Museveni, NRM on the wrong track in Northern Uganda
Museveni, NRM on wrong track
For the last 22 years, the NRM did not govern in the interests of Ugandans. It has therefore been and is bumbling on, on the wrong tracks. Post-conflict policy in northern Uganda is illustrative.
Relative peace in northern Uganda is changing programming from humanitarian relief to reconstruction and development. NGO plans are predicated on disbanding camps and resettling people to their land. Likewise, the NRM are repositioning. Unlike humanitarian agencies, the government is reinforcing coercive state infrastructures, and dubious "investment", and "modernisation" strategies that are discordant with the immediate needs and priorities in the region.
For instance, the government is spoiling to alienate 40, 000 and 20,000 hectares of land in Amuru District for Madhvani Group, and Canada's Eco-Gestion-NileCan, to grow sugar cane. As centrepiece of the government's socioeconomic reconstruction strategy, the policy ignores 22 years of war, displacement, social breakdown, post conflict needs, and imperatives for relevant social action. Such policy prevarication, despite obvious necessity demanding clear-cut solutions, betray efforts by the NRM, to construct a subjective truth different from the social, economic, existential, moral and practical needs in northern Uganda. It is a strategy aimed to detract from and conceal genocide, and the hopeless human conditions there caused by Museveni's ill-advised scorched-earth counter-insurgency strategies and tactics.
In any case, Museveni's development discourses are poorly disguised political strategies of power, aimed at reconstructing and representing the deplorable human security conditions in northern Uganda as essentially economic. Its logic is therefore to present private capital and the market as the best solution. This is to pre-empt legitimate moral, political, and accountability questions on northern Uganda. Such subjective approach seeks to construct new, or patronise old traditional, structures of power, subjection, and control in Acholi, with particularistic viewpoints, to legitimise the gospels of "development" according to saint NRM.
Obviously, the basic, immediate needs of people in the concentration camps lie outside economics. But NRM lackeys do not want to submit to this reality, lest probing reveals what we know: that these problems are embedded in partial, self-serving NRM historical narratives that conceive our national social, political, economic, intellectual, moral and cultural landscapes before 1986 as arid.
The NRM problem is the delusion that their actions and the ends or utility of the Luwero insurgency and political victory marked the best or most glorious social, political, ideological, cultural, intellectual and moral progress no other Ugandan generation can achieve or transcend. This is the deception that there is nothing left to struggle for now or tomorrow. But as historical materialists, the we reject this notion, which underlines NRM intellectual bankruptcy and deep faith in historical falsifications.
Fundamentally, there is no unified theoretical, normative perception, assumptions of "development" as process or goal. We view "development" as dynamic, more than economic essentialism, and not value free, but filtered projections of our world coloured by our personal, social, and political values and beliefs. The NRM has authoritarian penchant for imposing policies from above. We believe communities must participate in defining, identifying, and ranking of problems policies must respond to. However, the NRM policy process treats people as inert objects. People are labelled "poor", "backward," in order to strip them of self-determined human characteristics; creating the subjective conditions for arbitrary intervention.
Intervention is premised on assertions that northern Uganda has historically been "underdeveloped", "poor" and "backward". What is disingenuous about such prefatory policy statement is its arbitrary, convenient restriction to colonial and post-colonial periods before Museveni came to power in 1986. It deliberately edits out 22 years of conflict, violence, destruction, and government neglect, and resultant social, moral and economic corrosion. Effectively, Museveni's post-conflict policies for northern Uganda are formulated with wrong socio-economic conditions, wrong data sets, and for a pre-1986 society.
Because NRM opportunistically embraced IMF and World Bank imposed economic liberalisation measures, they have become free market and supply-side economics evangelical fundamentalists in policy approaches. Despite social, cultural, moral and economic breakdown, and erosion of social capital in northern Uganda by war, the NRM waves trickle down economics, as the magic wand. This contrasts very sharply with the kind of intervention responsible governments make when faced with national challenges on the scale of the northern Uganda debacles.
The Marshall Plan for reconstructing Europe after the 2nd imperialist war, or The New Deal after 1930s economic depression in the USA come to mind. But the current global economic setbacks provide excellent immediacy in contrasts. The monetary shambles caused by greed, predatory lending, speculation and aggressive pursuit of profits under laissez faire economies, forced western democracies to dispense with ideological prescriptions, and do what are right to maximise the welfare of their citizens.
Our interest is not in the nature of the global economic turmoil, but how governments who are on the right tracks, particularly the bastions of capitalism, have responded to the crisis. They went against their grain, to nationalise, bail out, failed, insolvent banks and financial institutions. These actions set aside doctrinaire market orthodoxy. Traditionally, these institutions should have been left to fail and be liquidated.
Because investments decisions and market volatility characteristically involve uncertainties and risks, such losses come with the territory. Comparable to the socioeconomic breakdown in northern Uganda, policy actions of industrialised countries indicate that, the current global economic crisis is no normal business downturn best left to market forces alone to self-correct. They have demonstrated that leaders on the right tracks ought to break with ingrained, partisan ideological niceties in times of extraordinary national need. This is a position Moses Byaruhanga, and by extension the NRM, disagrees with (see President Museveni is on the right track, DM 13.10.2008).TIt is the same false belief in dogmas that makes the NRM and its hatchet men in northern Uganda rely on routine ministerial and departmental budgetary discretions to respond to the extraordinary human security debacles in northern Uganda.
On the surface, NRM discourses of development for post conflict northern Uganda may provide semblance of rational policy, but closer scrutiny reveals dubious goals of seeking to maintain old or attract new political loyalties. For meaningful post conflict policy, and to implement realistic, reconstruction programmes, stakeholders must question, and if necessary, reject the normative assumptions of "development" favoured by the state. Hence, we cannot possibly overstate what Marx called the "need, the practical expression of necessity" for people to liberate themselves from dominating, oppressive relations of power and self-negation in nothern Uganda in particular, but Uganda generally.
Under a responsible and accountable government, disbanding the camps, resettling people on their lands, restocking, and establishing peace dividend schemes for education for northern Uganda, would be priority one. This should have gone hand-in-hand with rehabilitation of schools, hospitals, dispensaries, water wells and boreholes; and investments in rural electrification and community forests. In the medium term, the government should have created a Northern Uganda Development Fund to promote cooperatives and small business ventures for indigenous entrepreneurs as the backbone of the local economy.
Besides livelihood security, we believes it is important to expand and deepen democratic, deliberative politics, so that people are involved in the policy process, and become subjects rather than objects of development. Therefore, it is important to organise grassroots resistance to NRM local sites and nodes of power, domination and control, and transpose people as subjects of development.
Finally, we believe development is for people; its goals must include freedom to organise and pursue self-defined objectives and priorities. The state must provide the space and incentives, and when necessary relieve its stricken citizens, but not recite unrealistic, impractical ideological claptrap that benefits only those with access to state power and wealth.
For the last 22 years, the NRM did not govern in the interests of Ugandans. It has therefore been and is bumbling on, on the wrong tracks. Post-conflict policy in northern Uganda is illustrative.
Relative peace in northern Uganda is changing programming from humanitarian relief to reconstruction and development. NGO plans are predicated on disbanding camps and resettling people to their land. Likewise, the NRM are repositioning. Unlike humanitarian agencies, the government is reinforcing coercive state infrastructures, and dubious "investment", and "modernisation" strategies that are discordant with the immediate needs and priorities in the region.
For instance, the government is spoiling to alienate 40, 000 and 20,000 hectares of land in Amuru District for Madhvani Group, and Canada's Eco-Gestion-NileCan, to grow sugar cane. As centrepiece of the government's socioeconomic reconstruction strategy, the policy ignores 22 years of war, displacement, social breakdown, post conflict needs, and imperatives for relevant social action. Such policy prevarication, despite obvious necessity demanding clear-cut solutions, betray efforts by the NRM, to construct a subjective truth different from the social, economic, existential, moral and practical needs in northern Uganda. It is a strategy aimed to detract from and conceal genocide, and the hopeless human conditions there caused by Museveni's ill-advised scorched-earth counter-insurgency strategies and tactics.
In any case, Museveni's development discourses are poorly disguised political strategies of power, aimed at reconstructing and representing the deplorable human security conditions in northern Uganda as essentially economic. Its logic is therefore to present private capital and the market as the best solution. This is to pre-empt legitimate moral, political, and accountability questions on northern Uganda. Such subjective approach seeks to construct new, or patronise old traditional, structures of power, subjection, and control in Acholi, with particularistic viewpoints, to legitimise the gospels of "development" according to saint NRM.
Obviously, the basic, immediate needs of people in the concentration camps lie outside economics. But NRM lackeys do not want to submit to this reality, lest probing reveals what we know: that these problems are embedded in partial, self-serving NRM historical narratives that conceive our national social, political, economic, intellectual, moral and cultural landscapes before 1986 as arid.
The NRM problem is the delusion that their actions and the ends or utility of the Luwero insurgency and political victory marked the best or most glorious social, political, ideological, cultural, intellectual and moral progress no other Ugandan generation can achieve or transcend. This is the deception that there is nothing left to struggle for now or tomorrow. But as historical materialists, the we reject this notion, which underlines NRM intellectual bankruptcy and deep faith in historical falsifications.
Fundamentally, there is no unified theoretical, normative perception, assumptions of "development" as process or goal. We view "development" as dynamic, more than economic essentialism, and not value free, but filtered projections of our world coloured by our personal, social, and political values and beliefs. The NRM has authoritarian penchant for imposing policies from above. We believe communities must participate in defining, identifying, and ranking of problems policies must respond to. However, the NRM policy process treats people as inert objects. People are labelled "poor", "backward," in order to strip them of self-determined human characteristics; creating the subjective conditions for arbitrary intervention.
Intervention is premised on assertions that northern Uganda has historically been "underdeveloped", "poor" and "backward". What is disingenuous about such prefatory policy statement is its arbitrary, convenient restriction to colonial and post-colonial periods before Museveni came to power in 1986. It deliberately edits out 22 years of conflict, violence, destruction, and government neglect, and resultant social, moral and economic corrosion. Effectively, Museveni's post-conflict policies for northern Uganda are formulated with wrong socio-economic conditions, wrong data sets, and for a pre-1986 society.
Because NRM opportunistically embraced IMF and World Bank imposed economic liberalisation measures, they have become free market and supply-side economics evangelical fundamentalists in policy approaches. Despite social, cultural, moral and economic breakdown, and erosion of social capital in northern Uganda by war, the NRM waves trickle down economics, as the magic wand. This contrasts very sharply with the kind of intervention responsible governments make when faced with national challenges on the scale of the northern Uganda debacles.
The Marshall Plan for reconstructing Europe after the 2nd imperialist war, or The New Deal after 1930s economic depression in the USA come to mind. But the current global economic setbacks provide excellent immediacy in contrasts. The monetary shambles caused by greed, predatory lending, speculation and aggressive pursuit of profits under laissez faire economies, forced western democracies to dispense with ideological prescriptions, and do what are right to maximise the welfare of their citizens.
Our interest is not in the nature of the global economic turmoil, but how governments who are on the right tracks, particularly the bastions of capitalism, have responded to the crisis. They went against their grain, to nationalise, bail out, failed, insolvent banks and financial institutions. These actions set aside doctrinaire market orthodoxy. Traditionally, these institutions should have been left to fail and be liquidated.
Because investments decisions and market volatility characteristically involve uncertainties and risks, such losses come with the territory. Comparable to the socioeconomic breakdown in northern Uganda, policy actions of industrialised countries indicate that, the current global economic crisis is no normal business downturn best left to market forces alone to self-correct. They have demonstrated that leaders on the right tracks ought to break with ingrained, partisan ideological niceties in times of extraordinary national need. This is a position Moses Byaruhanga, and by extension the NRM, disagrees with (see President Museveni is on the right track, DM 13.10.2008).TIt is the same false belief in dogmas that makes the NRM and its hatchet men in northern Uganda rely on routine ministerial and departmental budgetary discretions to respond to the extraordinary human security debacles in northern Uganda.
On the surface, NRM discourses of development for post conflict northern Uganda may provide semblance of rational policy, but closer scrutiny reveals dubious goals of seeking to maintain old or attract new political loyalties. For meaningful post conflict policy, and to implement realistic, reconstruction programmes, stakeholders must question, and if necessary, reject the normative assumptions of "development" favoured by the state. Hence, we cannot possibly overstate what Marx called the "need, the practical expression of necessity" for people to liberate themselves from dominating, oppressive relations of power and self-negation in nothern Uganda in particular, but Uganda generally.
Under a responsible and accountable government, disbanding the camps, resettling people on their lands, restocking, and establishing peace dividend schemes for education for northern Uganda, would be priority one. This should have gone hand-in-hand with rehabilitation of schools, hospitals, dispensaries, water wells and boreholes; and investments in rural electrification and community forests. In the medium term, the government should have created a Northern Uganda Development Fund to promote cooperatives and small business ventures for indigenous entrepreneurs as the backbone of the local economy.
Besides livelihood security, we believes it is important to expand and deepen democratic, deliberative politics, so that people are involved in the policy process, and become subjects rather than objects of development. Therefore, it is important to organise grassroots resistance to NRM local sites and nodes of power, domination and control, and transpose people as subjects of development.
Finally, we believe development is for people; its goals must include freedom to organise and pursue self-defined objectives and priorities. The state must provide the space and incentives, and when necessary relieve its stricken citizens, but not recite unrealistic, impractical ideological claptrap that benefits only those with access to state power and wealth.
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