The great lakes region of Africa including DRC, Rwanda and Uganda is one of the richest, if not the richest, region in the world. It has natural resources in diversity and abundance and many resilient, intelligent and hard working people. In spite of these attributes, the region has some of the poorest people in the world.
Before slave trade and colonialism, Bantu people in east and central Africa had developed economic and political systems and institutions that ensured human security. Bantu groups such as Ganda, Nyoro, Kongo, Luba, Lunda and Rwanda had established great kingdoms (The World Book Encyclopedia 1983) which ensured human security through law and order, food security and respect for human dignity for all Bantu peoples. All these developments and civilizations were undermined by the arrival of Europeans through slave trade, colonialism and bias against Bantu people. Slave trade took place in all parts of the great lakes region. The introduction of European weapons and hunting human beings caused too much damage in demographic, economic and social terms.
Colonialism took place in the great lakes region at the time when race science was in fashion. In terms of civilization, white people were at the top and black people at the bottom of the pyramid. Black or Bantu people were not expected to have any civilization at all. It was believed that they lived in darkness. Ipso facto, they had no civilization or history.
When explorers arrived in the region, they were stunned by the richness of civilizations they found in the area. Because of bias against Bantu people, explorers concluded that the civilizations were developed by white people. John Hanning Speke championed western bias against Bantu people through his doctrine known as the Hamitic theory. During his travels in east and central Africa, Speke classified Africans into orders of superiority and inferiority. “He decided that all cultures [civilizations] in Central Africa [including Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi] by 1863 had been the work of a taller sharper-featured people who he decided must have come from a Caucasoid [white] tribe…These special Africans had a royal family and a semblance of a government and were, as a result, superior to the native Negroids. The other black Africans [Bantu], the majority, he casually classified as subhuman. They were savages who could be taken as slaves without troubling issues of conscience” (D. Temple-Raston 2005). In his book titled ‘Races of Africa’, Charles Gabriel Seligman popularized the Hamitic myth. Colonial and missionary officials who came from aristocratic families (D. Rothchild and N. Chazan 1988) adopted the theory in their colonial and missionary work.
“Sir Harry Johnston who was to become the first British administrator of the Uganda Protectorate put forward a theory of kingship as having been brought by ‘pastoral invaders’ whose memory had been preserved in a set of myths the Bachwezi. Thus Johnston was the link between the initial Speke theory and the nineteenth-century intellectual fantasies…”(G. Prunier 1995). Further research has demonstrated that Bachwezi were a Bantu aristocracy (B. A. Ogot 1999).
White rulers and missionaries in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi decided that the superior Bahima, Bahororo and Batutsi would be educated and help through the indirect rule system to administer the colonies. The ‘inferior’ Bantu people were reduced to ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’. “[In Rwanda as in Burundi and Uganda], the Tutsi were given administrative duties and the Hutu were shunned aside…In most instances, the Hutu were obliged to work for Tutsi. They tilled their land or grazed their cattle” (D. Temple-Raston 2005). This was the situation during the colonial rule. In Uganda, Bairu grew food, provided free labor for and carried Bahima and Bahororo rulers and members of their families in tillers and their luggage even when serving as salaried British civil servants.
Independence in 1962 in Rwanda and Uganda brought some relief. Bantu people (Bahutu and Bairu commoners) got educated and proved their intellectual superiority over Bahima, Bahororo and Batutsi. At the practical level, the governments ran by commoners in Uganda from 1962 to 1970 and in Rwanda from 1973 to 1990 did a superb development job that was recognized and applauded internationally including by the World Bank, IMF and major donors. For example “A 1989 World Bank report singled out Rwanda as a ‘successful case of adaptation’ where government policies had successfully encouraged growth in agricultural production. Rwanda avoided the urban bias common in Africa[which Kagame has embraced]” (G. Hyden and M. Bratton 1992). Yet these governments were undermined by western powers and eventually removed from power, in Uganda in 1971 and 1985 and in Rwanda in 1994. In Uganda Museveni a Mutusi/Muhororo and his National Resistance Army (NRA) with western support came to power in 1986 and in turn Museveni and western powers helped Kagame a Mutusi and his Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) to come to power in Rwanda in 1994. Both governments were installed through the barrel of the gun.
In appreciation of western support, Museveni and his government entered into a stabilization and structural adjustment program (SAP) in 1987 of the worst kind (shock therapy) that focused on inflation control or price stability and economic growth in line with western agenda. Consequently western assessment of Uganda’s performance in economic and political sectors is based on economic growth, price and political stability. Political stability has been achieved through suppression of human rights as dissent mounted against SAP. By and large, Western powers consider a country stable when there are no street riots and destruction of property. Price stability resulted in high interest rates that small and medium borrowers could not afford to start or expand their businesses and create jobs.
During the decade of the 1990s, Uganda’s economy attained a high growth rate reaching ten percent but poverty remained above 80 percent. Warnings against growth without equity were sounded but ignored. In 1998 the Administrator of UNDP, warned that although Uganda’s economy was growing at a rate averaging over 6 percent, two-thirds of Uganda’s population was living in absolute poverty (Development Cooperation Seminar 1999). A. K. Chowdhury and S. Erdenebileg (2006) reported that between 1990 and 2001, Uganda’s population living on less than $1 stood at 82.2 percent.
In order to meet balanced budget as required under SAP arrangements social sectors of education, health care and nutrition and housing were starved of funds. All the warnings about the impending human and ecological disaster were treated as sabotage by those against Museveni and his government and therefore ignored.
Thus while the government and donors were happily reporting successes in inflation control, economic growth, liberalization and privatization of the economy, export diversification and political stability, the diseases of poverty and ecological decay were gathering speed until they burst onto the world stage with demonstrations in the capital city of Kampala and in New York City in September 2009 and an FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) report that unless drastic and urgent measures are taken Uganda would become a desert within 100 years.
These disturbing outcomes of SAP could not be hidden any longer. Maternal mortality rate rose from 527 in 1995 to 920 per 100,000 live births in 2005. Uganda loses more than 6000 mothers annually, meaning that 16 mothers die every day in part due to lack of quality maternal care, and teenage pregnancies (African Peer Review Mechanism (2009) because girls drop out of school early in part for lack of school lunch which the government is unwilling or unable to provide or even subsidize. Under-nutrition of children has hit 40 percent, 12 percent of infants are born underweight because their mothers are under-nourished and infant mortality which is a reliable indicator of the health of the nation has risen from 75 to 78 per 1000 live births. Diseases that had disappeared such as scabies, jiggers and trachoma etc reappeared with a vengeance.
Embarrassed by these revelations, the World Bank and IMF – the drivers of Uganda’s economy – and subsequently the government admitted in 2009 that mistakes had been made. They came up with the five-year development plan which is unlikely to be implemented because there is no political will.
Notwithstanding economic and political failures in Uganda, western bias towards Museveni and his government is still intact. Museveni is still described as a regional leader whose delegation is doing well in the United Nations Security Council. You do not hear much about the plight of the people since 1986. Museveni will as in the past use all sorts of undemocratic means including military means on donors’ watch and get re-elected in 2011 for another five-year term. Museveni and his government, corrupt, sectarian and authoritarian as they are, will remain the darling of the west.
Western bias in Uganda was transferred intact to Rwanda in 1994. Kagame a Tutsi and the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) government have been loaded with praise for bringing political sanity and economic growth averaging over 8 percent per annum. Abuses of human rights including assassination of opponents, treating every Hutu including those born after 1994 tragedy as genocidaire to silence, exploit and humiliate them and plundering eastern DRC in human and mineral terms have taken place on donors’ watch with missions in Kigali and neighboring countries. Warnings that economic growth is concentrated in the capital city of Kigali and very disproportionately benefiting Tutsi minority have been ignored. Meanwhile Hutus are being herded back into subsistence economy with all the obvious economic and social adverse implications.
Everyone knows that Kagame’s re-election (August 2010) for another seven-year term was a sham. Yet western powers who preach democracy, human rights, human security for all still and free and fair elections will continue to regard Kagame as a star and distinguished performer and success story in the great lakes region and will remain very much the darling of the west.
Meanwhile in Uganda and Rwanda conditions of human security will get worse. People will increasingly live in fear, in want and in indignity. However, there is a limit beyond which such conditions cannot be tolerated.
Many in the great lakes region are convinced that western powers are an integral part of the human suffering in the region. With respect to Uganda, Ellen Hauser observed that “Part of the blame [for political economy problems in Uganda] also lies with donor priorities, which assumed that eventual multipartysm would solve these problems, and with donors’ lack of diplomatic pressure on the NRM to cooperate with other groups to solve Uganda’s fundamental political problems” (The Journal of Modern African Studies 1999). Whether they are or are not part of the problem, western powers need to help find a solution because indications are that unless something is done to launch true democracy and a level playing field including ending categorizing people into superior and inferior groups, long term prospects are very bleak. Before the eruption of political violence in Kenya in December 2007, western powers shunned suggestions of political troubles in the Republic. We should all draw a lesson from Kenya’s experience.