How Alcohol defines social transformation in Kitgum

Alcohol Consumption

The scotching weather in Kitgum is one which can make life very difficult. However, for the people here, heat is not as much as discomforting as the chronic and persistent poverty that confront them on the daily basis. Fortunately, for Kitgum’s middle class, artisans and business fraternity, life appears to be vibrant. Kitgum is a small town, humbly laid in valleys and interlaced with River Pager which gives it the vein to wash away its filth and to others, the water to feed its living systems.

Walking on the streets, I hear that this year, Kitgum’s simsim harvest has been remarkable. The sight of heavily loaded Dyna trucks ferrying sacks of simsim away reaffirms this prospect. With simsim giving the people a good harvest, many would hope that the livelihood here would dramatically transform. The fact is, much of the proceeds from a good harvest go to drinking alcohol.

The truth be said, Kitgum was voted the dirtiest town in Uganda recently by the New Vision panel of experts. Walking through the dusty streets, it is obvious that Kitgum town’s main streets have never seen tarmac since independence. The traces ofTarmac built during colonial rule have faced enormous wear and tear, causing terrible unease for travelers. The dusty roads and the rather flat landscape give the city a naturally dirty appearance.

And yet, beneath its entire neglected infrastructure, Kitgum has probably the most resilient population in the entire Uganda. Here, boda-boda and wheelbarrow pushers are still trusted with your valuables; you hardly hear of petty thefts, like phone stealing, night time robbery or such under-class mannerism which afflicts most of the sprawling urban centres elsewhere.

The humble life in Kitgum town also reveals the tragedy of the NRM’s desire for social transformation to dependence. In the last two years, the District budget shows that the population only contributes about 1.5% to its total budget. The rest of the tab is picked by central government and donors. This also signifies persistent and chronic poverty.

But this city has also been gifted with hard working city bureaucrats who toil day and night to make ends meet with the meager resources at hand. Maybe someday, they will bring tarmac to this city’s main roads.

However, it is the low productivity and high alcohol consumption which challenges the economic recovery of this district. The harsh hot weather and the exhausted soils due to environmental degradation presents a fear for a rough future of this place transforming into semi-arid land.

Social transformation comes with re-alignment and a shift in collective consciousness of a people. If a place like Kitgum is to reinvent itself to a post conflict modern city, then the force to compel it forward must come from within. The over two decades of war has made the residents of Kitgum suspicious of foreign influences. Coupled with the many NGOs that had flooded this place, people had become dependent on hand-outs but the lull created by the subsequent withdrawal of NGOs has also driven the people to their gardens, to grow Simsim and other food crops.

The dilemma of this place now is alcoholism. Alcoholism has redefined the collective consciousness of this town, just as it has usurped the growth of other districts in this region.

I heard saddening stories in social places such as morning devotions that people are selling their harvests to buy alcohol. Unlike in the south and other parts of the country where youths sell off their lands to buy boda boda cycles, here, people have the proclivity to dispose-off valuable assets for alcohol. The situation has reached a pandemic level and yet the societal response is minimal if not timid. One would get the impression that the churches and local authorities have already been defeated. Even the prospect of near death cannot can not deter  alcohol consumption.

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Anti-corruption fight is a bully for the weak

FIGHTING CORRUPTION

The article by Hon Rose Namayanja Nsereko, the Minister of Information and National Guidance titled “Government has registered victory in fighting corruption” must be applauded and at the same time examined critically (see: DM, Jan 10, 2014). So far, this article is the most comprehensive insight of the progress being made by the office of the Inspector General of Government, the statutory body assigned to fight the endemic vice of corruption in government.

To add a more moderate voice to this rather glamorous account as depicted by the Minister, Uganda is known for having some of best laws in the region. Whether laws against graft or those prohibitive laws against moral corruption, human liberties and so forth. When it comes to writing laws, Uganda has gone off its way to extract laws from Britain and from the United States without fear. Of recent, this country has been able to invoke a colonial law – that ensures preventive arrests on assumptions or prediction of potential breach. 

This law has been used specifically against dissenters like Besigye and others but not on potentially corrupt politicians.

The existence of many robust anti-corruption laws in Uganda is not issue of contestation here. The major ingredient that Uganda lacks in the fight against corruption is the political will to reinforce those laws to their rational ends. In all aspects, the problems that afflict the fight against corruption are also the transformative as well as functional nature of corruption, it being used as a political tool.

Ugandans will not be dubbed by romanticized statistics which glorifies half a success story. While I am tempted to believe that all is rosy at the Ombudsman’s office as the Minister portrays, reality checks may reveal another narrative - far from what government is numbing our nerves with.

First, cases that have been easily disposed are those that affect the less important personalities who commit petty acts of corruption due to poor supervision. The government has deliberately failed to persecute those bigger political fishes whose fingers never leave public purse. And yet, the political class is the most corrupted class. This means the IGG’s office and the police have never had sufficient and real powers to reign in on the politicians.

Second, corruption is the mediating mechanism of the regime upon which patronage and allegiances are negotiated. 

As a consequence, the cost of politics on public purse has become overwhelming at the expense of public service. The cost of public administration and the corruption which sustains it ensures that no public institution can claim to work independently and free of corruption. The IGG’s office and its officers are no exception. This is why those political honchos, who can bribe their way out or those who are connected to the establishment, tend to also evade the wrath of anti-corruption laws as we saw with the Gavi/Global funds scandal.

Thirdly, government’s failures to prioritize funding for anti-corruption institutions and its inherent inability to accept good governance as a principled aspect of the fight against graft, do illustrate their contempt for genuine anti-graft fight. Here and there, favoritism, cronyism, tribalism and the desire for life presidency, comes in handy to compromise any genuine head strong efforts at fighting corruption. The police appear too incompetent to conduct thorough and timely forensic investigation targeting politicians, and even where they have the capacity; their efforts are often thwarted by political interference from above.

These are not far-fetched claims because the recent Office of the Prime Minister’s scandal involving Ministry of Finance where money for reconstruction of Northern Uganda was fleeced, can attest to utter political sabotage in the works of police criminal investigation.

It is therefore justifiable to assert that any successes in the fight against corruption cannot be celebrated when the small fish down there are the target, leaving the politicians and key decision makers to be protected by the status quo.

It is only logical that any victory in the fight against corruption should not be celebrated too soon; else we shall be throwing the baby out with the bath water. Corruption prevails precisely because of thriving inequities in resource distribution. The political class and the corrupted middle class have conspired to operate in the unofficial institutions which have deprived the public institution of resources and sanity. Public servants have resorted to abuse public service because it is not rewarding anymore, so they sit on their hands or abandon it all together for politics.

The injustice is even distressful because the political elite appropriate larger shares of national resources to themselves while they mockingly implore the public servants and peasant farmers to adhere onto patriotism rather than distributive justice and equitable society. Today we hear common slogans like “tusaba gavumenti etuyambe” (we beg our government to help us), which signifies the increasing gap between the government and the common people.

People are increasingly distrustful of their government because of its corrupted way. All they see as the face of this regime are wealthy politicians accumulating personal wealth, while the common man’s space is dwindling and his fate consigned to providence. Like Karl Marx would say, issues of economic production have become too stressful that religion and Premier League have provided the fantasies of solace for the majority of disengaged Ugandans. The anti-corruption fight is one which is perceived as bully for the weak and toothless on the most corrupt.

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Identity Politics has become the landmark of NRM regime

IDENTITY POLITICS

In writing this article, I have made deep reflections on the evolution of NRM regime in its close to 30 years rule. Most interesting is the current manifestations of the regime, from a promising state builder into the very political organism for which its predecessors were condemned. We all recall in the late 80s and 90s when President Museveni, then liked by the masses as messiah incarnate, would berate the Obote’s UPC regime as a government which had perpetuated tribal factionalism, escalated religious divisionism and above all, a regime that was characterized by obscurantism.

To Museveni, the NRM had come with ten point programs, one key facet of it was the restoration of true democracy, establishing meritocracy in individual merit and so on. That the first ten point programs became the commandments of failures and were revised to fifteen points, then shelved, reveals the point of deviation to where we are today.

President Museveni has excelled in symbolic misrepresentation of both his intentions and relations. Where he promises rule of law and democracy, he instituted and ruled by legal notices, which in themselves are dictatorial decrees; where he promised free democratic society, he imposes the draconian article 269 in the 1995 Constitution to limit fundamental human liberties and rights of people to associate or indulge in free speech and he presides over rigged elections.

These, and many more, explains why it was inevitable for the NRM to become in all purposes and intent, the very vice for which it had promised to resolve.

Today, every public institution is confronted by breakages. Since independence, Uganda’s public service has suffered enormous neglect and mismanagement. Indigenous Ugandans have to endure limited options for basic and fundamental services like healthcare. Our hospitals have become a place where death is vended. 

Schools are in worse possible shape in history and for the record, even the government agrees that the education standards are at its lowest, regionally. Ministry of transportation, roads and infrastructure authorities have presided over the decay of the public transport sector with poor infrastructure all around the country.

Today, Uganda is experiencing growth in the private sector where ordinary Ugandans have been left unprotected against the vagaries of rogue individuals and private institutions. 

Hard-working Ugandans are losing homes over unsustainable mortgages whose rates are unstable; Banks are in cahoots with loan sharks to rip off hard working citizens while the regime watches with glee. The counterfeit products are being imported into the country in full gaze of the regime's minders; food prices are soaring by the day with scarcity of almost every basic food items despite the fact that Uganda still relies on agro-based economy.

Amidst these all, something more stellar a revelation must be made out of courage – identity politics has become the landmark of the NRM regime. 

If the UPC regime got the country divided on ethnic identities, the NRM regime has excelled in perpetuating identity politics. This is something they deny, but available facts counterpoises their obscurantism which is pedaled by a well orchestrated machination.

Frantz Fanon has argued that the chief consequence of identity politics is the rift in the nation along religious and ethnic boundaries. Fanon identifies that it is the national bourgeoisie who flame these religious and ethnic divides for which they are major beneficiaries.

In the case of Uganda's malicious middle class, we must find a plausible explanation to the prevailing rampant decadence in social services and in public institutions. This is attributable to identity politics, if not identity crisis.

We all know that the bush war NRA was founded on the basis of ethnicity in the pretext of fighting the same vice. The original 27 people who started the 1980 bush-war were all people from same ethnic group. The NRM government has retained such a characteristic through its close to 30 years in power. Majority of cabinet and key public service positions are retained by persons from the Western part of Uganda.  

Incidentally, the bulk of the NRA guerillas were nourished by many sons and daughters of former Rwandese exiles living in Western Uganda since 1959. Today, many of them have taken up Ugandan citizenship, while equal number or more, continued to hold dual identities of Ugandan and Rwandese – like the recently slain Col Patrick Karegyera - thereby setting grounds for identity conflict and crisis in loyalty to Uganda as we saw in the Kisangani conflicts. 

And yet, In Uganda, this group wields enormous power and are influential in both private and public sectors. Those in government are strategically located in key military and government positions where their influence remains visibly profound.

Herein lies the dilemma, could the conflicting identities and crisis in loyalty also explains the disparity in degree of commitment to public service delivery between Uganda and Rwanda? Why is Rwanda governed meticulously with social services delivered to near efficiency while in Uganda things have fallen completely apart? Why do we endure this high disregard for public utility in Uganda, while in Rwanda every public officer is accountable, professional and efficient?

In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon explains that identity politics generate distinctive situations that wear the spirit of a nation out; the ruling class becomes sympathetic to the bourgeoisie who don’t usually care about the welfare of the masses and nation building. Avigail Eisenberg and Will Kymlicker in their 2011 book “Identity politics in public realms: Bringing institutions back in” provided a robust analysis of state response to identity politics and illuminated both the risks and opportunities embedded in state response to identity claims. They concluded that public institutions can either enhance or distort the benefits of identity politics based on the agency of citizenship.

The above citations show that the Ugandan regime has increasingly become supportive of predatory middle class, many of whom are direct beneficiaries or a prodigy of the regime itself. And yet these groups are faced with identity conflict leading to crisis in loyalty to Uganda and to public service. Because of the crucial positions that this conflicted group dominate, the regime’s utmost interests have grown to become exclusively mutual with that of the many impoverished and disenfranchised common citizens of Uganda.

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