Imposing "development" from above: Robbing peasants to enrich Museveni's corporate friends
IMPOSING “DEVELOPMENT”FROM ABOVE: Robbing peasants to enrich Museveni’s corporate friends
Putting politics ahead of Lives
Relative peace in northern Uganda is forcing people and groups to re-envision their futures. Individual entrepreneurs, communities, government agencies, NGOs and public international organisations, are appraising their future roles and activities in a changing stance from emergency humanitarian provisioning to reconstruction and development in a post conflict society. For aid agencies, their plans for the future are contingent on disbandment of concentration camps and resettlement of people to their homes. Like the NGOs, Yoweri Museveni, the National Resistance Movement / Army (NRM/A), and their apparatchiks in Acholi, are repositioning themselves to remain politically relevant in the region. Instead of “iron-fisting”, it is now time for “iron-roofing”, and for peasants in Acholi who drink sugar, to be charitable and donate their land to big profiteering subsidiaries of international sugar conglomerates to grow sugar cane and produce sugar. One would be forgiven for thinking that the sugar industries distribute sugar for free in northern Uganda, and everyone there consumes sugar.
Unlike the humanitarian organisations, the Uganda government under Museveni is pushing “investment”, “development”, “industrialisation”, “modernisation” programmes that are completely disconnected from the immediate and medium term needs and priorities for the population in this region. One would be further forgiven for thinking that some of the political statements issuing from the president himself and his political operatives in northern Uganda, on envisaged government policies in Acholi, were for a different planet, not a region falteringly emerging from twenty-two years of war, violence, destruction and despair.
Such wilful political and policy blindness, on the part of the NRM/A, to the relevant needs and priorities of existential conditions in northern Uganda forces the thesis that, there is no altruistic wish on the part of Museveni, his party and government, to end the nightmares of the population in northern Uganda. But seeing that peace may be inevitable through possible complete collapse of the Lord’s Resistance Movement /Army (LRM/A); or through the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement and settlement that brings a permanent ceasefire and peace to northern Uganda, the NRM/A is forced to reinvent its role with the hope of sustaining itself politically in the region. Because a sustainable peace ought to inevitably obviate the need for the presence and role of the army in the public policy process, the NRM/A political presence here will be less than feather weight. Hence, it is groping in the dark for a plausible policy plank that could purchase for itself some further political life and relevance.
But focusing on acquisition of large tracks of land, spoiling to change land rights and land tenure laws on the fly and on the eve of the return of people to their abandoned homesteads, raises suspicion and strengthen long held view that the war lasted this long not because of government incompetence or the invincibility and supernatural powers of the LRM/A and Kony, but because it provided cover for sinister political projects only known to Museveni and his closest political conspirators. Accompanying flurry of activities around land policy pronouncements and political mileage devoted to them, suggest a realisation that the war may come to an end not largely according to their script and time frame; so some of the business that remain unaccomplished and are works in progress, needed to be accelerated. It is possible that if Museveni were to have his wish, the concentration camps would be turned into permanent slum settlements as a strategy to sever peasant links with land and open up the countryside to “foreign” investments in large scale mechanised agriculture, and transform the Acholi into wage labourers.
Realistically, any initiative that introduces significant modifications to current land tenure and access rights policies ahead of the return of displaced population to their land is a bad idea. It is equally bad to impose from above, economic and social plans that fit government grand schemes of things but out of place with the priorities of local needs, especially where such projects impose sacrifices and degrade communal property rights by displacing people from their own land, thereby threatening their livelihoods and that of future generations.
For their part, the Acholi have survived the violence and brutalities of the war, the loss of their livelihood and life in the concentration camps, and hold onto the hope of returning to their land, picking up the pieces and rebuilding their lives and self-sufficiency. If the government were serious about development, and were the Acholi the subjects of the process and goals of the state’s lauded development plans, emphasis would be laid elsewhere than acquisition of large tracts of land for sugar cane plantation and industry. Sympathetically, it is for these reasons that we would like to argue against Museveni’s modernisation plans, and assert that rather than seeking to develop the Acholi, the NRM is in a death struggle to remain relevant here after the war. True to form and belief, they have chosen a subject with as nebulous objectives as “development” to impose false moral and ethical burdens upon those who resist their misguided, outdated and tautological development teleology, policies and strategies. It is the perceptions and assumptions of desirability and universality of process and goals in their “development”discourses with which we would like to take serious issues.
What and whose “development”?
“The whole sphere of the conditions of life which surround man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now come under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time become the real, conscious master of nature, because he has now become master of his own socialisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto confronting man as laws of nature alien to him and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding and thus be mastered by him. Man’s socialisation, which previously confronted him as something imposed from above by nature and history, now becomes his own free action. The alien objective forces which till now have dominated history, pass to the control of man himself.”
Engels: Selected Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1967), pp.223.
There are disparate contending normative perceptions and assumptions of “development” as processes and goals. A complete review of the contentions and varieties of “development” is beyond the scope of this essay. For our discussion, it is sufficient to simply and generally state that we adopt a view of “development” that (1) goes beyond economic essentialism, and that (2) development is not value free, but a filtered projection of our view of our world bounded by our personal and societal values. This makes it crucial, therefore, to demand to know what the underlying ideological assumptions of the NRM/A strategy for agrarian reforms and “modernisation” or “industrialisation” policy are, for a post-conflict northern Uganda. How do these policy positions complement or challenge, for instance, Acholi ideals of self-reliance, satisfaction of basic needs through socialised means of production, deliberative democracy, reciprocity, social equity and equal access and rights to land for those here and now and future generations? Particularly, how do the policies engage current existential questions in the war-ravaged region?
Already, a diametric opposition of development paradigms or policy formulation has emerged. The Uganda government, particularly Yoweri Museveni himself, and his political operatives in Acholi, are partial to imposing policies from above. In our view, we contend that Acholi or communities must participate in the definition, identification and ranking of the problems policies must respond to. Unbelievably, as conscious though “poor” and impoverished beings, northerners are being treated as inert objects of Museveni’s uncritical development paradigm. They are labelled as poor and backward, in an attempt to alienate them from both their humanity and their land, and create the subjective conditions for intervention. Yet social and economic conditions in northern Uganda situate them as subject-objects of development discourses; they must on their own seek answers to their own situation because they are aware of the unnatural logic of social and economic conditions and relations that dominate them and how these are linked to human action. They further do understand that their conditions can be changed, and that the insights to the solutions cannot be imposed from outside; it must come from their self-knowledge of reality.
To convince northerners that he has overcome his petty old grudges and prejudices that have guided his punitive and vindictive northern Uganda political strategies, Museveni should not be left to simply lecture northerners on how good “development” is for them; he must show both sides of the balance sheet of his kind of “development”. What are the social and ecological costs? Who should determine how beneficial the “thing” development is, and beneficial to whom? These are pertinent questions that even poor people like those in the camps are within their rights to ask. Moreover, they do not have to forego the luxury of drinking sugar in their beverages before they could challenge the desirability of “development” and the kind of strategy being championed by the state.
Part of the need for intervention through Museveni’s type of “development” is the tautological assertion that northern Uganda has historically been underdeveloped, poor and backward. What is missing from such prefatory policy statement is that it is arbitrarily and conveniently restricted to colonial and post-colonial periods before Museveni came to power in 1986. Therefore, there is a conscious decision to ignore twenty-two years of conflict, violence, abductions, destruction, social, moral and economic collapse. Consequently, Museveni’s social and economic policies for northern Uganda are being formulated with the wrong socio-economic conditions in mind and for a society that ceased to exist in 1986. How else could one explain the government’s single-minded push for sugar cane plantations and land alienation in Acholi, where 90% of the population is in concentration camps and dependent on humanitarian relief? Even if we were to allow for the facts that the war destroyed schools and ground education in Acholi to a halt, and therefore the region has an abundance of unskilled wage labour suitable for cutting sugar cane and picking cotton, there are still moral and practical objections to a government promoting such a policy.
Were plantation and monoculture agriculture one of a range of policy interventions and of lower priority ranking as part of government response to the dire conditions of need in Acholi, the policy proposals could be entertained for further discussions. But that it is a key policy for the government and seemingly first on its agenda, makes it difficult to accept, particularly for those who know the current social and economic conditions in Acholi. In our view, Acholi Parliamentary Group (APG), local district council leaders and others are exceedingly courteous in giving more than one audience to proponents of such egregious and contemptuous policy. Acholi leaders would be completely forgiven if they had just told the proponents of such policies to, please, vamoose!
What a responsible government would do now in northern Uganda
Based on our long observation of the northern Uganda situation over time, the government would have been well advised if it had focused on the following areas immediately and in the medium term:
i. Dismantle the death camps and invest in resettling people back on their ancestral lands;
ii. Compensate families, individuals and businesses for losses of livestock, crops and commercial stock and machineries as a result of the war;
iii. Establish a peace dividend scheme for education in the region to provide funds and scholarships schemes for Acholi and northern children;
a. Establish community colleges or set up parallel programmes in existing / expanded schools for accelerated education to take in adults and children whose education were interrupted or disrupted;
b. Design combined academic and vocational / practical skills training curriculum in a network of community colleges or expand and re-orient current technical colleges;
iv. Re-habilitate social infrastructures; schools, hospitals, dispensaries, health and community centres, and repair and sink new water wells and boreholes;
v. Re-open and reconstruct roads, repair and rebuild bridges, repair drains systems, extend electricity grid and invest in and expand clean renewable energy, including solar power, community forests / biomass;
vi. Through peace dividend grants, promote and aid cooperative ventures for indigenous communities and entrepreneurs in commercial farming, food processing, canning and bottling, marketing and exports, and in transport, manufacturing and machine tools.
After 10 years of recovery and stabilisation, it would be appropriate to begin thinking of further progressive agrarian reforms, if objective internal social and economic conditions had not already stimulated changes in patterns of land use, land tenure, equity and justice in access rights and other related issues. Gradual and graduated agrarian transformation, keeping pace with other social developments, particularly possible educational goals of at least two university graduates per family and 100% adult functional literacy and school enrolment throughout Achol by 2025, should be a firm foundation for future development that ensures social equity and justice. But should it succeed, Museveni’s current strategy will create a society with deep socio-economic crevices between haves and have-nots; the way his state divestiture and privatisation of national assets in 1980s created overnight millionaires from one ethnic group and from a single district in Ankoke. It is speculations and rent-seeking mentality of this state-dependent middle class and their fronted business allies who are behind contemplated land reforms and opening up land markets throughout the country.
As seen already in their callous proposal for acquiring 40, 000-that is right, forty thousand- hectares of land to be put under permanent sugar plantation, the government’s policy is disconnected from current Acholi particularistic experiences of war, its consequences, and post conflict needs on the one hand, and social action on the other. This should not come as a surprise, if we keep in mind Museveni’s characteristic indifference to northern suffering. Such prevarication in policy and action in the face of obvious necessity and clear cut solutions, suggest consistent attempt to construct a different and subjective regime of truth not borne out by social, economic, existential, moral and practical experiences in Acholi. It is a stratagem that seeks to conceal the magnitude of desperation and hopeless human conditions in Acholi imposed by Museveni’s ill-advised military policy, strategy and tactics. Furthermore, Museveni’s monologues on development are calculated political strategies of power that aim to pre-empt ethical and political questions in northern Uganda by reconstructing and representing problems there as essentially economic. Such subjective approach seeks to create particular viewpoints that construct and nurture social structures of subjection and control of Acholi individuals and clans through adaptation and modified personal and social traits responsive to the precepts of so called “development” conjured by Museveni and proponents in the region. What better persuasive propaganda than to use Acholi to counter popular Acholi voices and articulate a completely different need from the one that would be damning to the state?
Panorama of bad faith and failed policies
After twenty-two years in power, the Museveni /NRM/A regime spectacularly failed to: (1) achieve outright military victory against the Lord’s Resistance Movement / Army (LRM/A); (2) protect civilian lives and property; (3) effectively and significantly discharge the classical, historical, constitutional and political role, duties and responsibility of a state towards its citizens in northern Uganda. Consequently, there is hardly any measure of political or governance success to speak of, outside of its faithful use of violence and the military to impose its will over this region and the country. The futility and despair of such fidelity to violence is palpable in the physical, social and economic conditions of inhabitants of the concentration camps. Readers unacquainted with details of these conditions need only peruse websites and reports of the major international humanitarian and human rights organisations.
Caught between a brutal insurgency and an equally unfeeling state counterinsurgency strategies that victimised rather than protected, northern Uganda remained uniquely resilient; their will power unbroken and stubbornly defiant. They have rebuked Museveni and his regime time after time, particularly in Acholi, by voting against him in every election held since he shot his way to power in 1986. The futility and limitations of violence have been exposed both on the battlefield against the LRA’s twenty-year survival, and the NRM’s political failure to establish any respectable civic democratic infrastructures in Uganda, especially in Acholi, that are free of coercion and military superintendence. Because of this, a post-conflict, peaceful northern Uganda portends grim political spectre for Museveni and his NRM ideologues.
A permanent end to conflict, gradual return to normalcy in northern Uganda, and withdrawal of troops to their barracks threaten to expose NRM/ A’s political nakedness and grand policy and governance failures in this region. Aware they may simply have nothing to show and nothing to stand on politically in a post-conflict Acholi, Museveni, the NRM and its lieutenants in northern Uganda, are in overdrive mode to impose and promote a “development”, also interchangeably called “modernisation” or “industrialisation” strategy that they tout will transform peasant agriculture through land consolidation and mechanisation.
Such a rethink of their policy and political strategy in northern Uganda in the wake of gathering and irreversible movement towards peace in the region, largely conditioned by their own military, policy and political failures in twenty-two years, signals NRM strategic and tactical policy shift. Suddenly, the old ingrained perception of Acholi as a mass of inert objects seems displaced by that of rational economic beings predisposed to maximise personal interests and greed. By no means this should be understood as wholesale jettisoning of old grudges and historical prejudices and myths on which a northern leviathan enemy was constructed by an NRM / teleology. It is however, a deceptive attempt posing a more tempered and deliberative approach to policy, to disorganise unified Acholi opposition to land alienation by co-opting selfish individual and clan interests.
Nevertheless, there is no delusion that Museveni has overcome his deeply held prejudices and contempt for northerners and Acholi in particular. For instance, he declared his home district a disaster area after cattle had died there of draught in 2001, but snubbed parliamentary motion to accord northern Uganda a disaster area the same year. Furthermore, despite overwhelming citizen representations to the parliamentary committee on presidential and foreign affairs to recommend a peaceful and negotiated settlement to the northern Uganda conflict in 1996, Museveni personally campaigned against it and in the end the committee recommended a military solution. Additionally, in 2001, Museveni ordered operation Iron Fist, for Uganda military to occupy southern Sudan and flash out the LRA from its bases there. As a result, the LRA crossed back into Uganda and wreaked havoc on civilians in northern Uganda. Although some would credit the invasion with the derogation of LRA offensive capabilities, the costs in further abduction of children, increased violence, maiming and deaths in the concentration camps negated any positive, strategic, battlefield gains from the military offensives. All these underscore the difficulties a rational person would have in accepting that Museveni can act in good faith on policies that do not aim to benefit him personally or strengthen and safeguard the security of his regime. Therefore, we have well-founded doubts that government designs on land and investments in Acholi are driven by absolute altruistic humanism. It is thus safe to say that Museveni’s northern policy is still guided by petty old grudges and false revisionist historical prejudices.
Need to clarify and broaden political, ideological resistance to Museveni
As war comes to an end, Museveni’s primary concern is to increase and deepen NRM/A presence and influence, and thereby conceal if possible, but minimise at worst, his personal and state role in the debacles of northern Uganda. The politics of fighting and defeating Joseph Kony and the LRM/A nurtured the careers and rationalised obsequious loyalties of certain northern political and business figures in the past twenty-two years. In the same vain, the discourse of development for northern Uganda aims to provide a semblance of rational policy but with dubious goals to maintain old or attract new loyalties in post conflict northern Uganda. For a meaningful post conflict disarmament, demobilisation and re-integration; disbandment of concentration camps, resettlement of people on their own land and implementing realistic and responsive reconstruction programmes, northerners need to question and if necessary, reject the normative paradigm of “development” being foisted on them by the state.
It is important for the people to remember that it is the same state that neglected their suffering for twenty-two years, while it preferred violence over negotiations. Such policy is responsible for their current situation, their neglect and abandonment to the mercies of international charities. It is the same state that now turns around in the name of “development”, purporting to show it cares, by promoting a development strategy that aspires to remove from them the only means of production and social reproduction they have: land. There is no overstating therefore, what Marx called the “need, the practical expression of necessity” for the people to liberate themselves from dominating and oppressive relations of power and self-negation. In other words, the people must oppose the tautological framework that informs Museveni’s assessment of their needs as a society.
We have shown that immediate and medium term needs and priorities of northerners lie elsewhere, outside of the externally driven need for slave-era plantation industry and mono-cropping strategies that look at them simply as objectified instruments. This makes it imperative that Acholi and northern Uganda reject negative social self-perception imposed by NRM discourses of development, that seek to create in themselves and collective psychology a feeling of material, moral, spiritual, physical and cultural poverty, in contrast to their compatriots south of the Nile. Except for the despoliation of the war, levels of deprivation among northerners would not be radically different from that among southern peasants and urban underclass that never benefited from Museveni / NRM state corruption, clan and ethnic patronage. It would thus be a fatal mistake if they were treated as anything but allies who share similar fate, albeit under peaceful and secure conditions.
Therefore, it is imperative that northerners do not engage in ideological, conceptual construction of poverty and its social conditioning to validate NRM social abstraction, objectification and commoditisation of themselves. They must never forget too soon, earlier NRM/ A discourses that presented northerners as a society of ”killers” and “backward” people who needed to be rescued from themselves through military subjugation and domination. The failure of the military strategy to completely subdue the region to submit to NRM / A politics, have forced current policy and strategy rethink. Coupled with overwhelming national and international conjunction of social and democratic forces agitating for peace in northern Uganda, a discursive shift from fighting “rebels”, “rebel collaborators”, “criminal elements”, “backward” people and “killers”, to “our people” and “land owners”, have been forced upon the NRM. Unwilling reformers that they are, this change is not fundamental but merely putting NRM political strategy and tactics in new garbs. In other words, it aims at reordering relations from what Foucault distinguishes between negative exercise of power to insidious, positive power and control. What better cloak to conceal such transition and intentions, than the nebulous nature and dubious goals of development?
True to their nature, the proponents of development or modernisation through plantation agriculture and land alienation consciously choose to obfuscate the existential and political conditions in northern Uganda, because the basic solutions required lie outside economics. They do not want to admit that the roots of these problems are embedded in NRM / A historicism that neither predates its ascendancy in 1986, nor transcends the teleology of its narrow social and political orthodoxy. As far as Museveni and the NRM are concerned, their political ascendancy and institutionalised personal rule for the last twenty-two years, is the apotheosis of social, political and ideological progress Uganda could achieve and cannot transcend. In other words, they stand with Francis Fukuyama in hollering that, for all intent and purposes, their coming to power is the end of history; there are no more social goals to struggle for in the name of social progress. But as students of social science and dialectical materialism, we know and should tweak cynical Hegelian, Engels and Marxist, even Weberian and Parsonian noses at them, and retort that it is not so and totally false. However, majority of Ugandan peasant population and urban subculture are not that sophisticated. So Museveni and his friends can get away with such blatant, vainglorious, deceptive triumphalism.
It goes without saying that in a post conflict northern Uganda, material wellbeing and livelihood security are important considerations. But equally important, are the need for deepening democracy and deliberative politics, so that people are actively involved in the policy process, and become subjects rather than only objects of development. Such a position suggests the organising of local resistance to NRM /A imposed notions and processes of development through local sites and nodes of power, domination and control in northern Uganda. A people-centred conception of development must be interjected as counterbalance to a perception of “development” that ignores real needs and real people with real problems that need real solutions, but not discredited trickle down theorisation. Because development is for people, therefore, its goals must include self-actualisation through freedom to organise and pursue self-defined objectives for social development.
Putting politics ahead of Lives
Relative peace in northern Uganda is forcing people and groups to re-envision their futures. Individual entrepreneurs, communities, government agencies, NGOs and public international organisations, are appraising their future roles and activities in a changing stance from emergency humanitarian provisioning to reconstruction and development in a post conflict society. For aid agencies, their plans for the future are contingent on disbandment of concentration camps and resettlement of people to their homes. Like the NGOs, Yoweri Museveni, the National Resistance Movement / Army (NRM/A), and their apparatchiks in Acholi, are repositioning themselves to remain politically relevant in the region. Instead of “iron-fisting”, it is now time for “iron-roofing”, and for peasants in Acholi who drink sugar, to be charitable and donate their land to big profiteering subsidiaries of international sugar conglomerates to grow sugar cane and produce sugar. One would be forgiven for thinking that the sugar industries distribute sugar for free in northern Uganda, and everyone there consumes sugar.
Unlike the humanitarian organisations, the Uganda government under Museveni is pushing “investment”, “development”, “industrialisation”, “modernisation” programmes that are completely disconnected from the immediate and medium term needs and priorities for the population in this region. One would be further forgiven for thinking that some of the political statements issuing from the president himself and his political operatives in northern Uganda, on envisaged government policies in Acholi, were for a different planet, not a region falteringly emerging from twenty-two years of war, violence, destruction and despair.
Such wilful political and policy blindness, on the part of the NRM/A, to the relevant needs and priorities of existential conditions in northern Uganda forces the thesis that, there is no altruistic wish on the part of Museveni, his party and government, to end the nightmares of the population in northern Uganda. But seeing that peace may be inevitable through possible complete collapse of the Lord’s Resistance Movement /Army (LRM/A); or through the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement and settlement that brings a permanent ceasefire and peace to northern Uganda, the NRM/A is forced to reinvent its role with the hope of sustaining itself politically in the region. Because a sustainable peace ought to inevitably obviate the need for the presence and role of the army in the public policy process, the NRM/A political presence here will be less than feather weight. Hence, it is groping in the dark for a plausible policy plank that could purchase for itself some further political life and relevance.
But focusing on acquisition of large tracks of land, spoiling to change land rights and land tenure laws on the fly and on the eve of the return of people to their abandoned homesteads, raises suspicion and strengthen long held view that the war lasted this long not because of government incompetence or the invincibility and supernatural powers of the LRM/A and Kony, but because it provided cover for sinister political projects only known to Museveni and his closest political conspirators. Accompanying flurry of activities around land policy pronouncements and political mileage devoted to them, suggest a realisation that the war may come to an end not largely according to their script and time frame; so some of the business that remain unaccomplished and are works in progress, needed to be accelerated. It is possible that if Museveni were to have his wish, the concentration camps would be turned into permanent slum settlements as a strategy to sever peasant links with land and open up the countryside to “foreign” investments in large scale mechanised agriculture, and transform the Acholi into wage labourers.
Realistically, any initiative that introduces significant modifications to current land tenure and access rights policies ahead of the return of displaced population to their land is a bad idea. It is equally bad to impose from above, economic and social plans that fit government grand schemes of things but out of place with the priorities of local needs, especially where such projects impose sacrifices and degrade communal property rights by displacing people from their own land, thereby threatening their livelihoods and that of future generations.
For their part, the Acholi have survived the violence and brutalities of the war, the loss of their livelihood and life in the concentration camps, and hold onto the hope of returning to their land, picking up the pieces and rebuilding their lives and self-sufficiency. If the government were serious about development, and were the Acholi the subjects of the process and goals of the state’s lauded development plans, emphasis would be laid elsewhere than acquisition of large tracts of land for sugar cane plantation and industry. Sympathetically, it is for these reasons that we would like to argue against Museveni’s modernisation plans, and assert that rather than seeking to develop the Acholi, the NRM is in a death struggle to remain relevant here after the war. True to form and belief, they have chosen a subject with as nebulous objectives as “development” to impose false moral and ethical burdens upon those who resist their misguided, outdated and tautological development teleology, policies and strategies. It is the perceptions and assumptions of desirability and universality of process and goals in their “development”discourses with which we would like to take serious issues.
What and whose “development”?
“The whole sphere of the conditions of life which surround man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now come under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time become the real, conscious master of nature, because he has now become master of his own socialisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto confronting man as laws of nature alien to him and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding and thus be mastered by him. Man’s socialisation, which previously confronted him as something imposed from above by nature and history, now becomes his own free action. The alien objective forces which till now have dominated history, pass to the control of man himself.”
Engels: Selected Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1967), pp.223.
There are disparate contending normative perceptions and assumptions of “development” as processes and goals. A complete review of the contentions and varieties of “development” is beyond the scope of this essay. For our discussion, it is sufficient to simply and generally state that we adopt a view of “development” that (1) goes beyond economic essentialism, and that (2) development is not value free, but a filtered projection of our view of our world bounded by our personal and societal values. This makes it crucial, therefore, to demand to know what the underlying ideological assumptions of the NRM/A strategy for agrarian reforms and “modernisation” or “industrialisation” policy are, for a post-conflict northern Uganda. How do these policy positions complement or challenge, for instance, Acholi ideals of self-reliance, satisfaction of basic needs through socialised means of production, deliberative democracy, reciprocity, social equity and equal access and rights to land for those here and now and future generations? Particularly, how do the policies engage current existential questions in the war-ravaged region?
Already, a diametric opposition of development paradigms or policy formulation has emerged. The Uganda government, particularly Yoweri Museveni himself, and his political operatives in Acholi, are partial to imposing policies from above. In our view, we contend that Acholi or communities must participate in the definition, identification and ranking of the problems policies must respond to. Unbelievably, as conscious though “poor” and impoverished beings, northerners are being treated as inert objects of Museveni’s uncritical development paradigm. They are labelled as poor and backward, in an attempt to alienate them from both their humanity and their land, and create the subjective conditions for intervention. Yet social and economic conditions in northern Uganda situate them as subject-objects of development discourses; they must on their own seek answers to their own situation because they are aware of the unnatural logic of social and economic conditions and relations that dominate them and how these are linked to human action. They further do understand that their conditions can be changed, and that the insights to the solutions cannot be imposed from outside; it must come from their self-knowledge of reality.
To convince northerners that he has overcome his petty old grudges and prejudices that have guided his punitive and vindictive northern Uganda political strategies, Museveni should not be left to simply lecture northerners on how good “development” is for them; he must show both sides of the balance sheet of his kind of “development”. What are the social and ecological costs? Who should determine how beneficial the “thing” development is, and beneficial to whom? These are pertinent questions that even poor people like those in the camps are within their rights to ask. Moreover, they do not have to forego the luxury of drinking sugar in their beverages before they could challenge the desirability of “development” and the kind of strategy being championed by the state.
Part of the need for intervention through Museveni’s type of “development” is the tautological assertion that northern Uganda has historically been underdeveloped, poor and backward. What is missing from such prefatory policy statement is that it is arbitrarily and conveniently restricted to colonial and post-colonial periods before Museveni came to power in 1986. Therefore, there is a conscious decision to ignore twenty-two years of conflict, violence, abductions, destruction, social, moral and economic collapse. Consequently, Museveni’s social and economic policies for northern Uganda are being formulated with the wrong socio-economic conditions in mind and for a society that ceased to exist in 1986. How else could one explain the government’s single-minded push for sugar cane plantations and land alienation in Acholi, where 90% of the population is in concentration camps and dependent on humanitarian relief? Even if we were to allow for the facts that the war destroyed schools and ground education in Acholi to a halt, and therefore the region has an abundance of unskilled wage labour suitable for cutting sugar cane and picking cotton, there are still moral and practical objections to a government promoting such a policy.
Were plantation and monoculture agriculture one of a range of policy interventions and of lower priority ranking as part of government response to the dire conditions of need in Acholi, the policy proposals could be entertained for further discussions. But that it is a key policy for the government and seemingly first on its agenda, makes it difficult to accept, particularly for those who know the current social and economic conditions in Acholi. In our view, Acholi Parliamentary Group (APG), local district council leaders and others are exceedingly courteous in giving more than one audience to proponents of such egregious and contemptuous policy. Acholi leaders would be completely forgiven if they had just told the proponents of such policies to, please, vamoose!
What a responsible government would do now in northern Uganda
Based on our long observation of the northern Uganda situation over time, the government would have been well advised if it had focused on the following areas immediately and in the medium term:
i. Dismantle the death camps and invest in resettling people back on their ancestral lands;
ii. Compensate families, individuals and businesses for losses of livestock, crops and commercial stock and machineries as a result of the war;
iii. Establish a peace dividend scheme for education in the region to provide funds and scholarships schemes for Acholi and northern children;
a. Establish community colleges or set up parallel programmes in existing / expanded schools for accelerated education to take in adults and children whose education were interrupted or disrupted;
b. Design combined academic and vocational / practical skills training curriculum in a network of community colleges or expand and re-orient current technical colleges;
iv. Re-habilitate social infrastructures; schools, hospitals, dispensaries, health and community centres, and repair and sink new water wells and boreholes;
v. Re-open and reconstruct roads, repair and rebuild bridges, repair drains systems, extend electricity grid and invest in and expand clean renewable energy, including solar power, community forests / biomass;
vi. Through peace dividend grants, promote and aid cooperative ventures for indigenous communities and entrepreneurs in commercial farming, food processing, canning and bottling, marketing and exports, and in transport, manufacturing and machine tools.
After 10 years of recovery and stabilisation, it would be appropriate to begin thinking of further progressive agrarian reforms, if objective internal social and economic conditions had not already stimulated changes in patterns of land use, land tenure, equity and justice in access rights and other related issues. Gradual and graduated agrarian transformation, keeping pace with other social developments, particularly possible educational goals of at least two university graduates per family and 100% adult functional literacy and school enrolment throughout Achol by 2025, should be a firm foundation for future development that ensures social equity and justice. But should it succeed, Museveni’s current strategy will create a society with deep socio-economic crevices between haves and have-nots; the way his state divestiture and privatisation of national assets in 1980s created overnight millionaires from one ethnic group and from a single district in Ankoke. It is speculations and rent-seeking mentality of this state-dependent middle class and their fronted business allies who are behind contemplated land reforms and opening up land markets throughout the country.
As seen already in their callous proposal for acquiring 40, 000-that is right, forty thousand- hectares of land to be put under permanent sugar plantation, the government’s policy is disconnected from current Acholi particularistic experiences of war, its consequences, and post conflict needs on the one hand, and social action on the other. This should not come as a surprise, if we keep in mind Museveni’s characteristic indifference to northern suffering. Such prevarication in policy and action in the face of obvious necessity and clear cut solutions, suggest consistent attempt to construct a different and subjective regime of truth not borne out by social, economic, existential, moral and practical experiences in Acholi. It is a stratagem that seeks to conceal the magnitude of desperation and hopeless human conditions in Acholi imposed by Museveni’s ill-advised military policy, strategy and tactics. Furthermore, Museveni’s monologues on development are calculated political strategies of power that aim to pre-empt ethical and political questions in northern Uganda by reconstructing and representing problems there as essentially economic. Such subjective approach seeks to create particular viewpoints that construct and nurture social structures of subjection and control of Acholi individuals and clans through adaptation and modified personal and social traits responsive to the precepts of so called “development” conjured by Museveni and proponents in the region. What better persuasive propaganda than to use Acholi to counter popular Acholi voices and articulate a completely different need from the one that would be damning to the state?
Panorama of bad faith and failed policies
After twenty-two years in power, the Museveni /NRM/A regime spectacularly failed to: (1) achieve outright military victory against the Lord’s Resistance Movement / Army (LRM/A); (2) protect civilian lives and property; (3) effectively and significantly discharge the classical, historical, constitutional and political role, duties and responsibility of a state towards its citizens in northern Uganda. Consequently, there is hardly any measure of political or governance success to speak of, outside of its faithful use of violence and the military to impose its will over this region and the country. The futility and despair of such fidelity to violence is palpable in the physical, social and economic conditions of inhabitants of the concentration camps. Readers unacquainted with details of these conditions need only peruse websites and reports of the major international humanitarian and human rights organisations.
Caught between a brutal insurgency and an equally unfeeling state counterinsurgency strategies that victimised rather than protected, northern Uganda remained uniquely resilient; their will power unbroken and stubbornly defiant. They have rebuked Museveni and his regime time after time, particularly in Acholi, by voting against him in every election held since he shot his way to power in 1986. The futility and limitations of violence have been exposed both on the battlefield against the LRA’s twenty-year survival, and the NRM’s political failure to establish any respectable civic democratic infrastructures in Uganda, especially in Acholi, that are free of coercion and military superintendence. Because of this, a post-conflict, peaceful northern Uganda portends grim political spectre for Museveni and his NRM ideologues.
A permanent end to conflict, gradual return to normalcy in northern Uganda, and withdrawal of troops to their barracks threaten to expose NRM/ A’s political nakedness and grand policy and governance failures in this region. Aware they may simply have nothing to show and nothing to stand on politically in a post-conflict Acholi, Museveni, the NRM and its lieutenants in northern Uganda, are in overdrive mode to impose and promote a “development”, also interchangeably called “modernisation” or “industrialisation” strategy that they tout will transform peasant agriculture through land consolidation and mechanisation.
Such a rethink of their policy and political strategy in northern Uganda in the wake of gathering and irreversible movement towards peace in the region, largely conditioned by their own military, policy and political failures in twenty-two years, signals NRM strategic and tactical policy shift. Suddenly, the old ingrained perception of Acholi as a mass of inert objects seems displaced by that of rational economic beings predisposed to maximise personal interests and greed. By no means this should be understood as wholesale jettisoning of old grudges and historical prejudices and myths on which a northern leviathan enemy was constructed by an NRM / teleology. It is however, a deceptive attempt posing a more tempered and deliberative approach to policy, to disorganise unified Acholi opposition to land alienation by co-opting selfish individual and clan interests.
Nevertheless, there is no delusion that Museveni has overcome his deeply held prejudices and contempt for northerners and Acholi in particular. For instance, he declared his home district a disaster area after cattle had died there of draught in 2001, but snubbed parliamentary motion to accord northern Uganda a disaster area the same year. Furthermore, despite overwhelming citizen representations to the parliamentary committee on presidential and foreign affairs to recommend a peaceful and negotiated settlement to the northern Uganda conflict in 1996, Museveni personally campaigned against it and in the end the committee recommended a military solution. Additionally, in 2001, Museveni ordered operation Iron Fist, for Uganda military to occupy southern Sudan and flash out the LRA from its bases there. As a result, the LRA crossed back into Uganda and wreaked havoc on civilians in northern Uganda. Although some would credit the invasion with the derogation of LRA offensive capabilities, the costs in further abduction of children, increased violence, maiming and deaths in the concentration camps negated any positive, strategic, battlefield gains from the military offensives. All these underscore the difficulties a rational person would have in accepting that Museveni can act in good faith on policies that do not aim to benefit him personally or strengthen and safeguard the security of his regime. Therefore, we have well-founded doubts that government designs on land and investments in Acholi are driven by absolute altruistic humanism. It is thus safe to say that Museveni’s northern policy is still guided by petty old grudges and false revisionist historical prejudices.
Need to clarify and broaden political, ideological resistance to Museveni
As war comes to an end, Museveni’s primary concern is to increase and deepen NRM/A presence and influence, and thereby conceal if possible, but minimise at worst, his personal and state role in the debacles of northern Uganda. The politics of fighting and defeating Joseph Kony and the LRM/A nurtured the careers and rationalised obsequious loyalties of certain northern political and business figures in the past twenty-two years. In the same vain, the discourse of development for northern Uganda aims to provide a semblance of rational policy but with dubious goals to maintain old or attract new loyalties in post conflict northern Uganda. For a meaningful post conflict disarmament, demobilisation and re-integration; disbandment of concentration camps, resettlement of people on their own land and implementing realistic and responsive reconstruction programmes, northerners need to question and if necessary, reject the normative paradigm of “development” being foisted on them by the state.
It is important for the people to remember that it is the same state that neglected their suffering for twenty-two years, while it preferred violence over negotiations. Such policy is responsible for their current situation, their neglect and abandonment to the mercies of international charities. It is the same state that now turns around in the name of “development”, purporting to show it cares, by promoting a development strategy that aspires to remove from them the only means of production and social reproduction they have: land. There is no overstating therefore, what Marx called the “need, the practical expression of necessity” for the people to liberate themselves from dominating and oppressive relations of power and self-negation. In other words, the people must oppose the tautological framework that informs Museveni’s assessment of their needs as a society.
We have shown that immediate and medium term needs and priorities of northerners lie elsewhere, outside of the externally driven need for slave-era plantation industry and mono-cropping strategies that look at them simply as objectified instruments. This makes it imperative that Acholi and northern Uganda reject negative social self-perception imposed by NRM discourses of development, that seek to create in themselves and collective psychology a feeling of material, moral, spiritual, physical and cultural poverty, in contrast to their compatriots south of the Nile. Except for the despoliation of the war, levels of deprivation among northerners would not be radically different from that among southern peasants and urban underclass that never benefited from Museveni / NRM state corruption, clan and ethnic patronage. It would thus be a fatal mistake if they were treated as anything but allies who share similar fate, albeit under peaceful and secure conditions.
Therefore, it is imperative that northerners do not engage in ideological, conceptual construction of poverty and its social conditioning to validate NRM social abstraction, objectification and commoditisation of themselves. They must never forget too soon, earlier NRM/ A discourses that presented northerners as a society of ”killers” and “backward” people who needed to be rescued from themselves through military subjugation and domination. The failure of the military strategy to completely subdue the region to submit to NRM / A politics, have forced current policy and strategy rethink. Coupled with overwhelming national and international conjunction of social and democratic forces agitating for peace in northern Uganda, a discursive shift from fighting “rebels”, “rebel collaborators”, “criminal elements”, “backward” people and “killers”, to “our people” and “land owners”, have been forced upon the NRM. Unwilling reformers that they are, this change is not fundamental but merely putting NRM political strategy and tactics in new garbs. In other words, it aims at reordering relations from what Foucault distinguishes between negative exercise of power to insidious, positive power and control. What better cloak to conceal such transition and intentions, than the nebulous nature and dubious goals of development?
True to their nature, the proponents of development or modernisation through plantation agriculture and land alienation consciously choose to obfuscate the existential and political conditions in northern Uganda, because the basic solutions required lie outside economics. They do not want to admit that the roots of these problems are embedded in NRM / A historicism that neither predates its ascendancy in 1986, nor transcends the teleology of its narrow social and political orthodoxy. As far as Museveni and the NRM are concerned, their political ascendancy and institutionalised personal rule for the last twenty-two years, is the apotheosis of social, political and ideological progress Uganda could achieve and cannot transcend. In other words, they stand with Francis Fukuyama in hollering that, for all intent and purposes, their coming to power is the end of history; there are no more social goals to struggle for in the name of social progress. But as students of social science and dialectical materialism, we know and should tweak cynical Hegelian, Engels and Marxist, even Weberian and Parsonian noses at them, and retort that it is not so and totally false. However, majority of Ugandan peasant population and urban subculture are not that sophisticated. So Museveni and his friends can get away with such blatant, vainglorious, deceptive triumphalism.
It goes without saying that in a post conflict northern Uganda, material wellbeing and livelihood security are important considerations. But equally important, are the need for deepening democracy and deliberative politics, so that people are actively involved in the policy process, and become subjects rather than only objects of development. Such a position suggests the organising of local resistance to NRM /A imposed notions and processes of development through local sites and nodes of power, domination and control in northern Uganda. A people-centred conception of development must be interjected as counterbalance to a perception of “development” that ignores real needs and real people with real problems that need real solutions, but not discredited trickle down theorisation. Because development is for people, therefore, its goals must include self-actualisation through freedom to organise and pursue self-defined objectives for social development.
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