Northern Uganda Messenger Post

Are Acholi proponents of backwardness or justified sceptics of state-led development? The land issue in Acholi has mainly been looked at from journalistic reportage or conventional ethnic or regional analytical framework, which precludes any serious analysis and conceptual understanding of issues beyond their obvious manifestations. Lacking in theoretical depth, whether of the contending theories of social change and historical development, and taking as an article of faith, the class neutrality of the state, it simply amplifies dogmatic state assertions, which portrays the dispute as a struggle between the forces of change or modernisation, against those of reaction of primordial irrationalities. Their tacit logic is that Acholiland is a backward pre-capitalist social formation, under siege by the forces of traditionalism who use tribal ideologies to resist modernisation, so that the market and capitalist formations are necessary as agencies for socioeconomic transformation (See Achol...

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...