Petty-Bourgeois Politics and Class War Over Land in Acholi Part I
A class war and democratic struggle for equality and the control of resources has pitted legislators from Acholi –a northern fraction of the petty bourgeoisie- against the ruling NRM /A political class and bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie- a predominantly southwestern fraction. The Ugandan state, the popular press and political commentators represent the tensions as Acholi ethnocentricity and xenophobia. We would like object to this superficial presentation, but posit that the struggle is in fact an "interclass affair" and "intraclass politics", a product of the intersection of the dialectic of class and ethnicity, which in turn is induced by the uneasy tensions between centring (international) and decentring (local) elements of the forces of globalisation. Therefore, it is the objective consequence of the dual articulation of the kin-based moral economies and capitalist commodity production.
Contrary to Omara Atubo's contention, the land debate cannot be disconnected from the context of national socio-political differentiation, social inequalities, and the economic interests, policies and politics practised by the dominant social group that controls the state (See Govt warns Acholi MPs on land talk, New Vision 7 December 2006, Acholi MPs boycott land meet, New Vision, 4 December 2006, and Politicking won't help Acholi, New Vision 21 November 2006).
On their part, Acholi Parliamentary Group (APG) rightly argues that unlike the colonial state, the post-independence state cannot invoke arbitrary powers of state to assert claims, entitlements, authority and exclusive rights over communal natural resources as national commons for the benefit of the Ugandan nationhood. The APG wants communities to have recognisable and enforceable rights over natural resources and stakes in private investments ventures. It wants to insert preconditions that investments or development policy or strategy must coincide with local priorities and aspirations, rather than imposed by extraneous considerations uninformed by local needs and capacity (see APG Statement to [ Uganda] Parliament on the issues of Acholi land, December 2006).
Nonetheless, in terms of ideological basis of policy and development strategy, the APG is not in any fundamental disagreement with the state on the perceived crucial role of private capitalist accumulation in opposition to communal sovereignty of social capital. The only divergence between the two sides is in timing; whether the floodgates of private land markets should be thrown open now or after the concentration camps are closed and people resettled back home. In the long term, their position is as vague and as unhelpful as that of the state; it does not offer plausible mechanisms for security of tenure and no progressive agrarian reforms strategy rather than continued fragmentation on small family holdings. Seductive as it sounds, communal land trusts cannot be a long term bulwark against the forces of globalisation, commoditisation and penetration of private accumulation through social differentiation and class formation.
Currently, class analytical framework shows that the contradiction over land is part of a broader national interclass conflict, and intraclass competition between fragments of the same class, the Ugandan petty bourgeoisie inside the state (NRM/A) and those excluded from it (eg. the APG, leaders of DP, FDC and UPC). In this struggle, ethnicity and regional sentiments intersect with class interests to become convenient tools for social mobilisation wielded by class fragments to either protect and defend its class privileges or resist or fight perceived injustice by organising and building alliances beyond the narrow interests of their particular class fraction. The economic aspects of these contradictions have received hardly any attention but tangentially (See Is it the north that is setting agenda for Uganda's future?, Daily Monitor 8 December 2006, and War of words over Acholi land grave mistake, insult, Daily Monitor 7 December 2006.
The notion of intraclass conflict within the Ugandan petty bourgeoisie, resulting from fragmentation in the process of the struggle for state power, accumulation, the control and use of surplus, transcends the limitations and simplicities of the ethnic and regional framework of analysis. For our purposes, we rely on Mahmood Mamdani's theories of petty bourgeois politics and John Saul's conception of the unsteady state, using the general framework of class analysis to further explore and explain the content of social contradictions and dynamics of fragmentations endemic to the post-colonial petty bourgeoisie that inherited the post-colonial state. In this way, we hope to better delineate the crux and class contours of the disputes over land in Acholi.
Class or ethnicity: A theoretical aside
The notion of intraclass conflict within the Ugandan petty bourgeoisie, resulting from fragmentation in the process of the struggle for state power, accumulation, the control and use of surplus, transcends the limitations and simplicities of the ethnic and regional framework of analysis. For our purposes, we rely on Mahmood Mamdani's theories of petty bourgeois politics and John Saul's conception of the unsteady state, using the general framework of class analysis to further explore and explain the content of social contradictions and dynamics of fragmentations endemic to the post-colonial petty bourgeoisie that inherited the post-colonial state. In this way, we hope to better delineate the crux and class contours of the disputes over land in Acholi.
Saul (State and Revolution in Eastern Africa) agrees with Roger Murray that the critical problem for Africa was the assumption of power by an unformed, fragmented class; and according to Mamdani (Politics and Class Formation in Uganda) a class without ideological coherence or cohesion, due to a weak economic base. The result of this unformed, undefined, overlapping and transitional class makes consolidation of power and firm control of the state by anyone fraction a difficult national project. Hence, Saul's conception of the unsteady state, formulated after the coup in 1971, which remains an illuminating insight and window into present problems of the Ugandan state and nationhood.
According to Marxist conception of class conflict and social structuring, the petty bourgeoisie is the intermediary class, trapped between the bourgeoisies above and the workers and peasants below. In our case, it is the class to whom control of the postcolonial state was ceded. It is the class that sets rules and limits of capital accumulation in the postcolonial economy and defines the hierarchies of priorities to which surplus and scarce resources are invested. The position of the petty bourgeoisie in the production and economic sphere has determining influence at the political and ideological levels. Depending on which fraction –between the bureaucratic and the commercial bourgeoisie-emerges victorious in the competition for the control of the postcolonial state, accumulation and surplus extraction takes one of two forms.
First, a bureaucratic fraction, as did emerge in Uganda at independence and particularly consolidated after 1966, takes control of the state and uses it to create public property controlled by the state. Second, a commercial bourgeoisie takes control of the state and uses it to create private property, using political power to amass and expand the domain of private property regimes. The political character of the state therefore, would reflect the economic base of the fraction that wins the intraclass competition for the control of the state. Invariably, where the commercial bourgeoisie were the dominant class, the regime was characteristically reactionary; whereas where the bureaucratic bourgeoisie was successful, its politics was progressive. However, it must be made clear that whichever fraction controls the state, it has social linkages to the private sector, since it is inexorably splintered between the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial fractions of the bourgeoisie, and as a result are not cohesive, and exhibit competing fractious interests.
According to Saul, class fractions emerge in the process of intraclass struggle for the control of the state and economic privileges. In seeking to build alliances and mobilise and energise their political bases, leaders of factions bring the dialectic between class and ethnicity to the fore. Ethnicity becomes a basic cohering element of trust and commonality for unified action, and a useful social base for political alliances and mobilisation. Mobilisation on ethnic and regional bases is made all the more possible by cultural differences magnified by colonial direct and indirect, and divide and rule methods of control that primarily exploited ethnic and cultural diversities. Another negative aspect of such mechanisms of control was the patterns of uneven development, which followed on an arbitrary and crude division of colonial societies into productive and unproductive areas, thereby concentrating education and development within one region, while the other is consigned as a labour reserve. Uncritically, underdevelopment or backwardness is then presented not as an objective outcome of class division nationally and in the international political economy, but as the failure or victory of one ethnic group against the other in a zero-sum game for the control of the state.
In competing for the control of the state, petty- bourgeois fractions in their respective resentments of advantaged groups or defence of their privilege and entitlements attract tribal ideologies and ethnic political mobilisation that correspond with socio-political realities of social injustice and inequalities. Consequently, mutual suspicion between nationalities and regions, colonial induced inequalities or uneven development and the imperatives for bold national equalisation policies are understood in parochial ethnic terms latent with conflicts and destabilising politics. The intractable conflict in northern \nUganda arose out of such acute structural inequalities and discontent. Unskilful and insensitive counterinsurgency strategies and emerging land disputes with the state in Acholi demonstrates the incompetence of the NRM/A to pursue a nationalist civic agenda higher than the fractional politics and tribal ideology it exploited to defeat the nationalist fractions dominated by UPC. The NRM/A quest to dominate and eliminate other fractions, and to see them entirely in regional and ethnic terms, rather than unify them, have seriously undermined any notion of and prospects for a sound and healthy basis for a sustainable Ugandan nationhood.
NRM petty-bourgeois fractional consolidation and imposition of inequalities
After coming to power in 1986, the NRM/A used economic liberalisation and state divestiture programmes as hegemonic tools to take control of the economy, expand its base and personalise the state. Privatisation meant allocation of state enterprises to NRM/A oligarchs. This strategy aimed to impoverish fractions of the petty bourgeoisie from north and northeastern Uganda, whose loyalties were in doubt. At the same time, it sought to economically empower those from the west, thereby fusing political and economic power in the hands of a few clansmen, from one small corner of the country. It aimed to deprive opponents of the regime of the economic resources necessary to organise any future opposition to the inchoate regime in Kampala. The project saw people like Eriya Kategaya take control of Printpak in Jinja, and Salim Saleh raid and decorate himself with some of the most lucrative state assets, including Uganda Commercial Bank, produce, grains, cereals and coffee businesses. Core state assets were effectively taken over by the NRM/A political class, bureaucrats and businessmen from central and western Uganda, while marginal assets upcountry were doled out to selected men and women whose support and loyalties were bought as NRM/A beachheads into Acholi, Lango, Teso and West Nile. The scheme awarded Acholi Inn to Col. Otema Awany, Lira Hotel to Sam (Abiola) Engola, Soroti Hotel to Mike Mukula, and Hill Top Hotel in Kitgum to Peter Okwera. All these were done without competitive tendering and bidding or attempt to sell for the best price.
Simultaneously, a similar scheme to dispossess the northern fractions generally took place within the civil service or bureaucratic fractions. Most of those laid off were people from the "wrong" parts of the country, whose loyalties were in doubt. As soon as the undesirable elements were retired or dismissed, a programme of selling off government pool houses was embarked upon. Although some of these properties were sold to sitting tenants, whose regional distribution was now skewed to favour particular parts of the country, newly minted millionaires snapped up most of the lucrative assets, courtesy of huge unsecured loans to NRM/A heroes taken out of UCB, without intending to repay. These processes bred unbridled sense of entitlements among the NRM/A rank and file, political cadres, the executive, and bureaucrats. Their intemperate sense of privilege led to unparalleled corruption in the public service and arrogance towards contrary views exemplified by Salim Saleh's callous bravado that any land anywhere is his for the taking because he is entitled to it (See Acholi MPs boycott land meet, New Vision, 8 December 2006, and War of words over Acholi land grave mistakes, insult, Daily Monitor, 7 December 2006). Such outlandish claims emanate from the acute concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a few southwestern clansmen and their errand boys in other regions.
Saleh, Otema, Ochora & Co., are members of the composite petty bourgeois fraction the NRM revolution sought to create and imbue with deleterious sense of loyalty. They are certainly not the best and the brightest of their lot, nor enterprising and ingenuous. Their wealth and social ranks were not earned by honest work, for which others could be exhorted to emulate by putting in fair amount of hard work and tenacity to achieve. Their affluence and false sense of entitlements were purchased with political intrigues, state patronage and influence peddling that erased equal opportunities, social and economic mobility for others less connected or with more scruples and sense of fair play. It is this fraction of the petty bourgeoisie, their friends, relatives, in-laws and clientele that has captured and personalised the state and public service, and held the state and country at ransom.
Acholi legislators oppose these cliques because Acholi society has always been relatively egalitarian. There was a high regard for hard work, equity and fairness, and social and moral responsibility for those less fortunate. Contrary to bogus claims that Acholi depended on the state and military brigandage prior to NRM/ A political ascendancy, land, livestock and food self-sufficiency gave the Acholi the ability to educate their children as the key to greater social and economic opportunities. Many of the Acholi women and men in \nUganda and abroad with university and post-graduate degrees are sons and daughters of Acholi peasants, self-made professionals and entrepreneurs who thrived in an earlier environment of individual, economic and political freedom that offered equal opportunities to all regardless of parental station in the production and economic spheres. Only a small minority are products of colonial collaborator class and pre-NRM/A state patronage, political connections and influence peddling.
Since the NRM/A came to power, the Acholi lost all independence and the ability to educate their children. For twenty-one years, they have been forcibly removed and marooned in the concentration camps. They have subsisted primarily and solely on meagre handouts from international charities and UN agencies. The state is completely non-existent except for the military, and NRM/A partisans like Colonels Walter Ochora, Otema Awany, Nahaaman Ojwe, Lt. Okot Lapolo and other low ranking NRM/A party militants, who as authoritarian retailers intimidate the population and gang press them into forced slave labour along highways and byways of Acholi.
It is this fraction of the petty bourgeoisie in Acholi, in class alliance with its southern counterparts linked to international imperialist capital that is scrambling for land in Acholi. When the cloud lifts, we may find that the Museveni government is under pressure from the world bank, to privatise land in Acholi and displace the Acholi subsistence livelihood systems and make them into labourers, proletariat or wage earners, and potential consumers who will henceforth depend entirely on selling their labour and the precarious nature of capitalist labour market and wage employment. Cane cutters and cotton pickers in large estate farms in northern Uganda seems what the inhabitants of concentration camps are destined for.
Contrary to Omara Atubo's contention, the land debate cannot be disconnected from the context of national socio-political differentiation, social inequalities, and the economic interests, policies and politics practised by the dominant social group that controls the state (See Govt warns Acholi MPs on land talk, New Vision 7 December 2006, Acholi MPs boycott land meet, New Vision, 4 December 2006, and Politicking won't help Acholi, New Vision 21 November 2006).
On their part, Acholi Parliamentary Group (APG) rightly argues that unlike the colonial state, the post-independence state cannot invoke arbitrary powers of state to assert claims, entitlements, authority and exclusive rights over communal natural resources as national commons for the benefit of the Ugandan nationhood. The APG wants communities to have recognisable and enforceable rights over natural resources and stakes in private investments ventures. It wants to insert preconditions that investments or development policy or strategy must coincide with local priorities and aspirations, rather than imposed by extraneous considerations uninformed by local needs and capacity (see APG Statement to [ Uganda] Parliament on the issues of Acholi land, December 2006).
Nonetheless, in terms of ideological basis of policy and development strategy, the APG is not in any fundamental disagreement with the state on the perceived crucial role of private capitalist accumulation in opposition to communal sovereignty of social capital. The only divergence between the two sides is in timing; whether the floodgates of private land markets should be thrown open now or after the concentration camps are closed and people resettled back home. In the long term, their position is as vague and as unhelpful as that of the state; it does not offer plausible mechanisms for security of tenure and no progressive agrarian reforms strategy rather than continued fragmentation on small family holdings. Seductive as it sounds, communal land trusts cannot be a long term bulwark against the forces of globalisation, commoditisation and penetration of private accumulation through social differentiation and class formation.
Currently, class analytical framework shows that the contradiction over land is part of a broader national interclass conflict, and intraclass competition between fragments of the same class, the Ugandan petty bourgeoisie inside the state (NRM/A) and those excluded from it (eg. the APG, leaders of DP, FDC and UPC). In this struggle, ethnicity and regional sentiments intersect with class interests to become convenient tools for social mobilisation wielded by class fragments to either protect and defend its class privileges or resist or fight perceived injustice by organising and building alliances beyond the narrow interests of their particular class fraction. The economic aspects of these contradictions have received hardly any attention but tangentially (See Is it the north that is setting agenda for Uganda's future?, Daily Monitor 8 December 2006, and War of words over Acholi land grave mistake, insult, Daily Monitor 7 December 2006.
The notion of intraclass conflict within the Ugandan petty bourgeoisie, resulting from fragmentation in the process of the struggle for state power, accumulation, the control and use of surplus, transcends the limitations and simplicities of the ethnic and regional framework of analysis. For our purposes, we rely on Mahmood Mamdani's theories of petty bourgeois politics and John Saul's conception of the unsteady state, using the general framework of class analysis to further explore and explain the content of social contradictions and dynamics of fragmentations endemic to the post-colonial petty bourgeoisie that inherited the post-colonial state. In this way, we hope to better delineate the crux and class contours of the disputes over land in Acholi.
Class or ethnicity: A theoretical aside
The notion of intraclass conflict within the Ugandan petty bourgeoisie, resulting from fragmentation in the process of the struggle for state power, accumulation, the control and use of surplus, transcends the limitations and simplicities of the ethnic and regional framework of analysis. For our purposes, we rely on Mahmood Mamdani's theories of petty bourgeois politics and John Saul's conception of the unsteady state, using the general framework of class analysis to further explore and explain the content of social contradictions and dynamics of fragmentations endemic to the post-colonial petty bourgeoisie that inherited the post-colonial state. In this way, we hope to better delineate the crux and class contours of the disputes over land in Acholi.
Saul (State and Revolution in Eastern Africa) agrees with Roger Murray that the critical problem for Africa was the assumption of power by an unformed, fragmented class; and according to Mamdani (Politics and Class Formation in Uganda) a class without ideological coherence or cohesion, due to a weak economic base. The result of this unformed, undefined, overlapping and transitional class makes consolidation of power and firm control of the state by anyone fraction a difficult national project. Hence, Saul's conception of the unsteady state, formulated after the coup in 1971, which remains an illuminating insight and window into present problems of the Ugandan state and nationhood.
According to Marxist conception of class conflict and social structuring, the petty bourgeoisie is the intermediary class, trapped between the bourgeoisies above and the workers and peasants below. In our case, it is the class to whom control of the postcolonial state was ceded. It is the class that sets rules and limits of capital accumulation in the postcolonial economy and defines the hierarchies of priorities to which surplus and scarce resources are invested. The position of the petty bourgeoisie in the production and economic sphere has determining influence at the political and ideological levels. Depending on which fraction –between the bureaucratic and the commercial bourgeoisie-emerges victorious in the competition for the control of the postcolonial state, accumulation and surplus extraction takes one of two forms.
First, a bureaucratic fraction, as did emerge in Uganda at independence and particularly consolidated after 1966, takes control of the state and uses it to create public property controlled by the state. Second, a commercial bourgeoisie takes control of the state and uses it to create private property, using political power to amass and expand the domain of private property regimes. The political character of the state therefore, would reflect the economic base of the fraction that wins the intraclass competition for the control of the state. Invariably, where the commercial bourgeoisie were the dominant class, the regime was characteristically reactionary; whereas where the bureaucratic bourgeoisie was successful, its politics was progressive. However, it must be made clear that whichever fraction controls the state, it has social linkages to the private sector, since it is inexorably splintered between the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial fractions of the bourgeoisie, and as a result are not cohesive, and exhibit competing fractious interests.
According to Saul, class fractions emerge in the process of intraclass struggle for the control of the state and economic privileges. In seeking to build alliances and mobilise and energise their political bases, leaders of factions bring the dialectic between class and ethnicity to the fore. Ethnicity becomes a basic cohering element of trust and commonality for unified action, and a useful social base for political alliances and mobilisation. Mobilisation on ethnic and regional bases is made all the more possible by cultural differences magnified by colonial direct and indirect, and divide and rule methods of control that primarily exploited ethnic and cultural diversities. Another negative aspect of such mechanisms of control was the patterns of uneven development, which followed on an arbitrary and crude division of colonial societies into productive and unproductive areas, thereby concentrating education and development within one region, while the other is consigned as a labour reserve. Uncritically, underdevelopment or backwardness is then presented not as an objective outcome of class division nationally and in the international political economy, but as the failure or victory of one ethnic group against the other in a zero-sum game for the control of the state.
In competing for the control of the state, petty- bourgeois fractions in their respective resentments of advantaged groups or defence of their privilege and entitlements attract tribal ideologies and ethnic political mobilisation that correspond with socio-political realities of social injustice and inequalities. Consequently, mutual suspicion between nationalities and regions, colonial induced inequalities or uneven development and the imperatives for bold national equalisation policies are understood in parochial ethnic terms latent with conflicts and destabilising politics. The intractable conflict in northern \nUganda arose out of such acute structural inequalities and discontent. Unskilful and insensitive counterinsurgency strategies and emerging land disputes with the state in Acholi demonstrates the incompetence of the NRM/A to pursue a nationalist civic agenda higher than the fractional politics and tribal ideology it exploited to defeat the nationalist fractions dominated by UPC. The NRM/A quest to dominate and eliminate other fractions, and to see them entirely in regional and ethnic terms, rather than unify them, have seriously undermined any notion of and prospects for a sound and healthy basis for a sustainable Ugandan nationhood.
NRM petty-bourgeois fractional consolidation and imposition of inequalities
After coming to power in 1986, the NRM/A used economic liberalisation and state divestiture programmes as hegemonic tools to take control of the economy, expand its base and personalise the state. Privatisation meant allocation of state enterprises to NRM/A oligarchs. This strategy aimed to impoverish fractions of the petty bourgeoisie from north and northeastern Uganda, whose loyalties were in doubt. At the same time, it sought to economically empower those from the west, thereby fusing political and economic power in the hands of a few clansmen, from one small corner of the country. It aimed to deprive opponents of the regime of the economic resources necessary to organise any future opposition to the inchoate regime in Kampala. The project saw people like Eriya Kategaya take control of Printpak in Jinja, and Salim Saleh raid and decorate himself with some of the most lucrative state assets, including Uganda Commercial Bank, produce, grains, cereals and coffee businesses. Core state assets were effectively taken over by the NRM/A political class, bureaucrats and businessmen from central and western Uganda, while marginal assets upcountry were doled out to selected men and women whose support and loyalties were bought as NRM/A beachheads into Acholi, Lango, Teso and West Nile. The scheme awarded Acholi Inn to Col. Otema Awany, Lira Hotel to Sam (Abiola) Engola, Soroti Hotel to Mike Mukula, and Hill Top Hotel in Kitgum to Peter Okwera. All these were done without competitive tendering and bidding or attempt to sell for the best price.
Simultaneously, a similar scheme to dispossess the northern fractions generally took place within the civil service or bureaucratic fractions. Most of those laid off were people from the "wrong" parts of the country, whose loyalties were in doubt. As soon as the undesirable elements were retired or dismissed, a programme of selling off government pool houses was embarked upon. Although some of these properties were sold to sitting tenants, whose regional distribution was now skewed to favour particular parts of the country, newly minted millionaires snapped up most of the lucrative assets, courtesy of huge unsecured loans to NRM/A heroes taken out of UCB, without intending to repay. These processes bred unbridled sense of entitlements among the NRM/A rank and file, political cadres, the executive, and bureaucrats. Their intemperate sense of privilege led to unparalleled corruption in the public service and arrogance towards contrary views exemplified by Salim Saleh's callous bravado that any land anywhere is his for the taking because he is entitled to it (See Acholi MPs boycott land meet, New Vision, 8 December 2006, and War of words over Acholi land grave mistakes, insult, Daily Monitor, 7 December 2006). Such outlandish claims emanate from the acute concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a few southwestern clansmen and their errand boys in other regions.
Saleh, Otema, Ochora & Co., are members of the composite petty bourgeois fraction the NRM revolution sought to create and imbue with deleterious sense of loyalty. They are certainly not the best and the brightest of their lot, nor enterprising and ingenuous. Their wealth and social ranks were not earned by honest work, for which others could be exhorted to emulate by putting in fair amount of hard work and tenacity to achieve. Their affluence and false sense of entitlements were purchased with political intrigues, state patronage and influence peddling that erased equal opportunities, social and economic mobility for others less connected or with more scruples and sense of fair play. It is this fraction of the petty bourgeoisie, their friends, relatives, in-laws and clientele that has captured and personalised the state and public service, and held the state and country at ransom.
Acholi legislators oppose these cliques because Acholi society has always been relatively egalitarian. There was a high regard for hard work, equity and fairness, and social and moral responsibility for those less fortunate. Contrary to bogus claims that Acholi depended on the state and military brigandage prior to NRM/ A political ascendancy, land, livestock and food self-sufficiency gave the Acholi the ability to educate their children as the key to greater social and economic opportunities. Many of the Acholi women and men in \nUganda and abroad with university and post-graduate degrees are sons and daughters of Acholi peasants, self-made professionals and entrepreneurs who thrived in an earlier environment of individual, economic and political freedom that offered equal opportunities to all regardless of parental station in the production and economic spheres. Only a small minority are products of colonial collaborator class and pre-NRM/A state patronage, political connections and influence peddling.
Since the NRM/A came to power, the Acholi lost all independence and the ability to educate their children. For twenty-one years, they have been forcibly removed and marooned in the concentration camps. They have subsisted primarily and solely on meagre handouts from international charities and UN agencies. The state is completely non-existent except for the military, and NRM/A partisans like Colonels Walter Ochora, Otema Awany, Nahaaman Ojwe, Lt. Okot Lapolo and other low ranking NRM/A party militants, who as authoritarian retailers intimidate the population and gang press them into forced slave labour along highways and byways of Acholi.
It is this fraction of the petty bourgeoisie in Acholi, in class alliance with its southern counterparts linked to international imperialist capital that is scrambling for land in Acholi. When the cloud lifts, we may find that the Museveni government is under pressure from the world bank, to privatise land in Acholi and displace the Acholi subsistence livelihood systems and make them into labourers, proletariat or wage earners, and potential consumers who will henceforth depend entirely on selling their labour and the precarious nature of capitalist labour market and wage employment. Cane cutters and cotton pickers in large estate farms in northern Uganda seems what the inhabitants of concentration camps are destined for.
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