Africans without borders

Déjà Vu?


Since the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between Khartoum and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/ Army (SPLM/A) that established the Government of South Sudan at Juba, border and land disputes have characterised relations between South Sudan and Uganda. These disputes between border communities and the two countries underscore the need to revisit the notion of nation-statehood based on arbitrary colonial boundaries.


In its issue of 25 October 2011, the Sudan Tribune reported South Sudan accusing Uganda of tampering with international boundary markers between the two countries that extended Uganda’s northern frontiers by tens of miles into South Sudan. This is the border area between Magwi County in Eastern Equatoria State of South Sudan and Lamwo District in northern Uganda. According to the report, a meeting called to discuss the concerns agreed a joint resolution to investigate the matter, but Lamwo Resident District Commissioner (RDC), Omwony Ogaba, declined to sign, leaving Peter Bongomin, Magwi County Commissioner, the lone signatory to the declarations.


Besides concerns over international demarcations, the meeting apparently raised a number of other grievances. The Sudanese expressed discontent about the continued deployment of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) inside South Sudan, since the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) activities there and in northern Uganda have ceased. The presence of the Ugandan force is blamed for causing fear and tensions among communities who now want them withdrawn. In addition, accusations of illegal road construction, land grabbing, logging, insecurity and harassment of South Sudanese citizens are levelled against the Ugandan force. It is like DR Congo all over again!


Politico-military elite plunders


The idea of investigating plunder along the common border is welcome because logging, land grabbing and economic racketeering activities involving powerful elite on either side of the South Sudan – Uganda border have gone on for a long time. For instance, during and after the LRA insurgency, known UPDF and SPLA brass deforested Lututuru of its old growth and carried out extensive farming and logging along the border areas of Ngom Oromo. Furthermore, between 2009 and 2011, South Sudan at different instances laid claims to huge tracts of land in West Nile, Madi Opei and Lokung areas in northern Uganda. Surprisingly, the Ugandan government was eerily mute, even when ‘citizens’ were beaten, abducted and some killed by South Sudanese security personnel.


It is common knowledge that the politico-military clique around Dictator Yoweri Museveni has used all sorts of tactics, including coercion, to grab land throughout the country, especially in Buganda, Bunyoro and Acholi.  In Acholi, they attempted to enclose 40,000 hectares of land along the Nile, under the pretext of allocating it to the Madhvani Group for cane plantation. According to Acholi Parliamentary Group (APG) chairman and Aswa County legislator Reagan Okumu, the state has separately used statutory bodies-the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and the National Forest Authority (NFA)-to plunder large tracts of arable and mineral rich land in Acholi.


Hence, South Sudanese claims that border markers have been fraudulently shifted, may not be far from the truth. Considering how Acholi communal resistance to the state’s determination to appropriate their land along the Nile has riled Musevei, conspiring with some of his SPLM/A allies in South Sudan to shift national borders to ostensibly cede large expanse of Acholi land to South Sudan, which in turn would surrender it to Museveni’s crony network of speculators, is a likely ingenuous arrow in his quiver for vindictive politics.


That Magwi in South Sudan and Lamwo in Uganda are both Acholi homelands is a saving grace and vexatious, all at once. It should not matter whether the border is extended into Uganda or South Sudan. But this requires that the communities on either side realize the real fight is not about where the colonial boundaries that separate them are, but to act jointly to stave off possible collusion by Ugandan and South Sudanese politico-military elite from illegally dispossessing them of their land and marginalising them economically.


Africans without borders


As such, the solution to the problems of land and border disputes conditioned by outdated colonial boundaries, but exacerbated by greed, corruption and speculation by politico-military elite, does not lie in more effective border controls and militant form of nationalism based on a narrow and fictitious citizenship and identity criteria of the unreformed colonial state. What is needed is for the Republic of South Sudan and Uganda to demonstrate revolutionary leadership and Pan African spirit by renouncing and eliminating colonial fiction that pits community against community. Once done, divided communities automatically become citizens of the two states, with full rights in political and democratic processes and economic and cultural life of both countries.

This proposition implies that the Awori brothers-Moody as Kenyan and Aggrey as Ugandan-would not have needed to be too careful about their familial relationship. Such coyness would be unnecessary because all Samias are one and indivisible citizens of both Uganda and Kenya in an intersecting and unifying, rather than dividing and excluding national boundary lines. Such fluid boundaries will also reduce incidents of border conflicts in countries where the same cultural groups live on both sides of the divide. It will also re-adjust and correct the social and political status of communities who are small, dominated and marginalised minorities across the border in one country than in the other.


Clearly, this still leaves the question of inter-community land disputes and conflicts and how natural resources would be shared unresolved. In matters of land, I would have more faith in respective traditional and cultural authorities and mechanisms to handle this more equitably and effectively than the corrupt post-colonial state and its judicial systems and officials. And on how natural resources would benefit two or more intersecting states, the exploitation of such a resource would be collective and benefit shared equally, with the host community being the primary and major beneficiary. This will minimise, if not eliminate resource conflicts among states with split linguistic groups around resource rich frontiers.


Furthermore, renouncing colonial boundaries should also provide a much firmer and more organic basis for East African or African integration from bottom up. Were our leaders driven by the needs and aspirations of our people, region and continent, rather than that of global capital, integration should have begun with people to people initiatives rather than states, political and business interests.


If South Sudan and Uganda have truly ‘revolutionary leaders’ who embrace progressive politics, there couldn’t be a better  opportunity than now for them and their respective border communities to spark what could change the face of Africa and its politics for good.