Tag Archives: how

How peasants lose their land

From time immemorial, the rich and well connected have devised ways and means to grab peasants’ land for various motives. In this article we are going to examine what happened in the past and what is happening now or is likely to happen in the future. But first let us define peasants.

Peasants are “low-status cultivators who are trapped in a double bind of material poverty and political marginality. … Peasants labor in a subsistence economy that is typically precarious and subject to the predation of powerful elites. As a result, peasants in otherwise diverse cultural and historical contexts share a common vulnerability to natural and human made disaster that constrains peasant strategies in the direction of an emphasis on subsistence security and family survival” (Joel Krieger 1993).

There are many examples throughout the world showing how peasants have lost their land. In early 16th-century Europe, rising prices and bad harvests led landowners to squeeze peasants by raising rents, enclosing common lands and increasing feudal dues.

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How to avoid the failures of structural adjustment in the Dev plan

I have been a critic of Uganda’s economic policy since 1987 not to discredit the NRM government but to draw its attention to the empty half of the glass – particularly the social and environmental sectors that have been neglected. In designing and implementing stabilization and structural adjustment programs (SAPs), the government made four fundamental mistakes which should be avoided in the development plan.

First, the government opted for the extreme version – shock therapy – of structural adjustment calling for a comprehensive and simultaneous implementation of many elements like liberalization, privatization, retrenchment, export diversification and inflation control etc. Officials who recommended a gradual and sequenced approach to cushion the social and environmental impact of adjustment were dismissed or marginalized. The shock therapists believed very strongly in the pure theory of the invisible hand of market forces, private sector growth and trickle down mechanism. Accordingly the state had virtually no role in the economy. In the development plan, the government should avoid extreme version of state intervention.

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How Bairu descended from prosperity into absolute poverty

Some of us went to school for several reasons: to get a good education, job and income to enable us meet our basic needs and a little more but most importantly to make a contribution that would help others improve their welfare. This can be done by creating jobs however modestly or providing facilities that enable others to embark on productive work or providing information or sharing knowledge that can be used in policy formulation and strategy design that can ultimately make a positive contribution in people’s lives.

We (my family and I) have made a modest contribution at two levels. We have made investments in our home district of Rukungiri with the principal intention of helping others to improve the quality of their lives. From these investments we created some jobs, we produce food, milk, timber and fuel wood and provide residential and commercial space for the people of Rukungiri.

Throughout my adult life the desire to help or defend those in need has been at the center of my work. And for some forty years I have tried to understand why Bairu and Bahutu in the Great Lakes Region are poor and getting poorer. Is their endemic poverty due to in-born or human-made causes?

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How Ugandans got impoverished

When I wrote the article on ‘How Rujumbura’s Bairu got impoverished’, I was sending two messages.

First, I was bringing to the attention of Ugandans and the donor community the plight of Rujumbura’s Bairu who face the prospect of disappearing from their ancestral home through impoverishment and displacement.

Second, I was warning the rest of Ugandans what lay in store for them because the Bahororo who have presided over the impoverishment of Bairu in Rujumbura for the past 210 years, are now in charge of the whole country using the same governing tools to impoverish and dominate.

Before proceeding with the story of how Ugandans got impoverished, let us first clear the confusion about Bahima and Bahororo. While Bahima and Bahororo share a common ancestry of Nilotic Luo-speaking people from southern Sudan, they are distinct groups who are silently antagonistic.

When Batutsi from the ruling family of Rwanda founded the short-lived Mpororo kingdom (1650-1750) they took on the name of Bahororo (the people of Mpororo). Mpororo kingdom covered an area occupied by indigenous Bantu speaking people in parts of Rwanda and southwest Uganda. In this context, Bahororo refers to Batutsi people of former Mpororo kingdom hence the use of Bahororo as distinct from Bahima.

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