Northern Uganda Messenger Post

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...

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...