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Land is life

Fourth appearance on Radio Munansi

Greetings fellow Ugandans and friends

In this session I wish to share with you why in Uganda land is life and cannot be sold or leased to outsiders as is being done by NRM government.

1. Every human being needs land for a house, factory, recreation, garden, final resting place or a combination of all these functions.

2. Thus, every Ugandan whether educated, urban dweller, wage earner or not should have a piece of land. President Museveni stressed this point of land ownership when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 23, 2008. He stated that in Uganda all families own land. This point was well received by the audience.

3. Land ownership is especially vital for those who do not have non-agricultural skills.

4. Based on how an urban area is defined, some 90 percent of Ugandans still derive their livelihood from land.

5. The issue of land occupied the attention of colonial authorities. After serious debate between London and Entebbe taking into consideration the failure of European plantation agriculture in the 1920s, the colonial administration decided that Uganda’s land would be owned and worked virtually by Uganda peasants.

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Uganda’s development is being sacrificed again

Uganda is sacrificing its development – for the third time – as government directs its attention to hosting the United Nations peace keeping force of 50,000 military and police contingents, and 11,000 civilian staff budgeted at $5 billion (about 11 trillion shillings) a year. Ugandans who don’t know the challenges and implications of a project of this magnitude may dance in jubilation, hoping jobs will be created for Ugandans making poverty history. First of all the peace keepers will be internationally recruited with few jobs if any going to Ugandans with connections. Secondly, besides being the best political donation for Museveni and his NRM party a few months before presidential and parliamentary elections which is bad news for opposition parties, Uganda will also experience unprecedented shortages and high prices.

Uganda’s development has been delayed twice already because of ideological wars – the cold war between the capitalist west and the communist east which began in 1945 and ended in 1990; and the economic war between market forces and state intervention or socialism which began in the 1980s and is still with us although it was officially abandoned in Uganda in 2009. Uganda did very well economically and socially, especially in the 1960s before the impact of the cold war became evident. Donor funds and Uganda taxes were put to good use with tangible results. Quality education and health care were realized, infrastructure such as roads were paved, agricultural production facilitated by cooperatives increased, food security improved and more money was put into the pockets of farmers and those who provided services to the agriculture sector.

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Exposing silent genocide in Uganda

Santayana reminded us that “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it”. We should not forget that Uganda has been recorded as a country where genocide has already taken place (Fran Alexander et al., 1998).

Those who want to prevent genocide in Uganda must study carefully the definition of genocide and then analyze what is going on in their communities because genocide may be taking place slowly, incrementally and silently without being noticed. Ugandans know the type of genocide that took place in Rwanda – the armed killing of targeted groups that took place in 1994. Genocide that takes place silently and incrementally overtime is difficult to detect and much less to condemn. Let us revisit the definition of genocide which has the following elements:

  1. Killing members of the group
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another.
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Why Bahororo are contemptuous of Bairu

We are writing these stories on the deteriorating relations between Bahororo and Bairu people because old contemptuous habits are resurfacing. Statements about Bairu inferiority are being made at public rallies, Bairu women’s rights are being violated in many ways, arbitrary decisions are being taken with impunity, canning of Bairu has returned etc. If these developments are not checked, they may lead to unforeseen catastrophes. Those of us who believe in prevention rather than cure are speaking up before the situation gets out of control. The rushed decision by Rukungiri District Council and Uganda Parliament to designate Rukungiri a municipality stripping Bairu of their land without consulting them is the start of troubles that lie ahead.

Bahororo who erroneously still consider themselves white people with a dark pigmentation borrowed their contemptuous behavior from European colonialists based on racism that flourished in Europe in late 19th century. European Social Darwinists who applied Darwin’s evolutionary theory to human societies felt there was a major biological difference between them and other societies. Applying the doctrine of the ‘survival of the fittest’ Social Darwinists saw ‘fitness’ in white skin only. They also used pseudo-scientific studies (phrenology) of bumps on the head to demonstrate that Europeans were more intelligent than other races and therefore destined to rule over them. This sense of racial superiority was expressed in many ways in colonies including dress and social exclusion. However, social exclusion coexisted with relations of a more intimate kind including sexual encounters between Europeans and subject peoples. “Almost all relationships between colonizers and others were saturated with inequalities in power: sexual relations were no different” (M. Pugh 1997).

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Uganda being wrongly advised

When you press Uganda policy makers privately and anonymously they admit the country is receiving wrong advice most of the time from external advisers and their Uganda surrogates. When you press further for an explanation, they tell you the piper calls the tune, implying that the donors have resources which Uganda does not have.

And when you ask whether in return for loans and grants Uganda has lost control and ownership of the economy, most replies are positive.

When the NRM government came to power in 1986, it resisted – for 18 months – IMF and World Bank advice to abandon the mixed economy model in favor of the neo-liberal one based on market forces and private sector as engines of growth. Finally the message came hone loud and clear when Linda Chalker, former minister in Thatcher’s government advised the government and possibly the president himself that most major creditors believe that “the solution to Uganda’s problems depended on reaching an agreement with the IMF” (New African 1987-88) and its harsh conditions.

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