Northern Uganda Messenger Post

Many commentators have sought to explain Museveni’s continuing life-and-death hold onto power in terms of a desire to protect his family and cronies’ ill-gotten wealth and property. While that may be partly true, his greater motivation is to continue to control and protect classified information about tactical and strategic campaigns they employed during the guerrilla war in Luwero, as well as counter insurgency strategies used in northern Uganda. The perpetuation of the official versions told by the NRM/A is key to the NRM project of re-writing Ugandan social and political history, particularly around Luwero and northern Uganda. No doubt, there is the official, popular, filtered and controlled versions the public has been fed; and there is the classified version which only the fighters and senior political ideologues are privy to. Witness the swift and decisive action to stop in its tracks, the bush war stories series in the Daily Monitor in 2004, when some bush war “heroes” unguard...

If you spent four months weaving your way about and sleeping in IDP camps as I did during the last electoral mobilisation and campaigns, you would understand how it is indisputable that 1000 people should die a week in Acholiland. And that 41% of such deaths should be children under five, and also that the rate of violent deaths should be three times higher than in Iraq. Amazingly, Museveni and his henchmen are busy discounting and dismissing such studies, reports and policy briefings, without as little as offering situation reports and policy briefs that undermine such findings. Once you visit and sleep in these camps, and have spoken with the residents, you cannot help but come out feeling, perception and conclusion that, the Buturos and military spokesmen speak about a different country, when they issue denials on events in northern Uganda. Official denials and the rosy pictures they paint, whether by understatements or dismissive bravado, clash very sharply with lived daily realit...

Acholi Unity as a goal is a mirage. Whether unity of action or shared values or common aspirations that rely on our alleged common culture or ethnicity, or common external threats, is a goal that does not exist and therefore cannot be achieved. Not that we do not want or wish we could, or that it would not be a good thing, but it is just that, it is the stage of social and economic development that history, the world and human nature have imposed on us. In my view therefore, setting achievement of Acholi unity as a goal, urging Acholi unity rather than harmony, collaboration and coordination of individual and group interests in order to achieve certain shared but limited objectives that may benefit the majority or everyone equally, is an illusion. It is unbelievable to some that I would even say a thing like this. But I think we need to realise that the world keeps changing and Acholi society is part of the world and it has undergone comparable changes herself. Unless we can accept suc...

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 disconne...