the last to receive vaccines. Being born in Uganda for instance is not the same as being born in Japan. By being born in Uganda, your life expectancy is set under 60yrs while anyone born in Japan is expected to live to their 90s.

Place matters because it provides context for your material and living conditions that determine your health, and validate your identities and values. Although Africa is constructed as permanently needy, even within Africa, some internal legal migration should be made possible. We share ideas, improve our capabilities, and build a better world if we found better places suitable for us to realize our true potential.

END.

Gen Kainerugaba’s Presidential Ambitions are Infantile and Oedipal

 

Gen. MUHOOZI KAINERUGABA

I can bet with confidence, in this article, that Gen MK will neither be on the ballot as a presidential candidate nor a president-elect in 2026 unless he executes the oedipal method.

Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba’s (MK) train of presidential ambition has been fired up by tweets and seems now ominously unstoppable. Will he be the first person to depose a dictator over Twitter?

 But wait a minute, has Gen Museveni, the father, a lifelong president, and Gen MK’s Commander-in-Chief declared a position on succession or transition?

The characteristic actions of the President on this matter of succession speak louder than the rancor of Gen MK and his overzealously opportunistic supporters. Clearly, Gen MK’s expectation to replace his father in 2026 is simply infantile, diversionary, and at most, oedipal.

The question that this article raises, is not about the materiality of Gen Museveni handing over power to his cub. This which concerns the conscience of the nation is that with this steam of succession politics, have we, as a country rationalized institutional chauvinism and discarded the foundational ideology that fosters nationalism? Can we state, unequivocally, that the NRM-O and its leaders have arrived at the end-point of their ideological evolution?

I may not have answers to all the above questions myself, however, what is clear is that each time we indulge in this succession debate, the chauvinistic element of Chwezism emerges. The most logical justification of this succession debate is situated in reinventing a Chwezi “historical” might over the East African region.

This chauvinistic tendency is ingrained in the tweets such as the ambitions of capturing Nairobi, the prospects of caving a Chwezi empire to include Eastern DRC, or praises for uncle this and uncle that, including fabricating relationships with Egyptians, Ethiopians and exalting the Russians.

These tweets are not random. They must illuminate repressed knowledge or myth that resulted from being exposed to the power and how that power is mobilized and sustained. Far from those who may dismiss the General’s tweets as misgivings of inebriation, I see in them a pattern of premonition rooted in his father’s myth.

Additionally, the succession discussions feed into the ambiguous theme of transition that Hon. Norbert Mao fronts to justify his transition from opposition to the government. Like Gen MK’s false hope of becoming President in 2026, Mao is also “being driven like a wheelbarrow” to cultivate a false public narrative of a non-existent transition that is otherwise possible only upon God’s beckons.

Previous trends have shown that Gen Museveni says only things he has no intention of doing and effectively does only things he never says in public. For instance, in 1986, he promised never to cling to power, now he is one of the longest-serving presidents. In 1986, he was totally averse to corruption and vowed to end poverty in Uganda, now corruption and poverty, and two leading tourist attractions to Uganda. Somewhere, he promised the return to constitutionalism, rule of law, and securing persons and property, now the constitution is worthless, kondoism is back, everyone is insecure and private properties are being vandalized or appropriated under gunpoint.

Precisely, the contradictions of Gen. Museveni are our motivation to empathize with his son. If his goal is to become President in honor of his mother, then he may as well execute the Oedipal method and we move on!

END

Historia: Musevenism and puppet politics

The claim that opposition leaders strive to become western puppets has pervaded the current Uganda election landscape. Mr. Kaboggoza Kibudde, in the DM of December 20, 2020, penned an article titled: We need leaders who will not be Western puppets”. The article was strange and exposed the author to scrutiny. Mr. Kaboggoza took a swipe at Dr. Kizza Besigye and Hon. Robert Kyagulanyi for seeking and mobilizing foreign support in their effort to ouster the lifelong western darling, dictator Museveni from power.

For purposes of convenience, Mr. Kaboggoza cherry-picked facts and distorted history to support his arguments. First, Mr. Kaboggoza compares Dr. Kiiza’s claims to have won elections that were rigged to the bogus claims that outgoing US president, Trump is making. This is typically comparing oranges with stones.

Mr. Kaboggoza should know that Mr. Donald Trump is an incumbent president who lost an election.

The election that Trump lost was within precincts of a functional democratic institution operated by people of great integrity, the same system which made Trump President.

Incidentally, most of the prominent elected officials in the Trump contested states are Republicans, most of whom Trump recommended for those positions. Mr. Kaboggoza’s comparisons are as fake as Trump’s own litany of cases which have failed to progress in court for lack of evidence.

Neither Dr. Kiiza nor Hon. Kyagulanyi have been Presidents, and none could survive the nexus of global forces in which Uganda must operate. Uganda has long been a victim of neocolonialism, in which Mr. Museveni is the most reliable puppet of the western powers in the region. No one in the African continent has curved in so fundamentally to the whims of the West as Mr. Museveni over the decades.

Mr. Kabogozza may e one of the bazukulus who hardly read history or was too young to have known the evolution of Mr. Museveni from 1986 to date. The Museveni who promised Ugandans a fundamental change in 1986 is not the same Museveni we have today. In 1986 Museveni spoke very spitefully of western powers and imperialism. He preached Pan Africanism and formed various economic blocs, such as the Preferential Trade Area (PTA), and later was instrumental in forming the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) with a view of enhancing Africa's autonomy and reducing dependence on Western Markets. The 1986 Museveni believed that Africans were cheated in global trades controlled by the industrial west. In fact, at one point, Museveni even proposed that Africa should resort to barter trade to undermine the influence of US dollars.

When Museveni came to government, Margaret Thatcher was in power in the UK from 1979 and Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a US election on November 4, 1980. These two ultra-conservative leaders were ferocious in their single-minded promotion of the free-market economy. The two leaders enacted policies that ignited a wave of global neoliberalism as the solution to the post-1970s economic woes.

Museveni’s early Presidency was faced with mounting foreign debt repayment challenges and the country was faltering on all its debts. The World Bank and IMF were emphatic against such loan defaulters and urged these failed states to adopt a system that could reboot their economies to guarantee debt servicing.

In October of 1987, Museveni flew to an IMF/WB meeting and later met President Ronald Reagan. That meeting whitewashed the Marxist Guerilla in Museveni. Museveni returned a US and western puppet from that time. That visit prepared Uganda for the worst. Museveni was ideologically reorientated to the liberal free-market economy.

By 1990 we had devalued our currency and embarked on structural adjustment programs – retrenchment, radical disposal of national assets, and opening of the private sector while suppressing public service. The rest is history.

Over the years, Museveni has not denounced his links with Sweden, his dealings with lobbyists in Washington DC and the European Union, and the UK foreign office. Museveni’s friendship with Israel, Russia, China, North Korea, etc., remains public knowledge; his rental mercenary business in Somalia to the US and imperial control of DRC and Southern Sudan among others, have paved the way for the perpetual exploitation of resources by his western allies - a public knowledge too!

Mr. Kabogozza, if we are to talk about a western puppet amidst us, no African leader, other than Cameroon’s Biya, who literally lives in Switzerland, can challenge Museveni. For, Museveni’s very hold on power depends on his being an effective stooge managing neo-imperialist wars and a market economy in the region.

What is in Museveni’s logic of marginalizing Arts and Humanities?

 

    EPISTEMOLOGIES

Recently Mr. Museveni reignited the debate of marginalizing Arts in society by claiming that sciences are more important for national development. In one short video clip that I saw, Museveni asked a rhetorical question, something like, “How does reciting Shakespeare or Macbeth help a nation?”

I suspect that Museveni’s persistent marginalization of arts is borne out of fear for the evolution of new and attractive ideas for reimagining Uganda beyond him. Mr. Museveni understands that works of Art are what inspired his revolutionary mindset. The younger Yoweri was a staunch Marxist and inspired by thinkers like Fidel Castro, Franz Fanon, Machiavelli, European history, and the cultural history of the Bachwezi dynasty and recited their ideas for decades. I have never heard Museveni reciting the works of science other than the Luwero methods or military science!

If Arts did not matter, why was the younger Museveni and now the de facto lifelong president, not inspired by great scientists like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and others? Arts and science are siblings – one inspires the other and one cannot live without the other. The desire for wars and conquest led man to develop the war industry; the desire for food security led to the invention of hoes, farming industry, and seeds genetic sciences; the fear of plant diseases led to the science of developing disease-resistant crops. Science responds to material human fears communicated discursively and textually. Literacy is a requite for sciences!

Clearly, Mr. Museveni’s mission is as obscurantic as it can get and is steeped in averting national and civil consciousness arising from his distortion of history, material marginalization that Ugandans are experiencing, denial of space for the voice of reason and counter-reasoning, as well as the pervasive human rights violation which have become the landmark features of his administration.

Any scholar appreciates the role of arts or humanities, including social and political sciences, literature, and expressive Arts as well as imaginations, critical thinking, and creative ways of innovations. When you kill the arts, you stifle society’s imaginative minds and reconstitute a society trapped in valorizing the status quo, even when they are ensnared in its misery.

The young Yoweri used his knowledge of arts and humanities, mostly to question society and create space for new ideas for nation-building. Museveni has bragged about losing thirteen of his early years in fighting Amin’s and Obote’s governments. Once he ascended to power, Museveni embarked on fighting something strange (not imperialism for sure) under the auspices of Pan Africanism, as a cheerleader of global neoliberalism in the continent.

I have never heard a speech in which Museveni does not project an issue to an ideological realm. Infatuating with an idea for years and implementing is, constitutes sciences. If there is any success of Arts, Museveni and Nollywood are its truest revelation. However, as we know, the older Museveni is now rejecting the ideals of the younger Yoweri which was inspired by arts and humanities. I conclude, therefore, that this debate is not so much about marginalizing Arts, humanities, and their teachers – a great travesty in modern unequal society. This agenda is Museveni rejecting himself and projecting it onto arts teachers and people in the humanities. Is it a surprise that his actions follow restructuring and clumping down on civil society organizations? Undermining arts is an ideological ploy to suppress the emergence of new ideas that are critical to his rule and threaten to puncture his equilibrium!

While we recognize the imperatives of sciences in driving socio-cultural revolution – like the times of renaissance, sciences do not happen in a vacuum as an end to itself. Science is not a discrete happening. Good science is not an event of discovery and technology either. Science is a continuum of everyday social life and it becomes relevant when science is used to produce knowledge and utilities that are socially relevant. There is science in arts, for instance, the methods of inquiry in arts are scientific, methodological and knowledge from it is transferrable beyond geographies. Sciences is not limited to assembling boda-bodas and buses.

The science that is separated from the everyday social events becomes anathema to that society and so will be the scientists. Overemphasis on science will attract students who lack the skills and interests in the field, graduates who will later suffer in their career due to a mismatch of skills. Most of our young professionals already suffer in the job field because the education and the career choices or types are too limited. Added the vice of sectarianism in the workplaces, many people end up in jobs they have no clue about. This is where the debate should focus – how do we structure our education system to offer a wide range of career training programs?

I must remind Mr. Museveni that creating inequalities in the classroom is not a wise decision. Teachers with the same qualifications and years of services must be paid the same, whether they teach arts/humanities or sciences. People in the arts do pay taxes, raise their families, and run governments and businesses. They deserve the best and equally motivated teachers.

Our people in Uganda are dying from preventable causes

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEATHS

Most Ugandans die young and from preventable causes. The Ugandan Ministry of health claims in its 2016 report that Malaria is the top killer of Ugandans while the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the top funders of Uganda’s health care system claims that Neonatal disorders, HIV/AIDS, and Malaria in third place, are the three top causes of death in Uganda.

 Few people really write about death (mortality, rigor mortis, demise, fatalities, etc) until a prominent person dies. However, Ugandans have been dying at an acceptable rate for a young population. Only that no one cares except for the red soils that devour them. The red earth is feeding on us too!

 Deaths and funerals are very important social occasions in the Ugandan tradition. Many people are called to order the moment they are threatened to imagine how many people would gather on their graves during mourning when they pass on. The crowd that gathers at your funeral determines how resourced or important you were to your community in your lifetime.

 Sometimes, your reputation gathers for you the most important decision-makers from among your people, to mourn and eulogize you. Not these days anymore when the prospect of soda and food can attract anybody. Most funerals are attended by children yearning for sodas and meals anyway.

 The e-burials under the aegis of the coronavirus pandemic should have made dying even difficult for those obsessed with popularity at death. But a dead man is a dead man, anyway. Death is a neutralizer such that the dead offers nothing new except the material loss for those indebted to him or his recipients mourning for their lost source of livelihood. I doubt people these days mourn the dead as it was in the past! How else would you explain that widows marry the next week and widowers the next day?

 I must assert myself here that deaths in Acholi regions are mostly preventable. it comes prematurely, and you know, the culture of not screening for ailments is partly to blame. Nonetheless, across Uganda, chauvinism kills more than diseases. The idea that you are not sick until you have pain, or that you are pretending of sickness to avoid chores, places many at risk of dying young.

 Cancer, for instance, is eating up people like the cow gobbing roughages. HIV/Aids has affected everyone and Ugandans no longer bother about it. They have accepted to live with it, and this has reduced stigma. With the advent of medicine, the viral load could be managed to an undetectable level and people are living to their full potentials.

 Malaria has been with us and seriously, I never knew of anyone who ever died of malaria, until I read in the media that malaria kills so many people. I have known of children who died of malaria and never an adult. I once told a Canadian friend that I suffered terrible bouts of malaria while in Uganda in 2017. The dude almost fainted. I had to explain that Malaria is not contagious – that some horny female Anopheles mosquito just flirts with your blood and deposits the protozoa that make a home in your liver for few days. Once you take an anti-malarial then hydrate, then it is gone! What I have failed to understand though, is why African governments spend so much money on weapons and not on research to combat malaria 

Deaths in Uganda have a political economy to it. The politically connected and powerful tend to have large unrestrained mourners attending to their funerals. We saw that with Lt. Gen. Lokech (RIP) and recently with BMK’s funeral. A humongous crowd seated skin-to-skin in total violation of the pandemic SOP of 2 meters apart. But they mourned, finished, and went home – no police disruption. Meanwhile, our schools are still closed until 2022, right? 

I have seen that people are fast and blissful at celebrating death and least enthusiastic at preventing it. In the many WhatsApp groups, I am enrolled, everyone is busy collecting money for funerals (Mabugo) and none collects money for health insurance schemes so that the ill can get the medical care they need and not die young. Some even innovatively begin to collect money to build a house for a dead man. People cash out of empathy and it is unconscionable, outright! Death has been used on occasions to reap money, and yet no one accounts for the fact that the deceased died from a preventable death. We are killing our people deliberately and that is social murder!

End.

Ugandan MP have become the "New Government"

"THE NEW GOVERNMENT"

For years, we have referenced the difference between “government” and “State”, terms that have been loosely used as synonyms. Discerning these terms is crucial for understanding public policy.

Using a simple explanation, the state is what already exists – the people, society/country, with its constitution, laws, tax systems, security apparatus, institutions, et cetra – such as the colonial and post-colonial states of Uganda. The government, on the other hand, is the interested group(s) that contend to impress its ideology upon the state - to control and steer it. Such as the Obote and Museveni governments. The state does not change much on its own but the government changes at every elective year or during coups, revolutions, death of a leader, and so forth. This change affects how the state operates or is operated. In the case of NRMO, the government has fused to become the state itself through dictatorial permanency!

The foregone analogy helps to understand an emerging phenomenon that defines the nature of governance in Uganda, today. This article argues that the slow death of local government has ceded the role of local governance to the Members of Parliament as the new governors.

The local government arrangement was a compromise for federalism as was popularly demanded in the CJ Odoki’s Constitutional Review Commission that resulted in the 1995 constitution. At the time, some Ugandans had desired Federal governance while Buganda clung on a less understood and historically divisive “Federo.”

For decades, local government flourished with the hope that it would unite Ugandans, bring services closer to the people, make people’s voices visible in decision making at the local levels, and make local government leaders to be accountable locally. The way Hon. Bidandi Ssali articulated local government was such that it is a bottom-up policy approach that made administration and governance truly pro-people.

The central government ceded much of the public service administration to the local government through the Local Government Act, 1997 (as amended). Schools, hospitals, education, water and sanitation, cultural ceremonies, local infrastructure (roads), urban planning, including security among others, became the responsibility of the local government. The central government would finance the districts through its ministry of finance and economic planning.

For decades, the balkanization of districts in Uganda as an entrenchment political strategy for the ruling NRM created more pseudo-districts that are not viable through their tax generation. Consequently, the quality of public service has generally declined instead of improving, and the people are more alienated from decision-making than intended. Rent-seeking has created self-assured “Thiefdoms” in these districts as opposed to broader accountability and transparent practices.  The operations of the local government have become enigmatic and its functions are simply paradoxical. The lapse in local districts' performance has caused a political crisis that gave now makes the high-earning Members of Parliament become the new government in the place of local government.

Being an MP attracts a decent earning and in poor districts where there are four or more MPs, the collective monthly or annual income of their MPs outstrips such a district revenue collection. Further, districts like Kitgum has repeatedly failed to absorb central capitation grants. Consequently, the local people have abandoned seeking services from the local and central government only to turn their gaze of helplessness at their MPs.

Being an MP in Uganda today means running the everyday life of all constituents such as paying fees, acting as a husband to widows and father to orphans; being a health worker – providing ambulances and building health centers as well as pharmacies; being a chief mortician. paying for burials and body relocations; Being a chief witness at weddings and marriage counselor, a local conflict arbitrator,  a counselor of widowers and the terminally ill; agents of witchcraft, funder of flimsy business propositions, a chief mourner at funerals of people who die from purely preventable deaths, a transporter, teacher, priest, road builder, and even a cattle rustler in some districts!

The central government has reneged on its duties to fund local governments appropriately and the ministry of finance’s micro-management of local government accounts for some of these lapses. However, the central government has insisted on lavishing MPs with resources in ways that undermine the local government, and consequently, the MPs have gradually inherited much that local governments should do. This way, the MPS are constantly under duress from their insatiably needy constituents and their performance is judged not by the legislative requirement, rather by how they solve service gaps that the local and central government should have performed.

This also explains the rise in perpetual corruption, decline in legislative deliberations, and decline in the quality of leaders at all levels of governance. Additionally, the high commercialization of politics and its violent nature speaks to the level at which the MP transmits state tyranny, escapes credibility scrutiny, and evades accountability. In the end, when an MP is defeated at an election, they quickly depreciate physically, mentally, and financially. Most look up to a concession with the giver – Museveni – for fringe benefits or appointments.

The cost of public administration must be addressed to ease resources for local government to operate. The Ministry of finance should harmonize how it transmits funds to the local governments and ease up on micro-management which humiliates local leaders. Practically, the Parliament is bloated and needs reducing drastically. Districts that are impracticable need to be dissolved and a criterion to attain a district status be set based on the ability to collect taxes that can finance at least 60% of its operating costs. The MP should not be a “government.”

END