Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi

In Uganda, evictions of the poor from land by the dominant economic class have been common in the last two decades. They have mainly been classified under the broader rubric of land grabbing. Land evictions are a microcosm of Uganda’s political economy and offshoots of lapses in land governance and the unending land reform processes.

Eviction scenes are usually characterised by the following: a group of people (most often hired goons) destroying crops; a grader destroying structures or debris from already destroyed structures; victims trying to salvage their belongings from the debris (usually basic household items such as overused mattresses, plastic plates, cups, and clothing); stick-wielding victims voicing their frustration in front of media microphones/cameras, affirming their claim to the land and calling on a powerful agency or a politician to intervene (at times these calls to intervene are directed at the government using the popular Luganda phrase, “tusaba gavumenti etuyambe” (we are begging for the government’s intervention/help); women crying profusely, pacing around the scene, asking rhetorical questions (usually concerning their dire helplessness as widows/sole providers for their families and wondering how they will pay off that loan or feed the children now that the food is destroyed); and people in uniform wielding guns and court papers purportedly authorising the eviction. This description of evictions is a metaphorical representation of the actors, powers, agendas, and interests at play in land contestations. It is usually the face of other invisible forces deeply rooted in the letter of the law, power play, and asserted by a court of law through interpretation or misinterpretation. The scene can be appropriately captioned “noise verses uniforms, guns and court papers”. The poor can only amplify their voices of dissent by wielding sticks, while the instruments of state authority (uniforms, guns and court papers) remain in the hands of their tormentors.

The scene also presents a number of dichotomies: a class struggle between the underclass/poor and the dominant economic class, between the powerful and the subordinated/oppressed, citizens and subjects. The constitutional notion of citizenship bestows upon all Ugandans the right to state protection. Land conflicts have however presented a dynamic where the rich and powerful are more of citizens than others, for they can use the law and state institutions to assert their “entitlement” against the underclass/poor. Those who lose their land in this context become “subjects” whose claims are dismissed as merely an annoyance rather than “rights” worth defending. The “subjects” can only cry out for help as a privilege rather than a right. This is evidence that the most recent land law reforms of 1995, 1998 and 2010 have not yet benefited the majority of victims of land evictions. Their social-economic existence is destabilised. To them, the law is a powerful tool in the hands of the economically and politically dominant group.

The Constitution of Uganda recognises four tenure systems: mailo, freehold, customary and leasehold. Evictions have taken place on land held under all four tenure systems across the country. Not every eviction is unlawful, but unlawful evictions abound in Uganda’s history, and have intensified in recent times. They cause land conflicts, destabilise society, retard land-based production and curtail free marketability of land. Debates on land reform are frequent and the country is currently debating another range of reforms on the mailo system of land tenure.

There is need to understand the dialectic views about the need for reforms in this area, and I offer some discussion here. I take a teleological approach, avoiding the polemic debates on how we got here and focussing instead on what we could learn from and do about the sticking issues in the land reform processes in Uganda. I also explore the pro-commercialisation and other efforts aimed at land restitution in other countries, as well as the politics of the “entangled” interests on mailo land in Uganda, and how this shapes the efforts and politics of disentanglement. Land law has been used as a tool in the politics of entanglement and disentanglement. I argue that the law is not the magic bullet; it rarely addresses the underlying intersectional quandaries of a social, economic and political nature that normally converge in the spaces of the poor/underprivileged. Law should be coupled with other legitimate efforts aimed at disentangling the convergence of the issues referred to above and understanding the roles played by the various actors in land conflicts and their resolution.

Land reforms elsewhere

Land reforms elsewhere are characterised by scenes where (just like in Uganda) voices of protest confront forces wielding state authority sanctioned through law reforms, the poor pitted against the economically empowered in the struggle over land. A number of African countries have undertaken land reforms in the recent past, achieving—according to official supporting discourses—a constellation of gains ranging from correcting historical flaws, improving tenure security, promoting the capital value of land, and protecting indigenous communities, among others. South Africa and Zimbabwe stand out in the Southern Africa region. South African reforms have included a broader agenda to annihilate the dangers associated with the land dispossessions perpetrated against the black population during the apartheid era. Debates about racial inequalities, and restitution and/or compensation have been current in addition to communal land tenure policy initiatives aimed at vesting land in tribal authorities and streamlining its use and access within that traditional body politic. Expropriation without compensation is another hot debate in the South African context.

Land law has been used as a tool in the politics of entanglement and disentanglement.

In Zimbabwe, a number of land reforms took place in turbulent fashion in the early 2000s (of course there were efforts at land reform in the 1980s). Like in South Africa, reforms involved reversion of land from white to black farmers (put simply). The views about these reforms have been divergent with some believing that they have helped the small-scale farmer to gain ground in the agricultural market economy, while others see the initiatives as disastrous and unsustainable in economic and human rights terms (if all, both black and white, are considered citizens).

Next door in Kenya, the most recent reforms were heralded by the inauguration of the 2010 Constitution followed by the new land law of 2012 and the Community Land Act of 2016, among others. As elsewhere, the reforms were justified on a number of bases including inequitable distribution of land, historical injustices, landlessness among the poor, increasing trends of land grabbing, and the need to streamline communal land use. In her recent book, The Struggle for Land and Justice in Kenya, Ambreena Manji argues that one of the problems with reform in Kenya is the parochial view of “land reform” as reform of land law that leads to focus being placed on reforms within the land management and administration institutions that are pivotal to the exercise of bureaucratic power.

This approach diverts attention from the broader questions of access, land justice for the poor and unequal distribution. Manji further believes, “We must attend to insurgent knowledge and ideas of change.” In essence, any reform programme should aim at deeper and broader change beyond legal reforms in order to address the plight of the subaltern poor caught up in contestations over land. Such an approach questions the dominant but rather rhetorical narratives of the state as the protector of rights and people, to address situations where symbols of state power (uniforms, guns and court papers) are ironically applied to entrench a skewed power position to intimidate and dispossess victims in land conflicts/evictions.

The Uganda case

Public debate in Uganda has recently been dominated by discussions on the reform of the mailo land tenure system, with views varying from those that believe it needs to be reformed (and may be abolished) to those that believe that the mailo system does not need to be reviewed. Uganda has gone through a series of land reforms over the course of the country’s history, with each reform influenced by the political, social and economic factors prevailing at the time. In 1975, President Idi Amin abolished all perpetual land ownership tenure systems and vested all land in the state, which granted periodic leases to land users. The post-1995 land law reforms re-vested land back in the citizens to hold by virtue of the revived tenure systems (mailo, freehold, customary, in addition to leasehold). Unlike in the past, the post-1995 period saw heightened contestations over land and witnessed classic evictions.

The 1900 Agreement is often seen as the precursor of mega-reforms in the mailo system of land holding. The Land Law of 1908 introduced reforms to address the lack of clarity identified in the findings of the Carter Committee of 1907. Among the issues raised was whether the 1900 agreement introduced a new system which changed the reciprocal obligations that existed between landlords and tenants (embedded in custom and tradition) prior to its signing. The 1908 law defined and drew the boundaries of the mailo system introduced under the 1900 agreement. Mailo land could be transferred to anyone in the Protectorate (outside the clan system of Buganda) and it was no longer land exclusively governed based on Ganda customary law. In 1928, the Busulu and Envujjo law attempted to reorganize the landlord-tenant relationship by, among others, stipulating the rent payable and other terms of use. This was following tenants’ complaints of exploitation by landlords who were charging exorbitant rents. In 1975, mailo interests were by law commuted to leaseholds when land was nationalised, a position that was reformed through the Constitution of Uganda in 1995 and operationalised through the Land Act of 1998.

Any reform programme should aim at deeper and broader change beyond legal reforms in order to address the plight of the subaltern poor.

Reforms are not new. The question is why haven’t they delivered on their agenda to address the so- called “land question”? Can reforms focusing on the mailo land tenure (mainly in central Uganda) address all the problematic land issues at a national level or those associated with other tenure systems such as the vast customary tenure predominant in the north? Are we asking the right questions to guide reform processes? Are we addressing the right problems? Does the operating environment allow for clear and focused reforms? Can focus on “law reform” (to refer to Manji’s conceptualisation) without addressing the underlying social-political issues resolve the multifaceted nature of challenges encountered in the mailo system?

All these questions have one answer. Land is a part of the political repertoire and therefore efforts to bring about land reforms involve managing politics, society, and the economy, yet the balance is not easy to strike. Although cumbersome for some, the unresolved land issues are exploitable “stock”’ for others. Beneficiaries of the “stock” would therefore not opt for approaches that resolve the problem once and for all, since that would not be just a trifling inconvenience but a big loss.

The “miles” of “entangled” land

Any attempt at reforming the mailo system requires a broader approach using multiple lenses to disentangle the various legal and social-political issues that characterise its structure and practice. Broadly, the mailo system is entangled in class, religion, culture, politics, etc. Specifically, it is first entangled in history, conjuring historical rationales and claims that are also embedded in culture/traditions whose contemporary relevance may come into question. Who was who and who is who in terms of control of the centres of power. Does the new generation embrace the shifts (if at all) in the power centres? Second, the mailo system is entangled in the argument about the fairness of land distribution under the 1900 agreement and its contemporary relevance in debates about the classes of “victims” and “beneficiaries” in the mailo land tenure system.

Third, mailo system is entangled in the geopolitical imperative to promote registration and free marketability of land as a part of the broader goal of promoting a neoliberal model of development. In Uganda – The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation, the country is described as an exemplar of African countries that have fully embraced neoliberal restructuring that has resulted in significant economic growth, but also in inequality, concentration of wealth, corruption, and privileging production paradigms (as opposed to others of social value). Neoliberalism has also influenced land reforms by commodifying land and placing it in the markets, by increasing the relationship between land and commerce, and by changing the exchange value of land.

Fourth, mailo land is also entangled in the national political agenda on land reform, officially presented as a pro-poor logic; reform the land laws to strengthen protection of land occupants against land title holders. Fifth is the cultural issue where talk of mailo land evokes debate about the monarchy of Buganda and its power over land (mainly the official mailo land), considered trust land held by the King in trust for the people of Buganda. Crucially, land in Buganda is currently occupied by people/social groups from all over the country, including the powerful, and “foreign investors”.

Land is a part of the political repertoire and therefore efforts to bring about land reforms involve managing politics, society, and the economy.

Understanding these entanglements is invaluable in debates on mailo land reforms. One should take a microscopic view of them all in order to decipher them; use them as a guide to identify the actors to engage with; transcend blemished determinist economic views in the rationalisation of the purpose of reforms; promote debate and constructive engagement; avoid ideational and discursive hegemonic approaches shaped by subjectivities in perspective.

With the above, the law may indeed not be the silver bullet. It contains positive initiatives that would go a long way to solving the problem, but at the same time, it has contributed to the stalemate thereby further entangling the mailo tenure system. The reforms have largely not delivered emancipation for the oppressed, or corrected the power imbalances and the resulting injustices.

Beyond the law

The Constitution and the Land Act aim to “streamline” the “relationship” between the landlord and the tenant. This presupposes continuation of the dual/conflicting rights on the same piece of land for title holders and tenants/occupants, with some changes in the reciprocal rights and obligations for both, and amicable social co-existence. The land by implication remains entangled in the dual claims of the landlord and the tenant, albeit in a regulated manner. There are a number of initiatives in the Land Act aimed at regulating the landlord/tenant relationship, a few of which are highlighted here.

First, the tenant is guaranteed security of occupancy and protected against eviction on condition that s/he pays rent to the landlord. The rent is “nominal”/“non-commercial”, fixed through government bureaucracies with the resulting “coercive security of occupancy” for the tenants. The landlords are obliged to receive the rent (even against their will) and refrain from evicting the tenants.

This has elements of imposing “edifice” since market forces are locked out in the determination of rent and the social good of the tenant is considered to be of paramount importance. It is believed that such approaches of regulating rent entrench the social aspects of the landlord/tenant relationship in recognition of the historical dimension of the mailo system of land holding. The tenants can occupy the land as long as they pay the nominal rent to the landlords, which sustains the existence of dual rights on the same piece of land.

Second, the tenant can apply for certificate as evidence of his/her occupancy with the consent of the landlord. This is then registered as an encumbrance on the landlord’s title. It is ironical to expect that the landlord will accept to further entangle the land, and limit its application in the market.

Third, the landlord and tenant can jointly hold the land or equally agree to share it such that each can exclusively hold and occupy a portion. The skewed power patterns between landlord and tenant most times hinder the possibility of an amicable and fair agreement/outcome.

Fourth, under the Land Act, the tenant may request the landlord for a mailo title, freehold (resulting in subdivision of land and grant of exclusive ownership to the tenant on agreed terms), or a lease. Considering the fact that the majority of tenants are financially constrained, yet land is of high value and in high demand on the open market, it is unlikely that such negotiations would yield in the interest of the tenant. Offering the land on the competitive market is normally a more viable option. In some instances, the lack of assistance from a third party to participate in the negotiations exposes the tenant to exploitation by the landlord. In essence, unless the Land Fund provided for in the law is capitalised and applied to facilitate land acquisitions by tenants on mailo land, land will remain unaffordable to many.

The reforms have largely not delivered emancipation for the oppressed, or corrected the power imbalances and the resulting injustices.

Fifth, the law allows either landlord or tenant to sell their interest to the other or in case of a sale on the market, to consider the other as the one with priority to purchase. A 2016 study that I conducted for the Public interest Law Clinic of Makerere University finds that realities on the ground render many of the initiatives above mere perceptions of protection that fall short of the lived experience of people in a landlord/tenant relationship on private mailo land.

A 2010 amendment to the Land Law allows the landlord to sell the encumbered land to a new person who steps into the landlord/tenant relationship with the tenant(s), yet the tenant who sells in violation of the law (offering first to the landlord) commits a criminal offence punishable by law. This change (in favour of the landlord) perpetuates the entangled situation of the mailo system, which at times leads to evictions by new landlords.

The big question remains: how can the layers of entanglement be disentangled? To eradicate the dual and overlapping rights (of landlords and tenants) on the same land, the best two options are, first, mutual agreements to share land such that both landlord and tenant get (exclusive) registered title and, second, grant of leaseholds by landlords to tenants. The law makes provision for government support to acquire registered interest in land through the land fund. The law is to some extent confirming Manji’s argument, since it has not yet delivered on its promise. A lot more needs to be done in order to achieve the promises set out.

The dangers associated with the unintended consequences of going too far back in history outweigh the benefits.

Addressing the issues using the already existing initiatives is advantageous in many ways, and the assumption is that they are a product of consensus. This is more a from–now–onwards approach to the problem, conveniently avoiding peeling the discursive frames rooted in history to establish right and wrong. Remedying historical wrongs can be important, but some scholars (such as Jenna Thompson in Taking responsibility for the past: Reparations and Historical Injustice commenting about the choice between restitution and compensation) have argued that at times the dangers associated with the unintended consequences of going too far back in history outweigh the benefits.

For Uganda, the dual and overlapping rights to mailo land—with landlords holding registered title and tenants claiming occupancy rights—is a product of historical events heralded by the 1900 agreement. This situation perpetuates land conflicts and evictions. To resolve it, it will be necessary to ensure the active involvement/agreement of all those who are affected (landlords and tenants, and other actors). Also needed is government support to ensure that such agreements do not overly burden the weaker party (the tenant with occupancy). This will be facilitated by the gathering of information on the amount of land that is currently under the mailo system, how many landlords and tenants there are, how many are absentee, the location of the land, how much mailo land is without tenants, etc. This will fill the information gap and facilitate the reform process. Reform processes should provide a platform to discuss the problematic land issues in the whole country beyond the central region, by all citizens beyond the Kabakaship and the presidency.

In the meantime, rampant evictions are an indicator of the law’s and the system’s failure to address the sticky issues regarding mailo land. Yet land remains an arena for the entrenchment of class differentiation, portrayal of power and fear of the pro-commercialisation reforms that may lead to loss of land. The fact that mailo land is entangled has not stopped the rich and investors from evicting the poor. The entangled nature of the tenure is a “mess” that is exploited by the evicting class with impunity. Disentangling the tenure through provision of clear interests/proprietary rights (leases or mailo titles) could equip the disenfranchised tenants with the tools to assert their rights. If not, the metaphorical scene described here will remain the hallmark of land relations in Uganda.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi All sides involved in the International Criminal Court (ICC) trial of Dominic Ongwen agreed that he did not voluntarily join the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and that he was subjected to the group’s violent initiation rituals to force him to submit to the LRA.

What they disagreed on is whether Ongwen’s brutal induction into the LRA meant that he was himself a victim throughout the 27 years he was a member of the LRA, that he was always submissive and incapable of making his own decisions, including whether to escape the group.

Ongwen’s trial covered only a fraction of the time he was with the LRA— the period between 1 July 2002 and 31 December 2005. In 2002, Ongwen was 24 years old, well past the age of 15 years, the upper limit for him to be classified as a child solider under the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding law.

Ongwen’s lawyers advanced the “once a victim, always a victim” argument. The prosecution disagreed, pointing to the testimony of multiple former LRA members who, just like Ongwen, were abducted and forced to join the group but later chose to escape the LRA despite the threat of death if they were recaptured. Lawyers representing the victims said their clients had shared a similar a experience of their LRA superiors “beating the civilian” out of them but they later chose to leave the group at great risk to themselves.

The three judges of Trial Chamber IX agreed with the arguments of the prosecution and the victims’ lawyers when they unanimously convicted Ongwen of 61 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity on February 4 this year.

Presiding Judge Bertram Schmitt and Judges Péter Kovács and Raul C. Pangalangan also considered similar arguments when determining what sentence to give Ongwen. They sentenced him to 25 years imprisonment in a 2-1 decision issued on May 6.

The duress defence

In their 1,077-page judgement, Judges Schmitt, Kovács and Pangalangan explained why they concluded that when Ongwen committed the crimes he was charged with he was not under “a threat of imminent death” nor was he under threat of “continuing bodily harm.” These are the two elements Ongwen’s lawyers needed to demonstrate in their argument that their client was under duress when he committed the crimes he was charged with.

“In fact, based on the above, the Chamber finds that Dominic Ongwen was not in a situation of complete subordination vis-à-vis [LRA leader] Joseph Kony. The evidence indicates that in the period of the charges, Dominic Ongwen did not face any prospective punishment by death or serious bodily harm when he disobeyed Joseph Kony. Dominic Ongwen also had a realistic possibility of leaving the LRA, which he did not pursue. Rather he rose in rank and position, including during the period of the charges,” said the judges.

The judges further addressed the issue of Ongwen being a victim because of his abduction when he was nine years old and concluded,

“The Chamber has duly considered the above facts underlying these submissions [by the defence]. In addition, and while acknowledging that indeed Dominic Ongwen had been abducted at a young age by the LRA, the Chamber notes that Dominic Ongwen committed the relevant crimes when he was an adult and, importantly, that, in any case, the fact of having been (or being) a victim of a crime does not constitute, in and of itself, a justification of any sort for the commission of similar or other crimes.”

Dominic Ongwen also had a realistic possibility of leaving the LRA, which he did not pursue.

One reason the judges reached the conclusions they did about Ongwen was that dozens of witnesses who testified before them described having suffered similar experiences to what Ongwen underwent in the LRA. They testified about their abduction at a young age. They testified about their brutal initiation into the LRA. They testified about their constant fear of being killed on suspicion of wanting to escape but, in many cases, they overcame that fear or resigned themselves to the possibility of being killed and chose to escape anyway.

In their majority decision on Ongwen’s sentencing, Judges Schmitt and Kovács said they took into account Ongwen’s abduction by the LRA when he was nine years old and what he went through as a child. They said they weighed that against the gravity of the crimes for which they convicted Ongwen. Judge Pangalangan said he agreed with their reasoning regarding Ongwen’s sentencing but he disagreed with the sentence itself. In a partially dissenting opinion, Judge Pangalangan said he would have sentenced Ongwen to 30 years in prison. All the judges were agreed, however, that they would not sentence Ongwen to life imprisonment as the lawyers for the victims had asked.

Ongwen’s age

Another issue Judges Schmitt, Kovács and Pangalangan determined in their February 4 judgment was Ongwen’s age and the year he was abducted. After analysing the different testimonies placed before them, the judges concluded that Ongwen was abducted in 1987 and that he was nine years old at the time.

The judges decided to make a determination on Ongwen’s age and the year he was abducted because, as Ongwen’s case proceeded, different people gave Ongwen a different age at the time of his abduction. They included Ongwen himself who said he was 14 years old when he was abducted. He said this on the first day he appeared before the ICC in January 2015.

In 1987, when Ongwen was abducted on his way to school, the LRA was known as the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces before it later changed its name to the Lord’s Resistance Army. In the period during which he committed the crimes for which he was convicted and sentenced, Ongwen was a commander with the LRA’s Sinia Brigade. Between 2002 and 2005, Ongwen was first commander of the Oka battalion of Sinia Brigade and was later promoted to other command positions before being named overall brigade commander.

The crimes

The crimes for which Ongwen was convicted and sentenced include his role in attacks on four camps for internally displaced people in the Gulu and Lira districts of northern Uganda. Ongwen was also convicted of murder, persecution, pillaging, torture and attacking civilians in the Pajule, Odek, Lukodi, and Abok IDP camps. The attack on Pajule took place on 10 October 2003, the Odek attack on 29 April 2004, Lukodi on 19 May 2004 and Abok on 8 June 2004. These IDP camps and others in northern Uganda have since been closed and the people have returned to their villages, especially after the LRA left northern Uganda as part of the Juba-mediated peace process that ran from 2006 to 2008.

Ongwen was also convicted on 11 counts of sexual and gender-based crimes he committed himself. These include forcefully marrying five women identified in the verdict by their pseudonyms P-099, P-101, P-214, P-226 and P-227. Other sexual and gender-based crimes for which Ongwen was convicted include rape, torture, sexual slavery, enslavement and forced pregnancy. He was convicted of committing these crimes against seven women.

The former commander in the LRA’s Sinia brigade was also convicted of indirectly committing sexual and gender-based crimes against other women. Ongwen was also convicted of two counts of conscripting children under the age of 15 into the LRA and using them to participate in attacks.

Ongwen’s conviction on 61 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity is a record at the ICC. It is unlikely that Ongwen would be holding such a record had he not surrendered himself in January 2015. The ICC issued an arrest warrant in July 2005 but Ongwen evaded capture for close to 10 years. By the time he surrendered himself to a rebel group in the Central African Republic in January 2015, there had been an unsuccessful multinational effort in that country to capture Kony and other LRA commanders. So, what led to Ongwen’s surrender in January 2015? Ongwen did not testify during his trial so the reasons for his surrender remain unclear.

A prosecutor comes calling

But how did the northern Uganda conflict that Ongwen was part of end up at the ICC? The obvious answer would be that in December 2003 Uganda asked the ICC to investigate the atrocities committed in the region. This was the first such request to be received at the ICC after it began work in July 2002. The request led the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) to investigate the atrocities in northern Uganda and request judges to issue an arrest warrant for five LRA commanders, including Ongwen. The arrest warrant was issued in July 2005 and, almost 10 years later, Ongwen surrendered to a rebel group in the Central African Republic and was later handed over to the ICC in January 2015.

However, it turns out that the ICC’s involvement in Uganda was not that straightforward. Uganda did not simply seek the ICC’s intervention—the official ICC line on the issue. On the contrary, the ICC’s first prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, actively encouraged Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to seek the ICC’s intervention in northern Uganda. The mid-2003 discussion between Moreno Ocampo and Museveni did not seal the deal; Museveni referred the matter to the Ministries of Justice and Defence and there was debate on the pros and cons before Uganda sent the ICC a referral request.

According to Phil Clark in his 2018 book Distant Justice, Phil Clark says that it is Moreno Ocampo who first broached the subject. In short, Moreno Ocampo did what in legal circles is sometimes referred to as ambulance chasing.

According to Clark, Moreno Ocampo reached out to the Ugandan government in London in May 2003. He based his information on an interview with an unnamed Ministry of Defence official that corroborated a 27 July 2009 report in The EastAfrican.

At the time Moreno Ocampo made that initial approach to the Ugandan government, the ICC was almost a year old and it had no case to its name.

In his book, Distant Justice, Clark argues that the Office of the Prosecutor actively pursuing cases in the early days of the court underlined, “a view within the Court—and particularly within the OTP—that, as a new global institution with substantial financial and diplomatic backing from State Parties, it needed to open investigations and prosecutions quickly to be seen as a legitimate actor on the world stage.”

Ongwen’s conviction on 61 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity is a record at the ICC.

This is echoed by an unnamed ICC official Clark interviewed in 2006. “What use is a court without cases? We wanted to hit the ground running and show the world that we’re a force to be reckoned with,” the official told Clark.

When Moreno Ocampo initiated discussions with Uganda on a possible referral, he found a government thinking through what the court meant for world politics. Lucien Tibaruha, Uganda’s Solicitor-General of at the time, told Clark in a March 2006 interview that after Moreno Ocampo got in touch with Museveni, the issue of an ICC referral was passed on to both the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Defence. Tibaruha told Clark that it was the Ministry of Defence (MoD) that followed up on the issue with the ICC.

“They started talking to the Court and they kept us informed. MoD is in charge of day-to-day ICC affairs. . . . In our referral we told the ICC the LRA is out of reach by the Ugandan government. We asked the Court to go get them. It’s clear we’re unable to prosecute the LRA because they’re currently outside the jurisdiction of Uganda,” Tibaruha told Clark.

A Ministry of Defence official who spoke to Clark on condition of anonymity gave him a similar account of how Moreno Ocampo initiated the discussions with Uganda.

“In all truth, it was a blessing because we’d tried everything against the LRA—[peace] talks, military operations, amnesties. We needed a new approach and here was something new, something unexpected,” the Ministry of Defence official told Clark in August 2011.

The Ministry of Defence official also told Clark that Museveni thought going the ICC route, “would be a good way to get rid of Kony and the [other LRA leaders] but he wanted to know what we in [in MoD] thought.”

“We said it was the right approach but some in the government, like the Ministry of Justice, weren’t so sure. They thought the ICC could be turned around and used against the UPDF (Uganda People’s Defence Force). . . . Ultimately, the President agreed with us,” said the Ministry of Defence official.

What former Ugandan Solicitor-General Lucien Tibaruha told Clark about the military taking the lead in dealing with the ICC was in evidence during Ongwen’s trial. To corroborate witness testimony against Ongwen, the prosecution relied on Ugandan intelligence and police intercepts of LRA radio communications.

The UPDF and the Internal Security Organisation (ISO) recorded their intercepts of LRA radio communications. The UPDF and ISO members who were assigned to intercept LRA radio communications also took notes at the same time as they were recording the broadcasts. Separately, members of the Ugandan police force took notes of LRA radio communications they intercepted but they did not record those broadcasts. During Ongwen’s trial, it emerged that the UPDF had been intercepting LRA radio communications since 1995 and the ISO since 2000.

In total, the prosecution disclosed 600 cassettes of recordings of intercepted LRA radio communications and 22,000 pages of notes and other material related to those intercepts.

During the conflict in northern Uganda between the LRA and government forces, LRA commanders talked to each other and to their superiors via two-day radio. Former LRA radio operators who testified during Ongwen’s trial said some of the radios they used had been seized during attacks on the compounds of aid agencies working in northern Uganda.

The former LRA radio operators also said they used a cipher to communicate sensitive information over radio because they were aware that Ugandan security agencies were listening in on their conversations. They said the cipher changed regularly.

Moreno Ocampo did what in legal circles is sometimes referred to as ambulance chasing.

In addition to the cassettes and other material the Ugandan government handed over to the OTP, eight members of Uganda’s intelligence agency, military, and police testified during Ongwen’s trial. Four of them told the court about their routine as they intercepted LRA communications and described the cipher the LRA used while communicating sensitive information over radio. They said they learnt about the cipher from notebooks and materials seized by the Ugandan military during attacks on LRA positions.

Among the Ugandan military officers who testified was the top lawyer for military intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Nabaassa Kanyogonya. He told the court that the different intercept programmes had not been started with the aim of building a court case, but rather to aid the military in its fight against the LRA. Kanyogonya did say, however, that over time they also investigated LRA commanders and gathered evidence on 15 of them, including Ongwen. He said this evidence was handed over to the ICC.

Other LRA atrocities

Ongwen’s trial was limited to a three-and-a-half-year period and to attacks on four places in the districts of Gulu and Lira. His trial did not cover the span of the 20 years during which the Lord’s Resistance Army killed, brutalised and abducted tens of thousands of people in northern Uganda.

But it is easy to think Ongwen was being tried for all the atrocities committed in the name of the LRA. After all, three of the senior LRA commanders indicted by the ICC together with Ongwen are dead. The fourth—long-time LRA leader Joseph Kony—has evaded arrest to date despite a six-year multinational hunt for him and other remnants of the LRA in the remote areas of Central African Republic, Congo and South Sudan.

Outside the ICC, it is only in Uganda where a former LRA commander, Thomas Kwoyelo, is on trial. The proceedings against Kwoyelo began in 2011 at the High Court and his trial is ongoing.

To corroborate witness testimony against Ongwen, the prosecution relied on Ugandan intelligence and police intercepts of LRA radio communications.

Apart from the court cases, an amnesty programme for former rebels has also been in effect in Uganda and from the time the amnesty law came into force in 2000, more than 13,000 former LRA members have been given amnesty for their roles in the rebel group. Most were rank-and-file LRA members and, like Ongwen, a number were former senior or mid-ranking LRA members who were either his superiors or were his equals between 2002 and 2005. Some of them testified during Ongwen’s trial.

During the period between 2002 and 2005 when Ongwen committed the crimes for which he was convicted by the ICC, foreign news agencies regularly quoted 20,000 as the number of children abducted by the LRA, an estimate that was attributed to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Going by that estimate and subtracting from it the number of former LRA members granted amnesty by the Ugandan government, this means that as many as 7,000 people are unaccounted for in the northern Uganda conflict. How many of these are people who were killed during the 20-year conflict in northern Uganda? How many of them are people who survived the conflict but have not been able to return to their families?

These are not just academic questions. A clansman of Ongwen’s who was abducted together with him testified about these issues during the trial. Joe Kakanyero told the court that throughout the 27 years Ongwen was with the LRA the family was never sure whether he was alive or dead. Kakanyero, who testified for the defence, said it was only when they saw Ongwen on television making his first appearance at the ICC that they knew for sure he was alive and where he was.

Ongwen has been tried, convicted and sentenced and his family knows he is at the ICC Detention Centre. Thousands of survivors of the 20-year northern Uganda conflict do not know whether their sister or brother, mother or father, aunt or uncle is alive or dead.

–

Tom Maliti covered Dominic Ongwen’s trial for the International Justice Monitor from when it opened in December 2016 to when the judgment was issued in February this year.

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Follow us on Twitter. Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi

“Build Back Better” is Developmentspeak for a particular approach to disaster recovery. The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery defines it as “an approach to post-disaster recovery that reduces vulnerability to future disasters and builds community resilience to address physical, social, environmental, and economic vulnerabilities and shocks.” It looks forward to the post-COVID era and the potential to rebuild health, education and other human development systems in a fairer, greener and more robust way to minimise the likelihood and impact of future disasters.

The leaders of the USA and the UK use it frequently, Joe Biden more often than Boris Johnson. Unicef, which has mopped up Africa’s vaccine loans, has also adopted the phrase and has used it to signal better vaccine supply systems in the future. But BBB has been ridiculed in British social media and some Americans are irked by Biden’s “my Build Back Better Agenda” refrain repeated with every new policy announcement. African leaders have not yet adopted the mantra and there is hardly a trace of BBB on African social media.

At first, it sounded like more of the “revival of Empire” talk that accompanied the Brexit saga. A year into COVID, it is clear that what is being built back is the previous relationship between the developed world and developing countries before it was levelled out by the pandemic—for a brief moment in history, everyone was equally vulnerable. That moment has passed as recovery in developed countries outpaces recovery in Africa. Despite the far fewer deaths in Africa, the continent was more vulnerable to the economic shock caused by the pandemic. Recovery therefore requires more of that which was lacking in economic development prior to the onset of COVID: strong, accountable governance able to make and implement hard decisions.

According to the recently deceased Dr Anthony Mbonye, Uganda began to fail the governance test right at the beginning. The National COVID Task Force set up after the detection of Patient 0 in March 2020 excluded eleven doctors with experience of managing Ebola Virus Disease (of which Uganda has had five outbreaks), Yellow Fever and Cholera, in favour of some chosen on grounds irrelevant to the problem. This may explain why decision-making came to be dominated by the local World Health Organisation representative. Where a Ugandan may have understood the implications of contagion in Uganda, especially along truck routes through the poorest-served regions, the WHO representative was instrumental in lobbying to keep the borders open to truck drivers before their test results were known. During his mission, the representative was accompanied on media platforms by the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health. In his book Dr Mbonye singles out the permanent secretary as part of the problem plaguing Uganda’s health sector. Since then, the rehabilitation of regional hospitals has failed to respond robustly to the Second Wave.

Whatever the development goals, recovery from the pandemic will require money, which is in short supply, with nearly all countries maxed out. Uganda’s public debt increased from 32 per cent to 37.5 per cent of GDP (an increase of ten percentage points since 2015). The current account deficit rose from US$1,999 million to US$3,205 million between 2018 and 2019. Debt repayments increased by US$17 million in the same period. The current account deficit that grew by US$740 million was plugged with funds from the World Bank’s Uganda COVID Response and Emergency Preparedness Project (UCREPP) and the US$300 million IMF Rapid Credit Facility in 2019/2020.

In order to put together a COVID Response, Uganda and many other African countries resorted to massive borrowing through the pro forma Emergency Response, Rapid Credit Relief and Economic Recovery programmes designed by the World Bank. Within weeks of Patient 0’s detection, the country was close to a billion dollars in COVID debt (bi-lateral debt not included). Under UCREPP, US$300 million was released by the World Bank for among other things, medical supplies, tax relief for businesses in key economic sectors like tourism and industry and to provide relief for the vulnerable. The IMF formed a joint framework with the Bank and added a credit facility of US$491 million. The African Development Bank chipped in with US$31 million to support the medical response, social protection and maintenance of macroeconomic stability and economic activity. The following year the IMF added another US$700 million while the World Bank has continued to lend under existing programmes.

On the face of it, there are elements of better development solutions within the COVID response. For example, in order to bypass the global shortage of protective gear, funds were made available to build local manufacturing capacity for face shields and masks. The simplicity of it was astounding. Where these items have been imported since Independence in 1962, a solution was found and implemented within weeks.

The main candidate for the Build Back Better approach is the health sector. Prior to the emergency, there were active health sector loans of a combined US$468,360,000 and a history of loan-funded interventions dating back at least twenty years. Still, the stock and quality of health infrastructure was in need of improvement, human resources needed to be enhanced and service delivery to be made more efficient and effective. Every major disbursement related to the COVID Response has been accompanied by a public outcry about irregular procurement methods and the incompetence that led to ICU beds remaining uninstalled for months after delivery. The climax came when over 30 patients died in one day and it was discovered that the new oxygen plant acquired by the national referral hospital was not fit for purpose. The seven USh7 billion (US$1,883,587) contract had been handed over to the daughter-in-law of ruler Yoweri Museveni and her twin sister, a newly elected member of parliament. They are the daughters of disgraced former minister of foreign affairs Sam Kutesa.

A budget of USh32 billion (US$8,996,240) to procure cloth masks from local manufacturers quickly ballooned to over USh70 billion. Awards of contract followed the usual pattern—the government paid a price four times the production cost, contracts were awarded to people within the President’s Office and to a firm in the entertainment industry and to other entities not connected to garment manufacturing. To produce the masks would therefore entail sub-contracting, with the attendant price inflation. Whole districts did not receive any cloth masks.

Every major disbursement related to the COVID Response has been accompanied by a public outcry about irregular procurement methods.

A challenge that has existed since 1995—when I first encountered it—is the storage and distribution of essential drugs and medical supplies. Over the years, massive amounts of expired drugs have either been destroyed or remain in stores. At the same time, stock-outs of essential drugs are a widespread annual occurrence across health facilities. Symptoms have persisted throughout the pandemic. Some quarantine centres were shut down after being in existence for some time without the means to manage patients. Hospitals have lost patients for lack of oxygen. Health workers have been on strike over Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Rivalling Mulago Hospital’s oxygen debacle for incompetence, the medical stores lost an entire donation of half-a-million face masks. COVID test kits and drugs were later discovered being off-loaded from a truck onto private vehicles by a side-road.

The IMF is on track for BBB having reignited a lending relationship with Uganda that has been dormant since 2006. The World Bank has consolidated its dominance especially through its Hands- on Enhanced Implementation Support mechanism or Bank Facilitated Procurement through which it has supported the suppliers of its choice, and captured the African pharmaceuticals market. In this way, any possibility of Uganda cooperating with countries outside Europe and North America on vaccine acquisition and technology transfer has been extinguished. As a result, European and North American vaccine-supplying countries will also Build Back Better, financed by COVID outflows from countries like Uganda.

The easy borrowing under UCREPP was made possible by simply reopening or extending existing projects that were closed or closing in 2020/21: Uganda Health Systems Strengthening Project, East African Public Health Laboratory Networking Project, Agriculture Cluster Development Project (ending in 2021), and the Uganda Multi-Sectoral Food Security Nutrition Project.

New loans unrelated to the pandemic were sought and granted: Roads and Bridges in the Refugee Hosting Districts/Koboko-Yumbe-Moyo Road Corridor Project (US$130m); Uganda Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers (US$300 million additional financing); Securing Uganda’s Natural Resource Base in Protected Areas Project (US$2.7 million); and the Uganda Digital Acceleration Project—GovNet (US$200 million).

The IMF is on track for BBB having reignited a lending relationship with Uganda that has been dormant since 2006. In the meantime, repayments of multi-lateral loans continue uninterrupted. For example, since the pandemic was detected in Uganda in March 2020, an amount of US$8,222,820.93 has been repaid to the World Bank on the 2006 Transport Sector Development Project and US$988,160.75 on the 2011 East African Public Health Laboratory Project.

Appointed by the World Bank’s Assisted Procurement, Unicef has done better than Uganda’s entire COVID Task Force and members of the cabinet. It has carried out its biggest procurement assignment yet under the most stringent conditions. Individuals within Unicef and WHO have added key contacts to their address books, and pandemic management to their skillsets.

By surrendering their responsibility, Ugandan government representatives are now unable to say on any given platform what brand of vaccine would serve the country best, or why and when it is arriving. Tragically, while Iran and Vietnam have tested Cuban vaccines and are building for future pandemics by reaching technology transfer agreements with Cuba’s Finlay Institute of Public Health to create domestic production capacity, Uganda has not taken delivery of a single paid-for phial of vaccine. All the doses received a year and four months since COVID-19 made landfall have been donations.

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Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi During thunderstorms in Kampala the rainwater comes rushing down the hillsides in torrents, through clogged drainage ditches and silty channels, inundating the valleys with sudden floods. The rich make their homes on the hilltops, where the rain runs off their paved compounds. The poor crowd into the wetlands, in one-roomed mizigo rentals sometimes built with small brick walls around the doorway, to hold back the impending tide. In Luganda, an ordinary person is omuntu wa wansi, literally, a “person from down”. It is a metaphor that maps onto the very contours of the city.

The ruptures in Ugandan politics can be seen in the contrast between those valleys and hilltops. January’s tumultuous election was a generational contest and a struggle against dictatorial power. But it was also an eruption of class politics, embodied by the rise of Robert Kyagulanyi, a popstar- turned-politician best known as Bobi Wine. “If parliament will not come to the ghetto,” he said when elected MP in 2017, “then the ghetto will come to parliament.”

For Yoweri Museveni, now in his 36th year of rule, this upsurge is baffling. His self-proclaimed mission is to haul Uganda out of the sectarian logic of peasant society into the industrial age. In that brave new world, class would replace religion and ethnicity as the axis along which politics was organised. But the distortions of his rule have instead perpetuated old logics and blocked economic transformation, creating alternative forms of urban class politics that he can neither understand nor control. This long-read explores the politics and class dynamics of Museveni’s rule.

The next section explores Museveni’s sociological understanding of politics. Subsequent sections examine how its premises are undermined by the economic realities of neoliberalism and the rise of the “hustling class”. The conclusion considers how Museveni maintains his power in the Uganda he has created.

It’s not like in genesis chapter one

In the 1960s the western region of Nkore was going through a social upheaval. The spread of Christianity and colonial education had reconfigured relations between the high-status, cattle- keeping Bahima and the lowlier Bairu cultivators. Cash-cropping and enclosures were fuelling land conflicts. Politics had fractured along religious and ethnic lines.

The young Museveni was a schoolboy in Nkore at the time. He wrote later of his “revulsion at the sectarian politics in Ankole [which] was a microcosm of the sad story of political sectarianism in the whole of Uganda”. In 1967, when he enrolled at the University of Dar es Salaam, he found the intellectual tools to make sense of his experiences. Campus life was a cauldron of socialist and pan- African politics. Museveni attended a study group taught by Walter Rodney, and argued for the necessity of revolutionary violence in his dissertation on Frantz Fanon.

Museveni’s formative years in Nkore and Dar have shaped his politics ever since. They instilled in him the teleological notion that society progresses in stages from “backwardness” to “modernity”. As a young man in Nkore he had trekked between kraals, encouraging nomadic cattle-keepers to “modernise” and settle down. In Dar he learned a certain version of Marx’s historical materialism, with its dialectic unfolding from feudalism to capitalism to the coming era of communism. But he saw that if history had a direction, it could also be thrown off course. He thought that the petty local divisions in Nkore and the great divisions in African society had opened the door to imperialists and left the peasants poor.

In his speeches, Museveni still reiterates these themes of modernisation and unity. And yet they ring hollow. The long war he waged against the Lord’s Resistance Army has left a legacy of trauma and dispossession in the Acholi region of the north. In the Rwenzori mountains families mourn more than 150 people who were massacred by the army in 2016. There is resentment almost everywhere against the westerners, especially Bahima, who dominate the security apparatus. Division endures.

How can we reconcile Museveni’s political thought with his political practice? The temptation is to reach for psychology: to insist either that he was a imposter from the start, or a young idealist corrupted by the spoils of office. But a better solution to the Museveni enigma lies in political economy. One way to read Uganda’s predicament is as a dialogue between Museveni’s ideas, refracted through militarism, and the international economic order which confronted him.

Museveni was never a liberal. Political competition is dangerous, in his view, because opportunists will sow division for personal gain. After fighting his way to power in 1986, he established a system of “no-party democracy”, in which candidates stood for office without party affiliation. His own National Resistance Movement (NRM) was to be the all-encompassing arena of politics, containing the fractures which had once torn the country apart. Calls for multiparty democracy were missing the point, he told other African leaders in 1990. Democracy was like water, which can exist as liquid, vapour or ice: “Yes, I need water, but let me determine the form which I want to use.”

Museveni, with his Marxist training, believed that political institutions were hostage to the material circumstances of their time. “A society like ours here is still preindustrial,” he said at Makerere University in 1991, “which means that it is still primarily a tribal society, and that its stratification is, therefore, vertical. In an industrialised society, on the other hand, you have horizontal linkages and, therefore, horizontal stratification.” For example, British workers had united around their common class interests, rather than their English, Scottish or Welsh identities. “An industrialised society is really a class society,” Museveni continued. “A multiparty system in an industrialised society is likely to be national, while the propensity of a similar arrangement in a preindustrial society is likely to be sectarian.”

That rather self-serving logic underpinned Museveni’s view that the wrong sort of democracy, too soon, threatens cohesion and thus hinders modernisation. Even after a multiparty system was restored in 2005 – partly as a quid pro quo for the lifting of presidential term limits – the NRM remained the substrate of local politics. The leading opposition force, the Forum for Democratic Change, had itself splintered off from the ruling party. Politicians such as Kizza Besigye, the FDC’s tireless leader, were hounded by the police. They were treated less as rivals than as enemies of the state. How do Museveni’s disciples think today? Last August, I spoke with David Mafabi, a presidential advisor and NRM ideologue. In 2017 he had convened a meeting to plot the removal of an age limit from the constitution – the last legal obstacle to Museveni ruling for life.

“We are a nation in the process of becoming, an unstable multinational entity,” Mafabi told me, in the same restaurant where that notorious meeting was held. “Democracy, constitutionalism, are not acts of creation. It’s not like in Genesis chapter one: let there be prosperity, stability and everything. No, it cannot be like that.”

NRM activists buzzed around us in canary-yellow shirts. “With the advent of industrialisation, the advent of capitalism, you’ve had individuals who have acted as midwives so to speak of new societies,” Mafabi continued. “And sub-Saharan African countries are generally overall at that point… Leadership in such societies gravitates around the charismatic, visionary leaders, who in themselves express the objective needs of societies at those critical times.” He listed examples. Cromwell. Washington. Napoleon.

A technocrat’s dream

In 1984 the British journalist William Pike went to meet Museveni in the bush. He found a self- confident guerrilla in faded fatigues with a “faraway look in his eyes… the look of a dreamer, a revolutionary”. But Museveni was also the kind of man who would spend an evening debating exchange rate policy. Minutiae obsessed him.

What kind of economic policy could Ugandans expect when, eighteen months later, a victorious Museveni was sworn in as president? Nobody really knew. Many NRM leaders assumed that their Marxist commander would not allow them to own land or businesses, writes Matthew Rukikaire, who had chaired the movement’s external committee during the war. It was only when Museveni himself started buying up cattle ranches that his comrades “breathed a sigh of relief and followed suit”.

Like many post-colonial intellectuals, Museveni had always been a nationalist first, and a Marxist second. “Socialism is not the main issue for Africa,” he told Pike in the bush, “the crucial issue is disengagement from strangulation by foreign interests.” Perceptive rivals poured scorn on Museveni’s radical credentials. As early as 1980, the socialist thinker Dani Wadada Nabudere dismissed Museveni and his comrades as “petty bourgeois anti-Marxist reactionaries”.

In power, Museveni initially resisted IMF-inspired structural adjustment, and even bartered with Cuba. But with inflation running at 191%, and foreign aid funding half of government expenditure, he soon changed course. “In his search for the new Jerusalem, President Museveni went to the precipice, peered over the edge and did not like what he saw,” writes Emmanuel Tumusiime- Mutebile, a liberal economist and the most influential technocrat of the Museveni era. “It was scary. That is why he will never go back.”

How do Museveni’s disciples think today? Last August, I spoke with David Mafabi, a presidential advisor and NRM ideologue. In 2017 he had convened a meeting to plot the removal of an age limit from the constitution – the last legal obstacle to Museveni ruling for life.

The Cold War was over. Free market ideology was at its zenith, pushed aggressively by the West. A new constitution and elections were still several years away. “Uganda was effectively a ‘benign dictatorship’,” write two foreign economists who worked as advisors to the Ugandan government in the 1990s. “The next few years were a technocrat’s dream.” The government cut spending, crushed inflation and halved the number of public servants in just four years. The shilling was allowed to float freely. Foreign investors were welcomed with generous tax breaks. Between 1992 and 2007 the state sold its stake in 90 public enterprises, in sectors such as telecoms, banking, hotels, power, agro-industry and railways. Museveni still quoted “our friend Mao Tse-Tung” at startled World Bank officials, but his policies had made him a poster child for the Washington Consensus. When debt relief was granted to the Global South in the 1990s, Uganda was the first country to benefit.

And some things did get better. The proportion of Uganda’s population living below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line fell from 58% in 1989 to 36% in 2012. Over the same period, GDP growth averaged 6.9% a year, faster than in Singapore. Museveni lapped up praise – and money – from the Western governments that bankrolled him. The Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby described Tumusiime-Mutebile, the top civil servant in a new economic super-ministry and later central bank governor, as “the greatest contributor to Africa’s struggle against poverty in his generation”.

But reforms premised on the power of the market were simultaneously blind to its failures. The withdrawal of the state from coffee marketing gave farmers a greater share of the export price, but meant they got little support to improve quality or withstand disease. Reduced tariffs on garments led to a flood of cheap imports, swamping domestic industry. The sale of parastatals was opaque and allegedly corrupt. Museveni’s brother Salim Saleh was tangled up in several notorious deals, from the sell-off of a state bank to the privatisation of cargo handling at Entebbe airport (the latter with Sam Kutesa, the president’s in-law, who was investment minister at the time).

There was a deeper problem too. Arthur Lewis, the St Lucian economist, famously observed that poor countries become rich ones through a process of structural transformation, as workers move from subsistence activities into more productive sectors. In east Asia, this kind of industrial revolution was steered by an activist state. But Museveni’s Uganda instead became a test case for neoliberal reform in Africa, with all of its achievements and failures: low inflation, industrial torpor, precarious employment, and the expansion of the informal services sector. There was some initial export diversification and manufacturing growth, especially in areas such as food processing, but by the mid-2000s progress had stalled (some recent experiments with industrial parks notwithstanding). As a share of employment, industry has shrunk. Poverty is rising again.

“The historical mission of the NRM,” Museveni said last year, “is to make the Ugandan jump on the historical bus of machine power and gunpowder power… and, as a consequence, cause the metamorphosis of our society into a middle class, skilled working [class] society and away from the society of peasants, low skill artisans and a miniscule and powerless feudal class.” By that standard, although he did not say it, his government has failed. The people hustle, as best they can: flogging second-hand clothes, baking bricks, hawking herbal supplements, burning charcoal, cultivating wetlands, or toiling in Arab countries as maids and guards. If Ugandans have jumped on any machine in the Museveni era it is the boda-boda, the motorbike taxi, spluttering over hills and round potholes, choking out fumes and frustration. Museveni had once argued that economic transformation would create European-style class politics, which would make true multipartyism possible. But an industrial revolution has not come to pass. And so, by Museveni’s logic, democracy must wait.

The rich eat chicken but it is tasteless

But society is not static. Urban growth, a youth bulge and the informalisation of labour are producing new economic relations and identities. And perhaps the most important of these is the hustler, scraping by in the interstices of the city. In elite eyes, the hustler is an irritant and a threat. Intellectuals sneer about the “lumpen proletariat”. In Luganda, the lingua franca of the Bantu south, the hustler is often caricatured as a muyaaye (plural: bayaaye, adjective: -yaaye): a marijuana- smoker, a trickster, a thug.

Hustles, in many guises, have been around since the era of magendo, the black-market that flourished under Idi Amin. In those days Museveni was in Tanzania, trying to recruit Ugandan exiles into his guerrilla army. “These boys,” he wrote of one batch of idle recruits, “had mostly been working in towns like Nairobi and had a kiyaaye (lumpen proletariat) culture… They would start drinking and moving out of the camps.” He concluded that true peasants, uncorrupted by city life, were a more pliable material to work with.

But under Museveni’s rule the hustling class grew like never before. It was the hustlers – and not an industrial proletariat – that became the lifeblood of urban culture. By the late 1990s, when cheap recording equipment became available in makeshift studios, they were ready to take over the music scene, displacing the rustic kadongo kamu troubadours and imported Congolese soukous. “Eh, I remember in ’96 they called us bayaaye from Kamwokya,” sang one dreadlocked bad boy, mixing English, Luganda and street slang. “They said we stayed in the ghetto, in ramshackle houses, that we are failures / They say me come from a poor family / They don’t know ghetto life is the best.”

That singer was Bobi Wine, the man who now poses the greatest threat to Museveni’s regime. His People Power movement has been characterised, with varying degrees of accuracy, as a youth rebellion, a freedom struggle, or a rejection of Bahima dominance. But it is also, significantly, a class revolt. Bobi Wine – whose family had fallen into the ghetto, and who has long since clambered out – is the great rhapsodist of ghetto life, of its indignities, its promise. “Born hustling,” as he himself has said.

But under Museveni’s rule the hustling class grew like never before. It was the hustlers – and not an industrial proletariat – that became the lifeblood of urban culture.

The message is in the music. In “Ghetto”, released before a summit of Commonwealth leaders in Kampala: “Now see in Katwe that on the day the Queen comes, the poor man is cleared away.” In “Kikomando”, named after a cheap snack of beans and chapatti: “Sometimes you sleep hungry, sometimes you eat kikomando / and you think that God forgot about you / the rich are many and drive cars / they eat chicken but it is tasteless.” In “Situka”, the 2016 overture to his political career: “When leaders become misleaders and mentors become tormentors / when freedom of expression becomes a target of suppression / opposition becomes our position.”

These songs were an affirmation of all those who had been kicked down, boxed in, shut out. Young men like Rajabu Bukenya, from the flood-prone ghetto of Bwaise, in northern Kampala. Slight and neatly-bearded, he introduced himself to me by his street name: “Rasta Man e Bwaise Mulya Kimu” (Rasta Man in Bwaise who eats once a day). He dropped out in the third grade of secondary school, unable to afford the fees, and found work as a porter, lugging sand and bricks. These days he runs a small laundry business, and spends his spare time calling radio stations with the ten phones that he carries in his pocket.

“Bobi Wine also came from the ghetto – that’s why the people in the ghetto love him so much,” said Bukenya. “The pain they have, even Bobi Wine passed through that pain… Eating once a day, eating kikomando: in Uganda people don’t have money for food, they just eat chapatti and beans… We have nowhere to go. We have no money to buy land, to build a house. And the land we had in the village? The government took our land in the village.” Another example: dawn, December last year, in Bobi Wine’s expansive garden, and a cluster of young women who had come to campaign with him. “I’m among those who are the oppressed Ugandans,” said Gloria Mugerwa, draped in a red gown. “The poor can’t access the medical facilities, the poor cannot access the education facilities.” She and her friends had worked as maids in Arab countries where, said Mugerwa, “you are treated as a slave”. In Bobi Wine she saw hope. “He has been through it, and he can help us through this.”

There can be a millenarian tinge to this sentiment: a naïve sense that if only Museveni were gone then Ugandans would “walk with swag”, as the People Power movement’s unofficial anthem goes. Despite his mural of Thomas Sankara and fondness for pan-African iconography, Bobi Wine and his closest associates do not seem especially curious about the dynamics of global capitalism. Yet the radical potential of the movement lies less in the singer himself than in the forces he represents.

Class dynamics have long rumbled beneath opposition politics, from the career of Nasser Sebaggala, a populist mayor of Kampala between 2006 and 2011, to the crowds that thronged behind Besigye. But it has burst to the surface in Bobi Wine’s party, the National Unity Platform, which is an uneasy alliance of young intellectuals, opposition stalwarts, the petit bourgeoisie and the hustling class. In the constituency of Kawempe North the party selected as its candidate Muhammad Ssegirinya, a former restaurant cleaner known as “Mr Updates” for his voluble social media presence. He beat off more established rivals for the party ticket, including a former deputy mayor, who has since accused Ssegirinya of forging his exam certificates – a telling line of attack. Bobi Wine, whose own academic credentials have also been questioned, once told me that Ssegirinya’s selection was evidence of “a system that drops the powerful and elevates the unknown”.

Even the NRM elite can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. A year ago, I met Mike Mukula, a former health minister who fell from grace after he was accused of stealing money intended for medicines. These days he flies helicopters, drives fast cars and serves as one of Museveni’s vice- chairmen in the NRM.

Mukula laid out the classic Musevenist argument. “You know the British have a class setting, the haves and the have-nots – this is what was lacking in the African continent,” he explained in his Kampala villa, as servants laid out lunch. But something was changing. “Now there is this cluster of a new group, which was not there. I call them the urban lumpen proletariat. If you see most of those people who are on drugs, who are musicians, and so on and so forth – that group… Now they see the Museveni group like us having these houses, the vehicles, being in power for some time.” He sank back in his white leather armchair. These rabble-rousers were a “formation in its infancy”, he sniffed, without structure, organisation or ideology.

And that would also seem to be the view of Museveni himself, who has admonished Bobi Wine for focusing too much on the “lumpen proletariat” and “the bayaaye in Kampala”. Perhaps, in his mind’s eye, the old general thinks back to that cohort of recruits on a Tanzanian training ground. When he looks at Bobi Wine he sees a distracted cadet, with no place in his never-ending revolution.

More dangerous than AIDS and Ebola combined

Museveni should re-read Fanon, who wrote of the “lumpen proletariat” with a mixture of horror and awe. In The Wretched of the Earth, the Martinican intellectual argued that the anti-colonial struggle will find a foothold in cities among those who have “not yet succeeded in finding a bone to gnaw in the colonial system… It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpen proletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpen proletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonised people.” If this was true of the late colonial metropolis, is it not more so of the twenty-first century city, sculpted by corruption, militarism and neoliberalism? On 18 and 19th November last year, after Bobi Wine was arrested on the campaign trail, Kampala exploded in uproar. Young men lit fires, threw rocks, shook down motorists: this was, in the words of veteran journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo, “an anger bubbling among the ‘lowerdeck’ people, against the ‘upperdeck’ folks in general”. Security forces shot people dead as they protested, sought shelter, sold food, went shopping, walked home. Stray bullets said the police. Collective punishment, more like.

The ghetto had always been caricatured as a place of tough-guy masculinity, from the cartoon violence of the low-budget “Wakaliwood” flicks to Bobi Wine’s self-depiction as a mubanda (gangster), “more dangerous than AIDS and Ebola combined”. But here were men in t- shirts with automatic rifles, playing out the Rambo fantasy for real. The state had become more “ghetto” than the ghetto of the darkest imagination. “When you want to catch a thief, sometimes you behave like a thief,” said Elly Tumwine, the security minister, defending the use of plainclothes gunmen to shoot unarmed civilians last year.

And then the state started stealing people. Hundreds of opposition activists were bundled into unmarked vans, then disappeared. Many of them later showed up in military detention. One man told me that soldiers had electrocuted the soles of his feet and interrogated him about his links to Bobi Wine. “You, the bayaaye, cannot lead this country,” his torturer said to him. When Museveni spoke about the abductions, he said that the army were detaining “terrorists” and “lawbreakers” who were plotting that gravest of crimes – to “scare away investments”.

The blurring of law enforcement and criminality is not new. Under General Kale Kayihura, police chief from 2005 to 2018, stick-wielding thugs would routinely bludgeon protesters while uniformed officers looked on. One of the most notorious outfits was Boda-Boda 2010, a motorbike taxi gang, which terrorised drivers, attacked registration officials, and once set upon a group of schoolchildren who were wearing red, a colour associated with political opposition. In 2019 the association’s leader, said to be close to Kayihura, was sentenced to ten years in jail for illegal possession of firearms (he has since been freed).

But society is not static. Urban growth, a youth bulge and the informalisation of labour are producing new economic relations and identities. And perhaps the most important of these is the hustler, scraping by in the interstices of the city. In elite eyes, the hustler is an irritant and a threat

But Museveni’s dance with the ghetto is about more than just violence. A few weeks before the November protests I met Andrew Mwenda, an astute and controversial journalist with powerful connections: his older brother, a major general, is in charge of joint security operations in Kampala, and the president’s son describes him as a close friend.

“Museveni has the largest patronage machine of any government I know in Africa,” Mwenda told me. “When there is an uprising here, or demonstrations, the deployment of the police and army is a short-term tactical measure to secure stability, but the medium- to long-term strategy is always to penetrate the groups that are protesting politically and begin demobilising them using bribery. Co- optation. You should see how the system here works! In a very short time, within a month, they will give [their ringleaders] money, put them in party structures. They will find communities where the hotspots are, form co-operatives, put money on the account. They will get hair salon owners, bus drivers, taxi touts, vendors and hawkers, and begin organising them and counter-mobilising politically.” Perhaps the most striking example of this process is Museveni’s recruitment of musicians. Ragga Dee, a washed-up singer, was the NRM’s candidate for Lord Mayor of Kampala. Buchaman, former “vice-president” of Wine’s Firebase Crew, is now Museveni’s unofficial adviser on “ghetto affairs”. So too is Full Figure, a dancehall star, who once backed Bobi Wine but is now so enamoured with the president that she has named her new-born son after him. Last year I met her in her office, overlooking the welders and mechanics of Katwe. Twice a week, she said, she would visit State House or meet Saleh, the president’s brother. It was the job of musicians to bridge the gap between the government and the ghetto.

That transactional logic is evident even in its repudiation. Before elections, the NRM-state began recruiting boxers in Kampala. Most of them were naturally sympathetic to Wine, an amateur boxer himself, who had his own networks in the sweat-soaked gyms. “We met a certain general during these NRM things,” one boxer told me. “He told us: ‘Bobi Wine is going to make you killed [sic] and he’s not going to support your family and he’s not giving you money. Why don’t you come work for us, and we give you money?’”

The pay on offer was not enough to make the boxers do the NRM’s dirty work. They refused. One former national champion, Isaac “Zebra” Ssenyange, had been mobilising for the party but then fell out with his patrons. Security forces shot him dead in the street.

This is the ultimate rejection of Museveni: to spurn his money. On election day, as Bobi Wine arrived at his polling station to vote, his supporters burst into their favourite chant, which likens the president to “Bosco”, a bumbling character from a mobile phone advert.

Eh Mama! Twagala Bobi si ssente

Eh Mama! Twagala Bobi si Bosiko.

(Eh Mama! We want Bobi not money

Eh Mama! We want Bobi not Bosco.)

Even Museveni is a muyaaye

In 1852 a tousle-haired German journalist called Karl Marx sat down to analyse the politics of contemporary France. Napoleon III, elected president after the uprising of 1848, had recently assumed dictatorial authority. Revolution was sliding towards despotism, just as it had half a century earlier, when Napoleon III’s more famous uncle – the Napoleon everyone knows – had seized power in a coup. The new dictator, scheming and vaguely comical, was a caricature of the old one. History was repeating itself, wrote Marx: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.

Marx called his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, after the date in the French revolutionary calendar when the first Napoleon had staged his coup. It is an intricate study of class antagonisms in a society in flux. And reading it in Kampala, it feels strangely recognisable, despite the gulf that separates modern Uganda from nineteenth-century France. Consider Marx’s discussion of how money greases the wheels of dictatorship:

Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with prospects such as these that [Napoleon III] hoped to lure the masses. Donations and loans — the financial science of the lumpen proletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs Bonaparte knew how to set in action.

Or read Marx’s description of urban politics, and think of Museveni’s street enforcers like Boda Boda 2010 and its fallen patron, General Kayihura:

On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters [the list goes on] — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.

David Mafabi, Museveni’s adviser, had told me that the president could play the role of Napoleon. The Napoleon he had in mind was the famous one: the military genius, the moderniser, silencing his enemies with a whiff of grapeshot. It is a (historically inaccurate) vision of the great man bestriding history, wrestling with immense forces, even his violence justified by some larger purpose. This is Museveni the ssabalwanyi, the greatest of fighters.

But strip away these delusions and the Museveni project becomes nothing but an endless game of tactical manoeuvre, whispered deals, grubby handshakes. At times, when he is posing with Buchaman or attempting ghetto slang, there is even dark comedy about it. In this regard, Museveni most resembles that other, lesser, Napoleon, the one that Marx christened “the chief of the lumpen proletariat”. Museveni created the ghetto: now he must cajole, co-opt and crush it. “Even Museveni is a muyaaye,” I was once told by a small-time singer in a cramped recording studio in Kampala. “He’s ruling us in a muyaaye style, like fooling us.”

Museveni dreamt of ushering Uganda through the doorways of history, but his politics was premised on an economic transformation which never came. The blame lay partly in his own policies and partly in the international economic order which moulded them. He continues in power through inertia and intrigue, still chasing a vanished future. In his self-righteous violence and petty machinations, he evokes both Napoleons at once: the blood-soaked general and the wily schemer. This time as tragedy. This time as farce.

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Follow us on Twitter. Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi

For retired Anglican clergyman Reverend Fred Msimenta, the negative effects of his country‘s massive oil venture have begun to show early, and they are being manifested right in his backyard.

A few metres from his house in Butimba East village in Kikuube District in Western Uganda, lies what remains of his former half-acre tree plantation, which has now been reduced to mere stumps. He had to cut down the eucalyptus trees and sell them to traders before they had reached maturity to give way to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project. His land was identified for compulsory acquisition as it lies right on the 30 metre-wide corridor along which the pipeline will run.

Reverend Msimenta is not alone; a similar fate has befallen his neighbours in this fertile farming region where — besides coffee, maize, beans, sweet potatoes and a host of other crops — farmers also engage in commercial agroforestry, giving the area a beautiful green cover.

“We do not know how this area will look like in the future after this project disturbs nature. Already trees are being cut down to give way to the pipeline and to open up access roads. Without doubt we will lose a lot of animal habitats, forests and wetlands,” he says.

“There are many fears in people’s minds, a lot of communal land including forests will be taken up by the pipeline and we are really apprehensive over what will happen,” adds the clergyman.

The massive pipeline will move oil from the East African country’s oilfields in the larger Albertine region eastwards for some 1,443 kilometres to the port of Tanga on the Indian Ocean coast of neighbouring Tanzania for export, Uganda being a landlocked country.

It will be the world ‘s longest electrically-heated crude pipeline, with numerous pumping stations along the route to the Tanga terminal, due to what experts say is the “waxy” nature of the crude.

It is partly because of this that the project — which will cost the two countries and their partners, China National offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and Total, in the region of US$3.5 billion — that Msimenta and his neighbours are harbouring numerous fears over the environment.

It’s sheer scale aside, EACOP is just but a part of the “Pearl of Africa”’s huge fossil fuels venture that also includes Tilenga and Kingfisher oil development projects, the latter consisting of six wells located inside the biodiversity-rich Murchison Falls National Park. The projects jointly hold an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves, 1.4 billion of which is classified as recoverable.

It will be the world’s longest electrically-heated crude pipeline.

More than 20,000 people including landowners and “land users” will be affected by the whole enterprise, which will include six oil fields and 400 wells in 31 locations under Tilenga alone. Out of these, Total claims that no more ten will be drilled in the wildlife park.

“We hear news of spills in other countries around the world and wonder what would become of our land if the same were to happen here, but when we ask the authorities tell us that this will be a sophisticated conduit that can neither leak nor break,” Msimenta says.

Like many people here, the community leader expresses concerns for the Wambavya river and its many tributaries that emanate from one of Uganda’s most notable wetlands. In this locality, for example, is to be found the Ijumagambo wetland that gives rise to a stream of the same name which empties into Wambavya, the most important river in western Uganda.

Any threat to the river, Msimenta believes, would jeopardise the Kabalega Electric Station, a 9 MW hydropower station constructed along the river. Wambavya is also critical to the survival of Lake Albert, a trans-boundary resource shared with the Democratic Republic Congo, the river being its main inlet to the south and a source of livelihood for thousands of people in both countries.

“We hear news of spills in other countries around the world and wonder what would become of our land if the same were to happen here.”

These fears are however disputed by the country’s oil sector regulator, the Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU), which claims to have taken environmental and social measures to address both the direct and indirect impacts of the projects.

“Various Environment and Social Management plans are in place to address any cumulative and or indirect impacts. These also provide for various mitigation measures and environmental safeguards. In addition, continuous sensitisation programmes are undertaken within the communities to mitigate such impacts,” says Ernest Rubondo, PAU Executive Director.

Rubondo claims that the pipes will be insulated and buried to ensure there is no damage; and that Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (ESIAs) have been undertaken by the oil companies in consultation with state institutions and the communities concerned.

Some of the mitigation measures Rubondo claims will also be taken will include management of dust and equipment. He says that “combustion equipment will be designed to meet national regulations and project standards regarding air quality,” adding that “The project will also provide for progressive vegetation and habitat restoration as part of efforts to curb emissions.”

Total is equally defending itself against claims of possible adverse environmental effects, saying that it will implement actions that “generate a positive net impact on biodiversity”. Total also says that it will only use less than one per cent of Murchison Park land for its activities.

“The route of the EACOP pipeline has been designed to minimise its environmental impact. Careful attention was paid to watercourses, and “horizontal’ drilling will be used for the most sensitive case”. It said in a statement.

Environmental groups are however having none of it, insisting that the three projects — EACOP, Tilenga and Kingfisher — will spell doom for the environment, that they will affect or have affected over 30 “ecosensitive” areas, including Budongo Forest, and the Murchison Falls-Albert Delta Wetland, a critical bird area protected under the Ramsar convention.

“Of major concern is the fact that a third of the EACOP will be constructed in the Lake Victoria basin. This poses immense oil pollution risks yet project developers have failed to provide adequate mitigation measures to address the threats. As a result, court cases have been filed in courts in Uganda, the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) and in France,” said Dickens Kamugisha, CEO of AFIEGO, Uganda’s foremost energy policy research and advocacy body.

EACOP, Tilenga and Kingfisher will produce over 34.3 million metric tonnes, over 48 million metric tonnes and over 26 million metric tonnes of carbon, respectively every year, says Kamugisha.

According to Mohamed Adow, CEO of Nairobi-based energy and climate think-tank Power Shift Africa, the economic benefits from oil projects remain largely short-term compared to their prolonged impacts on Africa’s climate, environment and human health.

Adow notes that, considering Africa’s vulnerability to climate change, there is no reason for continued investment in fossil fuels, since there exists an abundance of potential for renewable energy — wind, solar and geothermal.

“The far-reaching environmental impacts, displacements, changes to groundwater and risk to our health cannot be put on the same scale with short-sighted, short-lived economic interests,” he argues, adding that it was satisfying to know that banks like Barclays and Credit Suisse had reportedly pulled out of financing EACOP. “Indeed, if more international financial institutions make commitments to prioritise green projects, such initiatives like EACOP will not see the light of day,” he says.

Meanwhile, despite the objections, on 11 April the presidents of Uganda and Tanzania inked the final agreement for the joint venture, paving the way for the commencement of EACOP as soon as funding is secured. Uganda president Yoweri Museveni and his Tanzania counterpart Samia Suluhu Hassan signed the deal in Kampala, moving the controversial project closer to reality.

It was satisfying to know that banks like Barclays and Credit Suisse had reportedly pulled out of financing EACOP.

Last year, groups including the Centre for Food and Adequate Living Rights (CEFROHT), the African Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), Natural Justice-Kenya and the Centre for Strategic Litigation Limited, filed a case against the Attorney Generals of Uganda and Tanzania, and the regional bloc — East African Community (EAC) — at the East African Court of Justice.

Besides seeking an injunction against the construction of the pipeline, they are pursuing nullification of a September 2020 Host Government Agreement (HGA) signed by the governments of Uganda and Tanzania with Total, in a ceremony graced by President Museveni of Uganda and the former president of Tanzanian, the late John Pombe Magufuli.

“Oil activities in Lake Albert region have already displaced some 7,000 people including 3,500 children and 1,500 women, and no compensation has been offered to them since 2012, even after we sued on their behalf in high court in Uganda in 2014,” say the petitioners.

The EAC has been enjoined in the case since the organisation is a signatory to various international treaties and agreements on the environment and human rights.

Considering Africa’s vulnerability to climate change, there is no reason for continued investment in fossil fuels since there exists an abundance of potential for renewable energy.

The petitioners are also seeking a declaration that EACOP is a violation of the fundamental rights of the people of East Africa. They say that the pipeline will traverse forests, lakes, wildlife habitats, farmlands and settlements, endangering not just the biodiversity, but lives and livelihoods as well.

Kamugisha says that opposition to the project has led to constant harassment of activists in Uganda through intimidation and imposition of stringent rules for the groups.

Harassment aside, it is not yet clear if EACOP owners will be able to secure the US$2.5 billion external financing needed for the project, if reports by the Stop EACOP campaign are true. The alliance reported that major banks in France — BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole — were withdrawing their earlier commitment to finance the project.

The EACOP is unlikely to remain Africa’s largest pipeline for long; Angola and Zambia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a feasibility study for a US$5 billion pipeline to transport oil and gas from Angola to Zambia.

–

This piece was first published in Science Africa. You can find the original article here

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Follow us on Twitter. Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi

With weeks to go until the Ugandan presidential election on January 14, 2021, Ugandan readers of The Elephant, an online platform published in Nairobi, Kenya, suddenly could not access its site. Typically, at first, they presumed, the site was down, or was experiencing some normal malfunctions associated with the heavy use of such a platform. So, they really were not duly concerned, they knew the site managers would no sooner fix the problem. But after a week, or so, word started filtering out from Kampala to Nairobi, that The Elephant site had been hacked and interfered with, and the worst thought was that the Ugandan government had shut down the website. Indeed, it had precisely done that. The publisher John Githongo had to explain to the Ugandan readers, on January 14, 2021, why they were experiencing difficulties accessing the site.

“For about a month now, some of our readers within Uganda have been reporting problems accessing the website. Following receipt of these reports, we launched investigations which have established that The Elephant has been blocked by some, though not all, internet service providers in the country. We have further ascertained that the directive to do so came from the Uganda Communication Commission (UCC) and was implemented beginning 12 December, 2020, when we noticed a sudden traffic drop coming from several providers in Uganda, including Africell and Airtel. We have written to the UCC requesting a reason for the blocking, but we are yet to receive a response.” The publisher assured the readers that the management had temporarily put in place measures to obviate the blocking: “To circumvent the block, a Bifrost mirror has been deployed.” The Bifrost mirror enabled the readers to access the website through a specially established link.

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who was inaugurated on May 12, 2021, in Kampala for his sixth record time, is setting a precedent, that of completely clamping down the entire communication system, that may as well be emulated by other African strongmen. Strongmen like President Museveni, who have no intentions whatsoever of abandoning state power, have come up with ingenious methods, every time they are faced with a general election, of winging the election into their favour.

One of the latest methods is temporarily shutting down the internet. “Museveni has gone a step further, Ugandans could not even use short message service (SMS),” said an Al Jazeera newsman who covered the election. “He also made sure that people with cross-country telecommunication roaming services could not use their mobile phones, hence blocking all forms of mobile telephony communication.”

President Museveni’s government resolve to temporarily bring down The Elephant platform was a tacit acknowledgment of two things: The Pan Africanist platform which also covers stories from Uganda, written by Ugandans, could be widely read in the country. Two, that the wonders of the Internet have allowed the platform, to be available to all corners of the country, therefore to anyone, so long as they have a smart phone and can afford some internet bundles.

Towards the end of 2019, I got a Twitter direct message from a Ugandan reader of The Elephant from Jinja town, who told me the publication had become his reliable source of well- analyzed information. When the platform begun writing stories on Uganda, the platform became a must read for him. He told me if there is one thing he uses his internet bundles for, is to download all the stories he wants to read from The Elephant, so as to read them offline later on.

The ‘New Breed’

Yoweri Museveni, it will be recalled, is an ageing East African leader, who in the mid-1990s was part of a group of leaders who were referred to as the “New Breed”. The others were Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. Kagame was then the Vice President and Minister of Defense. Zenawi was until his death in 2012, the Prime Minister. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the “New Breed” leaders was their capacity to control and channel communication effectively to their advantage. So, even as early as in the 1990s, leaders like President Museveni already understood the importance of managing and manipulating information as a way of keeping a stranglehold on state power. In a candid interview, in 1995, one of these “New Breed” leaders told a foreign correspondent that “the handling of information was about the survival of my country”. He could as well have said: it is about my survival to hold onto absolute power.

The influence of the Internet and information communication technology was just beginning to be felt in Africa and savvy political leaders like Kagame and Museveni were alive to the fact that it is the leader who controlled these communication advances that would stay at the apex of power. In essence, they mastered the art of information warfare. Is it any less surprising that the trio become the masters of shutting down the internet every time they are faced with presidential elections?

President Museveni’s government resolve to temporarily bring down The Elephant platform was a tacit acknowledgment of two things: The Pan Africanist platform which also covers stories from Uganda, written by Ugandans, could be widely read in the country. The latest president to shut down the internet during election time was Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, which was prior to the March 21, 2021 presidential elections. In a continent that has one of the fastest penetrations of the internet worldwide, African rulers aware of the power of the internet in relaying news and mobilizing crowds, have quickly learned that the new weapon for controlling the flow of information and mass control is the shutting down the internet.

Lisa Garbe, an internet researcher who has done some work on internet shutdowns by the authoritarian regimes of Africa, has aptly noted that “internet shutdowns in African have become the new normal.” To be fair to African despots, it is not only them who have been conspiring to shut down the internet: Four months ago, in Myanmar, a military junta, one morning on February 1, 2021, woke up and overthrew the democratically elected government of state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. One of the first things it did, was to shut down the internet as a way of checking the flow of information and controlling crowd mobilization.

President Museveni’s chief opponent this time around was a young man – the 39-year-old Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine, who was born four years before the 42-year-old Museveni captured state power in Kampala. Bobi considered a local boy, built his fame as a musician from the Kampala ghetto of Kyadondo, where he is the MP for Kyadondo East constituency. Because of being constantly harassed by Museveni’s security agencies, he could hardly hold political rallies. So, he resorted to investing heavily in social media, as a way of reaching his supporters.

But to Bobi’s (late) realization, he was using a campaign tool that was in complete control of his competitor. “Museveni was intent on shutting off Bobi from all information and communication relayed through the internet connectivity, from his legion of supporters: the tech-savvy millennial and Generation Z, whose use of social media is supposedly second nature to them,” said a foreign journalist who covered the election. Today, the millennial and Generation Z, constitute an upward of 65 percent of the total registered voters, hence, form the largest voting bloc in Uganda. “So even if it meant bringing the entire system altogether down, Museveni wasn’t taking any chances.”

Protests against IMF support

In Uganda, as indeed in many African countries including the East African countries of Kenya, and Tanzania, the most popular social media apps that today frighten the political class, are Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube and Telegram, necessarily in that order. Kenyans on Twitter (KOT), a motley crew of ferocious countrymen, for example, rallied in protesting against the IMF lending any more money to the ruling Jubilee Party. Said Grant Brooke, a social economist in Kenya on his Twitter handle: “Kenyans on Facebook and Twitter rejecting IMF lending Kenya government’s more money is a fascinating sign of things to come in global finance. Government might not care, but IMF is certainly sensitive to bad PR.”

On the eve of Museveni’s swearing-in, angry Ugandans unleashed a swift pushback aimed at the German Embassy in Kampala, after it posted a congratulatory message from Angela Merkel to President Museveni. “Hello followers, we are getting a lot of criticisms for this post…that’s OK.” Hoping to calm down the online warriors, the embassy’s acknowledgement only helped to fuel more anger. At night when everyone was apparently asleep, the embassy deleted the Facebook message.

Without information, the few election observers that were allowed into the country, for example, could not collect and collate data on the electioneering process. “But more fundamentally, Museveni made it nearly impossible to report on the election by the assembled media houses – local and foreign,” Al Jazeera claimed. “The internet shutdown took the media houses 20 years back in time. If you didn’t have satellite capabilities you couldn’t operate. Internet shutdowns not only work against the regime’s political opponents, but are also meant to cripple media operations or make it very expensive and difficult to report on the election.” Today, many of the media houses have invested in social media tools that greatly eased their work and lessened their operational costs.

Bringing the entire system down, Museveni wasn’t taking any chances.

“Some of us who could afford, had to resort to B-Gan and satellite phones to transmit information back to our stations,” said the journalist. B-Gan which stands for Broadband Global Area Network, just like satellite today, is very expensive, few media houses can ill-afford to equip all their journalists with the gadgets.”

Authoritarian regimes in Africa may be perfecting the art of shutting down the internet as an advanced form of rigging the elections, but they are not without a helping hand: Suraya Dadoo, a South African journalist in Johannesburg writes about Circles, an Israel telecoms company, which mostly deals with government helps those government, “intercept data from 3G networks, allows the infiltrator to read messages, emails and listen in on phone calls as they occur.”

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Follow us on Twitter.

Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi Driving down the fabulous Acacia Avenue parallel to Kololo hill in Kampala (the neighbourhood known for being the poshest of the posh) late on a Saturday night, the clubs are hardly unnoticeable. Dozens of cars fill the outside parking, bouncers walk the inebriated out to the street by the elbow and the dull echoes of bass lines filter out onto the trafficless tarmac.

Like it or not, safe or not, Kampala is taking reopening into its own hands. The curfew is still “strictly” imposed at 9 p.m. although the cops are said to be getting less lenient and more likely to attempt to tackle passengers on after-hours boda bodas and quicker to pull the gun on unwitting rule-breakers to better induce a quick handover of Ugandan shillings. The behaviour of the police has become so over the top in recent weeks that it almost seems as though they know that the curfew could soon be ending and are trying to cash in as much as possible before the plug is pulled. There are reports of heavy-handed police behaviour, not only arresting people and jailing them, but then holding onto IDs and remanding individuals in prisons outside of Kampala.

Talk to nearly anyone in Kampala and they’ll all tell you the same thing — that the curfew is far more a political measure than it ever was about the coronavirus threat. Across Uganda, before everyone scatters off into the wind to beat the curfew, the entire nation seems to be operating as normal; the markets are full, people hop mask-free onto matatus and big church services take place unimpeded.

That is the trouble with the current state of COVID-19 restrictions in Uganda; too much falls through the gaps, rules are bent as though they’re meant to be bent, and all the while the economy of Uganda is quietly falling into utter disarray — a pattern that is becoming the norm across the East African region. So now, as most countries in the world are hovering around the one-year anniversary of the beginning of pandemic lockdowns, it has become more clear that the “Western” model of lockdowns adopted by countries like Uganda and Kenya has simply not worked — and the fall-out will surely be felt for years, if not decades, to come.

March of 2020 saw the pandemic spiral out of control, with dozens of countries announcing lockdowns, curfews, business closures and other measures to try to stem the tide. Some nations, like South Korea and New Zealand, did a remarkable job and have all but contained the situation (and, frankly, had done so by May of 2020). These countries, however, were revealed to be outliers in the global community as most countries found their own methods of failure and leaned strongly into them. These include two of the most influential countries on earth, the UK and the US, both of which took arguably the worst direction they could possibly take and have spiraled into chaos as a result — that of inconsistent, slow and inadequate “half-measures”. In the UK’s case, it was the initial leaning into the concept of “herd immunity” for the population before pulling back and shutting down too late. In the US it was the exact confluence of systemic problems that caused this pandemic to tear down the façade of the “most powerful nation on earth” by way of killing over half a million people and decimating the economic status of tens of millions while politicians complained incessantly about money.

Unfortunately, Uganda seems to be borrowing largely from the failed policies of these two nations and has suffered immensely for it. If nothing else, the intensive measures taken, and their incompleteness have proved to be a sort of litmus test for the failures of neo-colonial influence. Museveni has long been known to have extensive ties with the West and, as with other developing nations, Uganda took the advice of foreign diplomats, external policy, and the NGO apparatus into careful consideration when outlining Uganda’s COVID-19 response, drawing sharp criticism from political opposition figures including Bobi Wine, who called for less short-term solutions and more long-term systemic changes to Uganda’s healthcare system.

Now, over a year in, the effects of the pandemic in Uganda have been largely muted, and potentially underreported in terms of case numbers and deaths. Despite the opacity of the information, the actual human toll has been far less than initially projected by a myriad of global media outlets in the early months of the epidemic.

That isn’t to say that the narrative has not continually shifted, with leading voices in Western medical, diplomatic and academic spheres being repeatedly mystified that the pandemic hasn’t impacted the African continent as it has the “leading democracies on earth”. Moreover, cases are also clearly rising in Kenya, and President Magufuli of Tanzania — one of the leading coronavirus deniers on the continent if not the world — recently died of heart failure days after finally admitting during a church service that the pandemic was real. The issue is clearly a real one, but that isn’t to say that it is not deeply complicated and unexplored, even by leading experts.

Right now in Nairobi, queues for the vaccine are lengthening, but diplomats are allegedly being given preferential priority for the jabs alongside frontline medical workers. Vaccines are being openly hoarded by several of the richer nations of the world, even as COVID-19 variants continue to pop up to potentially plunge the world back into turmoil just when there is a “light at the end of tunnel” following the development of vaccines (at least in the West, which has blocked vaccine access schemes, preferring to back the profit motives of pharmaceutical giants.)

If there is anything positive to have come out of this pandemic, it is the illumination that many leading powers and voices around the world (such as the US, the UK and the WHO) might not know best, let alone have the best interests of developing nations at heart. Whether or not this will lead to some sort of paradigm shift is altogether too far off to see, as we’re all still caught in the middle of the pandemic maelstrom.

A popular retort that many an American politician likes to resort to is: “it’s the economy, stupid!”. That most of the elected officials in Washington DC who like to use it tend to act with shocking economic obtuseness immediately thereafter is almost irrelevant. The phrase is not merely applicable to the American condition, but can be applied to any company, society, country, region or system. In a largely capitalist world, money makes all things go round and impedes many from trying to jump into the fray.

It has never been more starkly clear that the global financial structures are inherently flawed than in the last year of the COVID-19 pandemic. A case in point the ugly situation surrounding testing for coronavirus within the East African region.

If there is anything positive to have come out of this pandemic, it is the illumination that many leading powers and voices around the world might not know best.

While testing is available, it comes at a cost, a cost that is simply irrational for many people to bear. Unlike the free voluntary counselling and testing systems that helped to get the HIV/AIDS epidemic under control within the region, the COVID-19 testing systems within East Africa are largely preferential in nature; skewed towards the elite, the upper middle-class and the expatriate community in terms of access and availability.

Large foreign-funded organisations in places like Kampala have protocols in place to routinely test their staff, inevitably turning up positive cases as a result. The positive staff are then generally instructed to home-quarantine, where it is unclear if there are monitoring measures in place to ensure that the elderly house help is not allowed to come in to do the ironing. For her however, a “flu” that her neighbours don’t believe to be real might not be worth the risk of losing potential income during the two weeks her client is in quarantine.

And there’s the rub, that the coronavirus crisis comes with a brutal layer of classism ingrained within it. In the US, depending on their political affiliation, the upper classes either criticise individuals who try to continue running their businesses despite government orders or lambast government orders while staying at home. Both political sides of the upper class coin get takeout pizza delivered by a minimum wage driver and get the latest political tell-all book delivered by an Amazon worker who is employed at a crowded “fulfillment center” just far enough away to be out of sight and out of mind.

The cheapest test at a private clinic that I found in Uganda costs USh150,000 (US$41 or KSh4500 Kenyan). The last time the minimum wage was raised in Uganda was in 1984 when it was raised to USh 6,000 per month. Granted, no employer would dare offer such a pittance as a monthly wage in 2021, but ask yourself, would a waitress earning a USh600,000 monthly salary use a quarter of her take-home wages to get a test that may end up negative?

It is the economy, stupid.

The Kenyan government recently released further information about the rollout of the vaccination plan for the country, stating that it aims to have only 30 per cent of the nation’s population vaccinated by June of 2023. That is more than two years away at the time of writing, which begs the obvious follow-up question: what is everyone supposed to do until then? Will the rich nations in the West vaccinate the majority of their populations by July of this year and then continue to hoard doses from the rest of the world just in case?

It has never been more starkly clear that the global financial structures are inherently flawed than in the last year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is to reflect on how the vast majority of East Africans would cope if, for instance, the curfew was maintained for another two years. Apart from the psychological damage this would cause, the economic prospects for the region’s youth, in particular, would be perhaps irreparably damaged (and may already have been after a year of COVID-19 measures). This may be coming across as some sort of conservative pro-business stance, but I assure you this is far from the case. COVID-19 is real, it has killed millions and none of us knows just how deep the damage truly is.

The stark reality is that the economic realities of different nations are, well, different. COVID-19 funds to the tune of billions of shillings were famously “eaten” in Kenya. It is unclear whether the IMF will lend any more stimulus funds to Rwanda. Tourism numbers in Uganda have come dramatically down and are far below the rates seen in 2019, even six months after the country re- opened its borders to foreign visitors. It is a question of what the endgame will be, and how equitable it will be once the world crosses the post-pandemic threshold.

At present, it seems that the global economic systems, those of the neo-liberal ilk, the global powerbrokers, the spectres of the 20th century paradigm, are still winning out. This is frankly a horrid scenario, for if the world has been made to suffer so greatly, the livelihoods and health of billions disrupted, then the greatest shame would be to learn nothing and change even less. If the global “norm” is to revert to the ways of 2019, then truly the COVID-19 pandemic will have been a tragedy that will only grow uglier as, onion-like, its many layers are revealed in the months and years to come.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. Uganda Mailo Land Reforms: Disentangling Landlord From Tenant

By Rose Nakayi

If Marx had lived during our time, he would edit his timeless phrase about religion. He would write, as religion is the opium of the masses, democracy is the crack cocaine of the elite. Especially the African elite, we are high on it. As it quietly destroys our internal organs, we strive for more and of better quality. The vendors are merchandisers all the most aggressive and most persuasive. Their adverts have refused to add the cautionary label, “democracy smoking will kill you.”

These vendors are not only ‘creaming away’ all the profits from their product, but also eating the carcasses of their victims. By the time the African intelligentsia overcome their addiction, they would understand that the enemy to their governance-development question has never been themselves, their bad education or bad leadership but rather the stuff they have been smoking as medication – democracy itself, its crusaders and merchandisers. Democracy is not just a language of [colonial] exploitation, it is the practice of exploitation itself. Problematically mixed with civil liberties, democracy has inextricably, irretrievably tied the African elite to exploitative capitalism, while at the same time, exciting, distracting and completely blinding them from real concerns, or even revolution. Just the same way colonial exploitation thrived on divide and conquer, democracy does the same, but more tactfully, more elusively. Democracy thrives on a double-layered divide and conquer (a) it disconnects the elite from ordinary folks with the elite not only developing new tastes and cultures —not simply consumptive ones, but lifestyles and practices—but they also become obsessed with their own preservation. On the other hand, the lifestyles, struggles and pains of rural folks are exorcised as slight inconveniences, painful sores and humanitarian— not structural—challenges needing benevolent intervention. And (b) the elite are then split into often terribly polarised “political parties” and other smaller camps, where sustaining or grabbing power becomes the single most important preoccupation. The task of the African intellectual therefore is to understand the colonial exploitative nature of democracy (divide and rule, shameless vulgarity of free markets, disruptive endless ‘human rights’ quibbles, foreign aid, and loans, media bombardment); and the myriad lofty seemingly good-intentioned crusaders.

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Let’s start with some basic seemingly obsolete questions: Do former colonial masters still want to exploit the resources of formerly colonised places – specifically Africa? By exploit I mean, to steal or benefit at the expense of the Natives of those countries. Stated differently, are Africans convinced that their former colonisers are happy to see them thrive, and the endless streams of aid and loans, and the gospel of democracy are all meant for their betterment? How about new powers such as America and China? Are they benevolent friends helping in times of need or honest business partners? Has this urge, ambition and plotting to pillage ended? Again, this is not about countries in West Africa where the colonial powers, specifically, France actually didn’t leave after independence but rather retained its grip on their former colonies through especially banking. I am concerned about countries where colonial masters actually “left” upon independence.

The response to these questions is an easy YES; all the world’s new and old powers are interested in stealing from weaker countries especially in Africa. A sombre cry by novelist Ama Ato Aidoo on 500 years of European exploitation captures the painful state of affairs, and a recent meticulous study by Angus Elsby on coffee and cotton captures this ongoing pillage. But the question is this: if Africans know that there are thieves all around them plotting, scheming, and conniving to steal their resources, why are they not resisting the way their predecessors resisted colonialism? Why do Africans feel and behave so weak, incapable, and conditioned to playball as their countries are looted by the same powers their anti-colonial mothers and fathers resisted? Why don’t we have a second wave of anti-exploitation struggle on the continent resisting the new manifestation of colonial-like exploitation?

If Marx had lived during our time, he would edit his timeless phrase about religion. He would write, as religion is the opium of the masses, democracy is the crack cocaine of the elite

Let me make one caveat here: this has nothing to do with the so-called legacy of colonialism – see Mahmood Mamdani and co. – because that would mean seeking to bring an end to a way of doing things, or simple removal of the structures that were left behind after independence. Mine is not a quest to decolonise but rather to see foreign exploitation in all its new forms. Perhaps my first proposition is that seeing and discussing western exploitation of the African continent through the language of colonialism, and its blighted offshoots, neo-colonialism, decolonisation, etc is not necessarily obsolete, but is actually distractive. It denies us the chance to appreciate the performatively non-colonial ways in which the continent is being looted. My core proposition is that we need to see democracy as the new absolute manifestation of exploitation. There is urgent need to go behind it, expose its traps, and confront its beastly smiley face. Africa will need to proudly pursue a de-democratisation struggle—which is certainly much more difficult than the anti-colonial struggle.

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Let’s return to my central question: why are Africans not resisting this new form of exploitation – democracy? My answer to this question is threefold: (a) the new exploiters, couched in the slick but highly deceptive, confusingly omnibus understanding of democracy (to include free markets, free and fair elections, freedoms and human rights, free speech, choice, people, representation, equality, justice) have deftly disguised the manifest exploitation of democracy. The face of democracy appears attractive and sophisticated as it displays and performs ironically non-existent Mzungu practices on governance in Europe and North America.

As Ali Mazrui, 1997 succinctly demonstrated, the humanitarian values (freedom of speech, women emancipation and empowerment, freedom of choice, religion, etc.) believed to the guaranteed as so terribly inexistent even in the so-called democracies of the west. The denial of these values, Mazrui noted, only takes a different more subtle form. One doesn’t have to look too far to see how “democratic” America or the United Kingdom treats its black folks, workers, women, drops bombs on other nations for sport, continue to openly loot abroad, etcetera.. The beautiful decorated façade of regular elections, freedom of speech and religion mask a rather dangerous strain of thuggery and exploitation.

There is an army of pleasant looking, beautiful, ever-smiling, sweet-talking and cash-dangling handlers and brokers pushing democracy with high-sounding and seemingly beautiful arguments about justice, rights, the people… etcetera claiming these are provided and guaranteed by democracy. Who could be against that…? They subtly ask. These handlers – these new colonial administrators – do not call themselves Governors and Colonial Lords, but rather “regional coordinators,” “country directors,” “programme managers” and academics. They operate without the brutality, overt racism and insults that defined earlier exploiters. They are constantly “seeking partnerships,” not dominions. They claim to “respect” national sovereignty and independence and will seek to execute their duties in the confines of international law. They will never tell you the history of so-called international law, which explicitly does not recognise Africans as sovereigns but rather just as Africans (see Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, 1996). In doing all this, they never lose sight on the estate. These new exploiter emissaries include charming fellows in the European Union, American and British embassies, the United Nations offices, World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and several experts of democracy based at British and American universities—studying Africa! They run tantalisingly named units such as the Democracy Governance Facility (DGF) where they narcotize thousands of local elites into inertia, spending endless hours in offices writing proposals and forging accountabilities (see Makau Mutua, eds. 2009).

These strategies have quietly, methodically captured all local media houses, schools, and all other spaces of active learning to push the democracy agenda into curriculums. In the end, they produce democracy thinking clones – literally, producing democracy’s Uncle Toms. Ever wondered why war- torn countries such as Somalia, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Libya, etcetera have intellectuals and politicians on podiums chanting democracy amidst ruins and dead bodies—entering contracts for oil and other mineral resource explorations, signing off loans and debts? Yes, it is the good work of these handlers.

Oftentimes, these democracy “merchandisers” operate under the language of development assistance. They flood the NGO sector, and civil society. This is in spite of the copious amounts of scholarship that vividly demonstrate that aid does not work (see Andrew Rugasira, 2007; Juluis Gatune, 2010; Dambisa Moyo, 2010). African countries surely do not need aid to stave off famine or prosper – no country ever did – but the givers will not listen. Even when asked to leave, they go away sour-graping like they loved the recipient country more than its leaders. But these new exploiters, wearing their false smiles have, through a series of lengthy and underhand methods—including manufacturing narratives of poverty, predictions of disease, fake annual indices on this and that—they actually force, squeeze, cajole, and harass an African country into receiving aid, but will never mention better terms of trade (see Slavoj Zizek, 2009). If they fail to push this through more technicalized forgeries and liberal concoctions, they’ll resort to outright violence. Examples abound of both covert and overt uses of violence: Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, etcetera under the cover of civil liberties. In truth, these are fortune hunters – like their colonial predecessors who rode on the deceptive language of civilising the Natives, these are simply sophisticated thieves who have managed to manufacture a common sense around their practice of theft as the best form of governance (elsewhere, see Pepe Escobar, 2009).

And finally, against such an environment of deftly disguised exploitation and aggressive brokers (c) the current breed of leaders – in the academia, media, and mainstream politics – have been extremely softened by urban life, and the perverse spread of bodily pleasures from Europe and North America. Softeners range from their beautiful wives (and, occasionally, husbands) and long streams of concubines, comfortable beds, to sweet foods, which they have not earned and are haunted by the fact that they do not deserve. Incredible amounts of money circulate among these fellows over and above the rent for their labour. It is a cartel.

All the world’s new and old powers are interested in stealing from weaker countries especially in Africa. A sombre cry by novelist Ama Ato Aidoo on 500 years of European exploitation captures the painful state of affairs, and a recent meticulous study by Angus Elsby on coffee and cotton captures this ongoing pillage

These comprador leaders and elites surviving off the crumbs of elite capital are condemned to perpetual praise and gratitude to their present oppressors – for enabling them access to these crumbs in the theft of their compatriots. Intellectually inferior, and without the backing of a traditional modernities upon which their predecessors —the anti-colonial intelligentsia—were bedecked, our new leaders are barebones, thrown into modernities where they have no histories and are simply drowning. When Partha Chatterjee writes about ‘tradition’ presenting the anti-colonial intellectuals with ‘a liberal rationalist dilemma’, that is, in the words of Lidwien Kapteijns, the challenge to be modern and traditional at the same time, he actually recognises the base upon which the anti-colonial intelligentsia constantly made reference as they negotiated their entry into a colonial modernity in a postcolonial moment. Our new would-be liberationists have neither and are simply swimming with the tide.

Spending endless hours watching European football on SuperSport, and admiring lofty English on BBC and CNN, googling stuff, and busying themselves on the myriad social media platforms, they cannot imagine abandoning these pleasures for thoroughbred struggle, which could benefit the collective. It is simply enough and too much. With the majority of this elite imprisoned at their small desks in parliament, NGOs and Civil Society, they are seemingly content with the status quo since they can ably afford the bodily pleasures mentioned above (you’ll find them endlessly chanting: ‘Compatriots! Do not risk throwing the existing order up in air – who knows where we will land !’). They are obsessed with their pleasures and freedoms guaranteed by democracy as the actual wealth of the country is quietly scooped up by their NGOs and Civil Society funders. Democracy as divide and rule: Lessons from Uganda

Ugandans are now familiar with constant images of mostly white folks from the European Union, and other western embassies driving to homes of leading opposition candidate after every election. Their agenda remains the most enigmatic. When it was Col. Kiiza Besigye, amidst the tension of a stolen election in 2016 —the Uganda confirmed gross irregularities on two occasions but refused to nullify the election— EU folks would drive to his home in Kasangati for some conversations. We will never know exactly what they discussed but it wouldn’t matter anyway. But they often had such a grand entry and exit from the dusty Kasangati road turning into Besigye’s home. From Kiiza Besigye’s home, they would then go and meet the incumbent, Yoweri Museveni. This Museveni meeting was never as prominently publicised. Most recently, with Bobi Wine becoming the lead opposition candidate in the country, they have been driving to his home in Magere, and quite often to his party offices in Kamwokya. Again, they often make quite an entry. From meeting Bobi Wine, they then travelled a few kilometres to meet Museveni where he assured them that Uganda was not “their enemy” [sic] before posing for pictures.

There is no better manifestation, or blatant display of divide and conquer than seeing these democracy merchandisers strutting from one corner of Kampala to the other just like colonial lords patronising the lead politicians on either side of the rather superficial aisle. Their obvious but deftly disguised intention are threefold: (a) ensure that while these two groups remain diametrically opposed to each other, they do not disturb the peace creating a mess for business. Preach peace— there should be no disruptions to our looting! Because if they did, you will never know where it ends. (b) should either side emerge victorious, no alliances are lost, as all of them will consider you a friend. But more significantly, (c) once the cameras are gone, the EU uses opposition leaders as bargaining chips against which they force Museveni into tougher concessions. They constantly remind Museveni of their potential to support his adversary if he does not play ball. Indeed, if this were the 1970s, these fellows would actually sell guns to both sides, and then bring relief food supplies to war-displaced natives.

Democracy is not just a language of [colonial] exploitation, it is the practice of exploitation itself. Problematically mixed with civil liberties, democracy has inextricably, irretrievably tied the African elite to exploitative capitalism, while at the same time, exciting, distracting and completely blinding them from real concerns, or even revolution

If colonialism thrived on the principle of divide and conquer, democracy thrived on a likeable but sadly, equally dangerous arrangement, ‘multi-party governance.’ As a principle, a multi-party order divides the elite into polarized camps, political parties, with one forming the government and the other, the opposition. After the country’s intelligentsia are divided, the democracy brokers and merchandisers proceed to conquer them. Deeply divided, and sometimes at the point of violence against each other, Natives never get the opportunity to stop and see their real enemy. The contest over retaining office becomes the major concern for the ruling party at the expense of developing the country. Instead of actually uniting to consolidate their position and use their combined brain power (as their anti-colonial intelligentsia did), the sitting government both imprisons and murders its critics—key human resources—leaving it empty of brain power, and terribly exposed. By the time the democracy thieves strike, the sitting president has sycophants and praise singers to consult with.

In the Ugandan example, we will never know (a) how much money Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni invests in keeping the office of president, since he has some of the most sumptuous classified budget votes—such as state house (spending USH550m daily – US$152,000) with a budget allocation above tourism, the lead foreign exchange earner). It is certainly in billions. Since he has life presidency ambitions, Museveni spends a great deal of time and money procuring members of the opposition. To divide them further. Museveni is also endlessly facilitating and privileging the security forces, which in 2020, took 10% of the entire national budget above health and agriculture. [There is no war in Uganda, and the budget has been as high as this for the last 15 years]. The guardian ministries of the man (state house and security) also get sumptuous supplementary budgets for classified expenditure! But the larger goal is to keep the president in power, since he sees a constant threat in the opposing side.

Parliament, which Museveni obviously does not need if there were no democracy merchandisers pushing him, is terribly bloated with over 530 legislators currently making it the biggest in Africa—bigger than South Africa and Nigeria. Annually, the Ugandan parliament burns USH1.3 trillion (approximately US$360m) of Ugandan taxpayer just for the theatrics of it. Just for the theatrics of it. Yet, everything of consequence in Uganda is pre-decided by Museveni before it is dramatized on the floor of Parliament. Additionally, Museveni employs hundreds of advisors, ministers, Residential District Commissioners (RDCs) with equally senior deputies, simply as part of his great retinue of patronage.

The amount of money and energy Museveni spends on playing other centres of power especially the Catholic church, Muslims and the Buganda kingdom elite is equally immense. These are not simple cash-staffed brown envelopes—which are far too common—these are big sums ranging from billions to churches to four-wheel Land-cruisers. Just to buy off opposition in the name of democracy. But democracy merchandisers hold these items in his face, which forces him into concessions with specifically the foreign exploiters. Let’s now consider the related part of this argument.

As Ali Mazrui, 1997 succinctly demonstrated, the humanitarian values (freedom of speech, women emancipation and empowerment, freedom of choice, religion, etc.) believed to the guaranteed as so terribly inexistent even in the so-called democracies of the west.

Living in simple fear—not the principle—of the opposition (b) we would never know the amount of concessions, Museveni has had to make with the new democracy-wagging exploiters, the self- appointed vanguards of democracy to allow them to continue their pillage of Uganda, and him to continue governing. If he is not sending mercenary forces to Somalia, he is sending them to South Sudan, and DRC. The details of these concessions remain top secrets to the Ugandan public. The Ugandan parliament predicts that the country will need 94 years to clear this debt, which continues to surge every passing day. Business deals where Uganda is left with minority shareholding over its own resources such as oil are simply baffling.

Incidentally, all this rides on the wreck left behind by vanguards of democracy into African economies in the late 1980s when they coerced country after country into dismantling cooperatives that had enabled societies and the people to survive. The dismantling of cooperatives led to a rise in rural poverty after tilling the land had been made unprofitable. If this was no colonialism—an outright plot to exploit and break the toiling masses of Africa —then we’ll never appreciate the depth of its damage to the continent. Because after local economies were ruined, including the closure of all local banks – many of them closed without explanation – the vacuum left behind was filled by European and Asian banks. The Ugandan banking market is now dominated by foreign banks, with business-suffocating interest rates, making banks in Africa the most profitable in the world, yet the most inefficient—according to The Economist. It is extremely difficult, if not outright terrifying, for farmers and small scale businesspersons to access credit. Surprisingly, this so-called Washington Consensus is still enforced 20 years on – even when the damage is visible everywhere – and the WB has acknowledged its mistakes. What the fuck is this?

Yet farmers across Europe and North America are not on their own. They are heavily funded by their states. Take the example of Mali that Slavoj Zizek (2009) writes about, despite producing high quality cotton and beef, the two pillars of its economy, the country could not compete with the US and EU, where the same industries are heavily subsidised:

…the problem is that the financial support the US government gives to its own cotton farmers amounts to more than the entire state budget of Mali… the EU subsidizes every single cow with around 500 Euros per year—more than the per capita GDP in Mali.

These double standards are visible to every single soul from South Africa to Mali and Uganda (see also, Jörg Wiegratz 2019). The promotion of free markets remains a central idea to a so-called democratic government. But in truth, it is outright exploitation through the international dictates of structural adjustment and open markets which are pushed down the throats of Africans as a core parts of ‘democracy.’ Only in Africa!

To return to the question why is there no concentrated movement against this new form of exploitation dubbed democracy (its free market economics, loans, and grants, and foreign aid) and enforced onto only small countries? This is because of democracy’s disguised logic of divide and conquer. The language of democracy ensures the best brains of the country are split into conflicting camps with one obsessed with the holding onto the presidency as much of the intelligentsia remains blind but also conscripted to the networks and channels of exploitation.

The west’s no-change regimes, and PR presidents

One of the most powerful jokes of the 21st Century is the highly cited notion that “power belongs to the people.” It never does, has never, and will never. That in the exercise of democracy—specifically voting—ordinary folks wield their power to determine the ways in which they are governed, remains one of the biggest lies of our time. The lie continues that by this single act of voting, they have power to restore civility, end dangerous policies of previous governments such as removing American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, which since the start was based on fake intelligence, closing the very embarrassing Guantanamo Prison, or ensuring a minimum wage for workers etcetera. It is all high sounding nonsense. Ordinary folks have no power—except through violent revolution—but would be constantly manipulated into the belief in their electoral power.

The Slovenian theorist, Slavoj Zizek, was right when he claimed that while humanity was okay, 99 percent of people are boring gullible idiots. They have been deluded into belief of possessing electoral civil power. In truth, the world is run on self-interested authorities or autocracy. These take two forms, institutionalised and individualised. While in Europe and North America, authority or autocracy is institutionalised, it has tended to take individualised forms in Africa. The west has extremely autocratic institutions, which constantly change their public relations officers—often problematically called Presidents or Prime Ministers. The holders of these titles and offices actually have no power besides speech and celebrity. See for example, be it Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden, America’s domestic policy on immigration, the police force, black folks, guns, women, the minimum wage will remain the same. There will be minute adjustments that the very noisy American press will blow out of proportion discussing it endlessly. But by and large, stuff remains the same. American foreign policy towards the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, Iran and Africa will not change. Change only comes by way of violent revolution, marches, strikes, community organising, media activism, etcetera—not through the facades of elections. As an African watching America from the outside, I agree with Syria’s Bashar-al-Assad’s conclusion that President Donald Trump’s crime was transparency about the intentions of America’s imperial interests. While Obama and Clinton smiled and joked through their crimes in the Middle East and at home, Trump was boisterous and embarrassingly candid. With more gusto, Trump simply continued Obama’s policies at home and abroad. Surely, Joe Biden is already doing the same — with just a little sophistication and disguise. American and European presidents are like shirts and dresses, while some make the wearer turn out smart, others could simply mess-up their appearances. But the bodies behind these fabrics remain the same. The truth is, heavily invested, albeit invisible Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Lenins, and Napoleons control American and European institutions. True to their power, these invisible Hitlers and Mussolinis blatantly took away the megaphone from Donald Trump for constantly embarrassing them with terrible PR. They went ahead and killed those smaller units that sought to challenge their power? [Please note, Facebook and Twitter are simply a manifestation, not the wielders of actual power].

The cycle of deception continues. Americans will always unite in stealing and killing from the rest of the world. Then back home, lobbyists, bankers and the super rich will squeeze life out of workers and African Americans will constantly be jailed and murdered, as women march for equal work equal pay like democracy never existed. It is all a deception.

The deceptive entanglement that democracy is more than elections, but all other civil liberties and humane treatment is terribly ahistorical. African history is replete with civil regimes that have no connection with our present perceptions of so-called democracy. In truth, the proposition that their democracy guarantees and is synonymous with humaneness and civil liberties is not just problematically ahistorical, but a dreadful deceptive. It is the trick. It is behind this claim that Africans have been duped, as their resources are being stolen under their noses.

Towards regimes of authority

After Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli had died, and the deafening elite noise boomed from every corner of the region, sloganeering about how Magufuli stifled dissent and free press, a friend of mine asked me to name the major opposition political party in China, and how many MPs they had in their parliament. I didn’t know. He then asked me to name the main opposition party in Russia, and how democracy—as dramatized in western Europe and North America—played out there. I did not know it either. He moved on to the much admired Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. He mixed it up with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Argentina, North Korea, Iran asking me to name their opposition political parties. It was such as mixed bag, and I did not know how to respond. He then asked me about the quality of life in those countries compared to say the “more democratic” Great Britain, Kenya, Uganda or even South Africa.

Humbled, I then recalled Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya which the UN constantly ranked highest in Africa on its Development Index. Focused on items including literacy rates, women empowerment, living conditions, and healthcare, Libya, for years ranked above more democratic spaces such as South Africa and Nigeria. On their part, Russia, China and Turkey have a higher quality of life for their populations in addition to being major economic powers. Why, if they aren’t democratic? Why don’t they have open markets? Didn’t structural adjustment reach these places? Before asking about the civil liberties in these countries, my friend raised the story of Julian Assange and the asked whether I had read a Mazrui 1997 essay discussing how similar the so-called democratic spaces in the west aren’t any different from so-called authoritarian spaces in the Islamic world.

The exploitative dangerousness of democracy is captured in Slavoj Zizek’s eulogy to Nelson Mandela that appeared in The Guardian upon his death. Concluding that Mandela was a failure—as regards the uplift the victims of apartheid from the backwaters of the economy, land redistribution . Zizek speaks to a difficult capitalist-democracy dilemma, and how leaders get derided and fought as authoritarians and sometimes even killed. Zizek writes,

A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world”– but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest.

Although Zizek speaks to open confrontation from capitalists, we need to appreciate that exploitative nature of capitalism has thrived with ‘democracy’ as its utmost enabler, its methodology, which most importantly, makes resistance to exploitation divided and distracted.

Across Africa, this dilemma of whether to or not to touch the capitalist machine is as old as independence. Those leaders who played the game were either favourably profiled in international presses, given lucrative deals in mining and other resource exploitation projects. In other cases, they were knighted, and sometimes awarded with Nobel prizes. If they touched or simply threatened to dismantle this exploitative structure, they were punished, either with sanctions leading to removal from office, assassinated or exiled. They would be labelled dictators.

It is noteworthy that those few African leaders in history who actually managed to destabilise the machinery of new exploitation—euphemised as ‘free markets democracy’—had to craft something entirely different. But they were fiercely resisted. Even if they had actually been elected, as soon as they touched the machinery of exploitation, they were challenged. Especially on land and resources exploitation reforms, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, John Pombe Magufuli are noteworthy. The core reason for dispensing with their democracy is that it has tended to bind government into contracts (globalisation, and free market), sensibilities (such as certain political freedoms, international human rights regimes etc), which are often selfishly and racially applied onto weaker countries and then exploited. International exploitative capitalism would be dead if it were not offered democracy as its handmaiden.

It is noteworthy that those few African leaders in history who actually managed to destabilise the machinery of new exploitation—euphemised as ‘free markets democracy’—had to craft something entirely different. But they were fiercely resisted

Nelson Mandela’s Nobel Prize winning genius was in deftly deflecting ANC land reform and economic redistribution movement leaving the economy in the hands of white South Africans. And because Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Winnie Mandela presented a persistent threat to white capital, they were purged. It should be interesting to note that the land reform in Zimbabwe was for a while actually working despite the country continuing under sanctions and misinformation in the major media houses (see Grasian Mkodzongi and Peter Lawrence, 2019). Six years of John Pombe Magufuli would be characterised by immense international name-calling because he actually refused to cow-tow to the dictates of the democracy merchandisers.

Closely appreciating these exploitative dynamics of a mode of government—a more sophisticated mode of pillage and control just like colonialism—continues to be stifled by the democracy machine and lobby. Africans will have to take a stand. And standing up will be costly in terms of life and resources. Sanctions, death, wars will be created so as to reproduce democratic exploitation. But for the African who is convinced that democratic Uganda under Museveni or democratic Kenya under the Mwai Kibaki, Uhuru Kenyatta, or Raila Odinga rather than Libya under Gaddafi or Cuba under Fidel Castro has actually joined the thieves en-route to rob their father’s estate. Of course, there are empty comprador autocracies, which are as bad as democracy. Of course, Libya’s Gaddafi would be more humane, and the example of what it has become is extreme. But democratic Libya would never return to Gaddafi’s Libya, unless all Africans stood up. Nor will democratic South Africa ever reach Gaddafi’s Libya. The values often confused with democracy were more often preserved under the Ottomans. The scholarship on the Islamic tradition is deep and explicit on humaneness, rights of women, the poor, social security, equality between races, workers, independent scholarship, and thus freedom of speech, but the language is never “democracy.” In truth, democracy is divide and rule. It is thuggery.

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This article was first published in the Review of African Political Economy Journal.

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Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

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Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.