Nearly almost 40 years of National Resistance Movement rule in Uganda, inequity has been d developed into an effective tool of political, economic and environmental domination and control in Uganda.
Before, I proceed with demonstrating how inequity operates and achieves domination and control of the masses of Uganda, let me distinguish between equity and inequity.
A dictionary definition of equity is “the the quality of being fair and impartial. In social, leadership and governance terms, therefore, equity implies fairness and impartial towards all groups of people, communities and non-state and state institutions. Non-State institutions in Uganda include cultural institutions, non-governmental organizations, opposition political parties, churches, mosques, private businesses, private schools and private universities. State institutions include government itself (i.e the Executive, Parliament and the Judiciary), the Presidency, State House, Uganda Peoples Defense Forces (UPDF), Uganda Police, Prisons, statutory bodies, et cetera. Equity should be exhibited in the yearly allocations of money in the National Budget. In finance, equity is an ownership interest in property that may be offset by debts or other liabilities. Equity is measured for accounting purposes by subtracting liabilities from the value of the assets owned Wikipedia.
Therefore, inequity is the quality of being unfair and impartial in political, economic, social, environmental and in all other dimensions of human welfare. How a country is led or governed will depict the extent to which fairness and impartiality, and for that matter, justice are balanced towards ensuring that all people, communities and sectors of the economy benefit in public goods and services without much ado about nothing. Inequity will be the order of the day if leadership and governance are oriented more towards magnifying than diminishing it or even erasing it. Unfortunately, in Uganda, inequity is on the rise as everything is done to concentrate all power, social well-being, all economic power in the hands of a few ethnically-related people, whether local or foreign (Indians and Chinese).
Consequently, cultural penetration, domination and control of the indigenous groups are far more pronounced than was the case under British colonial rule. A feeling of unbelonging and exclusion among the indigenous groups of Ugandans is also on the rise. May indigenous people see clearly that there is exacerbated political exclusion, economic exclusion, social exclusion, environmental (and ecological exclusion) in favour of a small ethnic group of people, who were once refugees in Uganda and now have all the real power (political, military, political and social) and set the agenda in everything in the country.
This is why one school of thought holds that Apartheid-like conditions, which were sown in South Africa by white supremacists but collapsed, have been and are continuing to be reinvented in Uganda in the 21st Century. The school holds that the zeal with which money economy is being pursued by power is not so much to benefit everyone as to exclude many from the benefits of the money economy. Clearly, the school believes, it is a money economy for increasingly exclusive groups of Indians, Chinese and a few local ethnically related individuals. It is a money economy for enhanced political, economic, social, environmental (or ecological) and cultural control.
Money itself is a formidable culture, which in form of “Money Bonanzas’ is already operating as a tool for political, economic, social and environmental (or ecological exclusion) and magnification of inequity. Increasingly it is foreign money being used to develop inequity as a tool of cultural penetration and erosion, with all the exclusions taking place as de-development (underdevelopment) is entrenched almost regionally.
Political Exclusion as Inequality
In Uganda, political organizations as political parties can exist but not freely organize the way the perennial ruling Party, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) freely does, unmolested by the security organs. This has been the case since President Tibuhaburwa Museveni opened up to political pluralism, not so much because he was listening to Ugandans’ struggle for parity in political organization and process, but as surrender to external pressures connected to “foreign aid” (which is not charity). However, this status quo excluding alternative forces and voices from freely accessing the electorate to seek leadership.
We now have a political situation whereby long before the next General and Presidential Elections in 2026, three members of a small ethnic group and the same family (Odrek Rwabogo the son-in-law of the First Family; President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, the continuing ruler of Uganda; and General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the Presidents only son, a serving soldier and called the Alternative Generator by his NRM-leaning supporters) are already on the campaign trail, two years since the last General and Presidential Elections. They are freely traversing the country. No military and police (increasingly military-like in structure and function) harassment. Afterall both President Museveni and his son have variously claimed the Uganda Peoples Defense Forces (UPDF) is theirs although it’s a public institution.
We can say the family of President Tibuhaburwa Museveni has taken a three-pronged approach to exclusion of other political forces from activity in our political space well in the future. The political space is effectively for Odrek Rwabogo, Tibuhaburwa Museveni and Muhoozi Kainerugaba. By bequeathing large sums of money to the military, to the Presidency, to State House, to President Museveni himself and to Odrek Rwabogo the framers of the National Budget ensured that financially the three contending men have enough money to penetrate and interpenetrate the political space of Uganda and are able to exclude the financially poor and chained political alternatives towards 2026. It is a deceptive crafty strategy, which is already working.
President Tibuhaburwa Museveni needs no introducing in this article. He has continually been the supreme ruler of Uganda since he shot himself to power in 1986 after waging a five- year gun war against the regimes of Apollo Milton Obote and Tito Okello who overthrew the former in a military coup.
In 1996 he offered himself to elective politics, but introduced obnoxious laws to ensure that his political adversaries do not effectively challenge his power. He has used a combination of impossible promises, which he sometimes repeats as if he does not remember them, militarism, some untruths, money, jobs, an Electoral Commission whose members he has had the sole responsibility to appoint or compose, bantustanisation of the country, political ethnicization, ethnic politicization, the NRM caucus in Parliament, a pro-NRM Judiciary leadership, gifts to religious leaders who preside over millions of Ugandans, and the religion of poverty and money bonanzas to ensure his perennial rule. This way he has been able to disconnect cultures, clans and people and to create an environment of proliferating and continuing impoverishment of virtually all communities of Ugandans (farmers, businessmen, academics, intellectuals, et. cetera). Worship leadership and governance have become the in-thing and central to his rule. He would certainly want the status quo to continue. Unfortunately, deradicalization, dehumanization, desocialization, depoliticization, and deintellectualization -of Ugandans is ensuring that our people of all social strata are not politically developed well enough to challenge power and fit in this very challenging Century. We leave everything to God. He gave us Tibuhaburwa Museveni for a reason, which will become apparent. My concern is the new imperialism of land grabbing which is associated more with people who were nomadic pastoralists.
Odrek Rwabogo is concentrating on economic renewal through business and trade. It goes without saying that the UGX 37 billion bequeathed to him buy the national budget framers, will enhance his political visibility as he moves from one part of Uganda promising the impoverished Ugandans heaven on Earth. The political environment is secure for him as no military and police or even paramilitary organs are pouncing on him the way they would on alternative political actors. If he is in the national budget, then we can expect him to be in every national budget until the 2026 presidential elections. Political visibility or rising out of political obscurity is extremely expensive. If President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, the real Minister of Finance, did not want to help Rwabogo to access the electoral population or to capacitate him politically, he would not allow him to become a budgetary Item in the National Budget. He is not as vocal as his relatives. He is like a a snake called puff adder, which is extremely poisonous. He could be undone by the fact that he is not a soldier. Militarism will be against him.
Muhoozi Kainerugaba once said that the elderly NRM leaders, at whose top is President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, had failed Uganda and Ugandans. Characterizing himself as a youth (at 48 or 49) he said the time had come for the youth to run their country. If he had not been a son of the President, he would have been subject of a military tribunal, confined to prison or on Katebe and prevented from making political statements. Instead, the President allowed him to form what is called Team MK, composed mainly of former refugees, the youth and a few older and elderly people. He has thrown away military uniform while still a serving soldier and he is continually on the campaign train promising to erase the failure that have been the landmark of his father’s rule. While he is making his own promises, he has set his mind to the numerous unfulfilled promises his father has outpoured since 1986 and now seem to be a burden on the continued rule of the President. If his father has been a wasteful warrier, he could turn out to be a worse. Not long ago he said his army and himself could capture Nairobi in two weeks. Although his father apologized on his behalf, the mind animosity created in the minds of Kenyans still remains. The General has been to every war theatre in Uganda and outside Uganda. Those who believe Uganda should remain a wasteful military State see the General as a perfect replacement of his father. Indeed, top leaders of the politicomilitary NRM have said that much.
Economic, Environmental (Ecological) and Social Exclusion
While the defunct supremacist regime of South Africa excluded Black people from participation in the politics of the country and used political power to assign them to homelands, they called Bantustans, to exploit them and their country, the most dangerous exclusion was economic, Environmental (ecological) and social. This combined exclusion was called Apartheid. This abominable strategy of the supremacist galvanized the blacks together to remove the supremacists from power. It was a long struggle, which saw their leader, Nelson Mandela, confined to Robben Island for 27 years, making him the longest staying political prisoner. He was released in 1992 paving the way for Black majority rule. The supremacists peacefully handed over to Nelson Mandela and the Black majority.
I have written before that leadership and governance in Uganda has emerged to be Apartheid-like under President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s leadership and governance. Indigenous groups of people have been excluded from meaningful participation in the Uganda economy. If the economy during Idi Amin’s rule was a Magendo economy, that under President Tibuhaburwa Museveni is a middleman and frontman economy, with the middlemen and frontmen being increasingly from one small ethnic group, to which themen and women of power belong, interspersed with Indian and Chinese businessmen, with who they are frequently in league. Virtually every economic factor is in their hands. They own sugar factories, shops, supermarkets, petrol station, trailer, skyscraper, newest mansion. The men in and near power are predominantly the ones dominating the country’s institutions. Increasingly they are dominating Government (Executive, Parliament and Judiciary). They tend to hold the topmost jobs in industry too, as we have often read is the case in the military and the oil industry.
Consequently they, and many of those connected to them, are not only the business magnates but also the social magnates. They are socially well of and own the latest car models in the country. Things like these have moved some thinkers to conclude that Uganda has become socially segregated, with the agents and beneficiaries of segregation belonging to the small ethnic group in power.
Environmental and or ecological exclusion is seen in many disconnections of indigenous groups of people from their land by people who are biologically and culturally nomadic pastoralists either in power or connected to power. Yesterday I learn’t during a meeting of the General Council meeting of my village Nawaka, which I attended for the first time since I retired, that a son of a former nomadic pastoralist from Rwanda, whose name was Rugondo, is claiming that his father owned land in the village. The son is called Bahati, who even presented himself for election sometime back for Member of Parliament of Luuka North.
I knew Rugondo as an immigrant. He arrived in the village at night with his heads of cattle, like all his elk used to do, and quickly constructed a kraal in the 1960s. He arrived from a neighboring village where he had earlier grazed his cattle. I heard during the meeting that he is chasing many households from the land, claiming his father told him before he died that he had bought the land, although those days it was not the practice of Basoga to sell land to foreigners. We learn’t that Bahati has gone to court with papers claiming the land is his. Local police chief, we were told, said he cannot intervene in the land issue to provide security for locals because, according to reports, Bahati’s claim to the land is a high-level issue. We also learnt the matter has caused conflict between the Resident District Commissioner of Luuka (whose name I don’t know yet), and the Local District Council Chairman of Luuka District, Mr Simon Wakaze. Reportedly, The Resident District Commissioner is on the side of Bahati and the District Chairman is on the side of the people.
The issue of land grabbing in Uganda is so intricately linked to power. Yet power continues to tell Ugandans that it will solve the issue. It is unlikely that power will solve the issue in favour of Ugandans. The NRM made constitution, Uganda Constitution 1995, already states that the land belowground belongs to government. So, if the land belowground, even if it is my land subtending my house, contains gold reserve, I cannot say the God is mine. Government has also strategized that if it wants a development on your land, it will proceed with the development before it pays compensation. Of course, this is a form of repression through dispossession.. Everywhere landgrabbers are being protected by power.
As a result, traditional land owners who biologically and socioculturally subsist on the land to produce are simultaneously being displaced and turned into internal refugees manifesting as a non-productive floating population. This explains why production everywhere has meteorically fallen to worrying levels, compelling government to heavily depend on foreign aid (which is robbery of the poor by the rich because more money flows out than money that comes in as foreign aid).
Land grabbing by foreigners, immigrants or former immigrants is a new imperialism of environmental and ecological displacement and ownership.by dispossession. It is worse than political imperialism because it assigns former owner of the land to the margins of Nature to etch a living. They become foreigners in their country while the foreigners, immigrants and former immigrants in or connected to power, even if extraneously, become the owners of the country. It is not surprising that Indians have demanded to become a new “tribe” or indigenous group of Uganda and President Tibuhaburwa Museveni said he sees no problem with that. Indeed, before, the President presided over a constitution-making process that made immigrant Banyarwanda new indigenous group of Uganda.
In Conclusion Uganda is indeed a country under fundamental change, not for the benefit of Ugandans but foreigners including foreigners, immigrants and former immigrants. Inequity is the tool of fundamental change politically, economically, socially, environmentally and ecologically. Ugandans are steadily losing political ownership and control over their country to people who not have historical, biological, genetical, cultural environmental-ecological and psychological roots in the country. It is a reflection of the truism that political power, which makes decisions, even in form of policies and laws, has passed into the hands of people of roots in the country. Unfortunately, politically illiterate and politically undeveloped Ugandans belonging to our indigenous groups are abetting the process new ownership, domination and control. This is largely nonviolent and is, therefore, unlike what happened to the Aborigines of Australia, Maoris of New Zealand and Red Indians of the Americas nearly 400 years ago.
For God and My Country.