A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda Provides an Insider’S View of the Ugandan Leader and His Movement

The Death of Michael Alinda: Why Uganda Needs Coroners’ Courts

By Mary Serumaga

Coroners – judicial officials who hold inquiries into unnatural deaths – may not seem very interesting although the Canadian TV series Coroner attracted one million viewers in its first season. A related profession, that of the medical examiner (or pathologist), who may be appointed by a coroner to examine a corpse had its own American reality show, The Medical Examiner, that ran for seven years.

The absence of a (active) coroner in Uganda was felt following the death of the hitherto unknown Michael Alinda, a moderately successful self-employed IT technician and property owner with musical aspirations and a penchant for motorbikes – a twenty-eight year old living his dream regardless of the circumstances. Michael was also a People Power activist. When he died on 4th August at Mulago National Referral Hospital with horrendous facial and other injuries – thereby gaining the name recognition that eluded him in life – his death was examined mainly on social media. There were press conferences held by the police the facts of which were refuted by another held by his siblings and their lawyers. And then there was a TV documentary. Still the death of Michael Alinda (more commonly known as Zigy Wyne) remains a mystery.

It began with his disappearance reported on social media on 22nd July and to Ganda Police post by a neighbour on 27th July, a fact supported by documentary evidence and a police reference number. By the end of the month, People Power activists were tweeting about his disappearance and sharing the information that he updated on social media. In fact, Alinda’s Facebook page shows him to have been diligent in posting news of the fall-out that followed the Arua by-election in August 2018 and the abductions that followed from that difficult time. He also posted about the loss of some land to land grabbers, stating that it was injustices such as these that lead the youth to join opposition politics.

It was only after his death on August 4th that the police became proactively involved. They issued a statement the day after, stating a post-mortem had been carried out (presumably by a medical examiner) and showed that the deceased had suffered blunt force trauma to the head that led to his death. It also revealed “defence injuries” to his fingers “arising out of a struggle”. The thread continues to say a team was being assembled to investigate the murder.

However, the very next day, the same police spokesperson stated that the police was treating the death as a fatal road accident. They said that the accident report was received on the 21st July and that this report had not been presented to the media when this inquiry was being held.

However, in the absence of inquests and the existence of a long history of abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings by the armed forces under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government, and the People Power activists currently reported missing, it was not entirely surprising that the leader of the People Power movement, Robert Kyagulanyi (himself a survivor of said abduction, torture and near-death), should make a statement to the effect that Alinda had died following abduction and torture. The police confirmed the claim of death by homicide and at the time of writing their announcement of the post-mortem results is still on their Twitter timeline.

Under the Inquests Act of 1935, inquests are mandatory following death by road accident. Had the law been followed, the family and public would have been spared the trauma of prolonged and intense speculation, painful but necessary – essential even – in Museveni’s Uganda. The main benefit of having coroners is the judicial independence they enjoy. On his/her own initiative, s/he would have had the authority to order the medical examination of Alinda’s body to confirm or refute the conflicting reports about the condition it was in. A coroner appointed even after burial has the authority to order the exhumation of the body. This is something even favoured NRM journalists cannot pull off.

On the day of the post-mortem, Alinda’s sister, Immaculate Kiconco, spoke to the media outside the mortuary (from 00:32 to 00:48 ZIGGY WINE; Police to investigate tortured Firebase Musician’s kidnap). For the first time the public was informed of the timeline of his disappearance and discovery by his family in hospital on 29th July. On arrival she was handed a “release letter” which indicated he had been discharged on 25th July, meaning he was unattended for the intervening five days. (Not uncommon in Uganda.) In response to her doubts about removing such a seriously ill patient, she was told all he needed was to eat and take his medicine regularly. They were given a prescription.

The sister described Alinda’s body covered in burns “on different parts”. She also said she had been informed an eye was pierced. In Luganda she said it was so badly damaged it was “dead”. Unfortunately, with characteristic Ugandan inexactitude this became “eye plucked out”. The phrase gained traction and replaced anything more accurate (just as in Uganda to be sued will forever be referred to as being “dragged to court”). Whatever the case, the left eye was clearly visible in the photos of Alinda posted on social media. Apart from that the medic in question told Kiconco that her brother had arrived bleeding profusely from his middle finger.

The family sought the advice of a doctor friend who took one look at Alinda and advised them to take him to a big hospital, a Ugandan idiom distinguishing hospitals from clinics, health centres and dispensaries. They rushed him to the nearby Iran-Uganda Hospital, a modern well- equipped police facility. There the brain scans were examined and the family told immediate surgery was necessary as the injured eye was bleeding into the brain. It remains unclear why the procedure was not carried out at Iran Hospital, but they did provide a police ambulance by which the patient was transferred to the venerable missionary-founded Nsambya Hospital. Further procedures were carried out for which a large amount of money was paid and emergency surgery was again advised. After consultation, the staff and family agreed on a transfer back to Mulago.

After one night in Nsambya ICU, Alinda was re-admitted at Mulago Hospital on 30th July. There the diagnosis of Iran-Uganda Hospital was confirmed by another scan; brain surgery was necessary. Dr Muhumuza said the brain injury would have caused seizures which, in turn, could have moved to his throat, thereby choking him. This being TV and not a Coroners Court, it was not possible to have that testimony subjected to scrutiny by another expert in traumatic brain injury. Discussions about the surgery began on Tuesday 30th July, through Friday 2nd August resuming after the weekend when the doctors did not appear, and ending with Alinda’s death on the 4th of August.

The media became more interested but only NBS TV’s Canary Mugume and the NRM’s Andrew Mwenda had access to Alinda’s medical notes, and purported witnesses of the alleged accident. Mwenda was not expected to bring any sobriety to bear on the inquiry as he habitually refers to the People Power movement followers as hooligans, riff-raff and radical extremists and its leader Bobi Wine as empty-headed and other such political analyses.

Mugume was able to assemble all the witnesses at the scene (as coroners are obliged to do during inquests) and they gave more or less similar testimony – although unsworn because Mugume is not a coroner. The deceased was allegedly speeding, trying to overtake when he was dazzled by an oncoming vehicle, swerved and hit one Loy Atworo before winding up face down in a concrete culvert with his bike on his back. Slight variations include his being hit by a speeding taxi before landing in a ditch. All agree that he must have been burned by the bike although one voice says the bike fell some distance away from him. A woman pointed to a spot on the road where she says she saw Alinda’s severed fingers (she didn’t say how many). The woman victim, Atworo, was said to have been and in fact claimed to have become unconscious immediately although a first responder at the nearby clinic where both victims were allegedly taken states that she was conscious and speaking.

Uganda Radio Network attempted to speak to the “accident” eye-witnesses on the day the police disavowed the post-mortem report but failed as they had been rounded up by the police for investigations. When found a few days later, some said they had expected to be taken to CID headquarters from Kiira Road Police station but were instead driven to State House Nakasero where each was grilled about their account.

The witnesses were then driven home while repeatedly being asked if they were sure of their story. Inexplicably, this potentially damning revelation was syndicated in Mwenda’s The Independent. Mwenda himself never reconciled his own version of events with the police version. He has a different day on which Alinda was found by his family – the 24th and not the 27th. The family insists it was on the 29thth.

His timeline allows Mwenda to state the cause of death was failure to take prescribed anti-seizure medicines “when he was home”. However, there is no point at which Zigy was at home and out of the care of one of three hospitals except while in transit. His claims are based on Mwenda’s interview with Dr Muhumuza, the neurosurgeon who treated the deceased and to whom, like Canary Mugume, he had access. Nsambya Hospital staff observed protocol and declined to discuss the deceased with the media without a court order; only a coroner could have summoned and compelled them to give evidence.

Canary Mugume’s second in-depth coverage of the story alone makes the urgent case for the appointment of a coroner. It has a number of serious omissions, each tending to strengthen the claims of the State and to cast aspersions on the family, friends and political allies of Alinda.

Most glaringly, the NBS Special Report aired on 13th August does not reconcile the conflicting discharge dates; it does not investigate who attended to Alinda between his discharge on the 25th of July and his transfer four days later. The omission has a bearing on the claim that he died from not taking his prescribed drugs.

Furthermore, the reason he did not receive surgery between his re-admission and his death four days later is not probed. Effort is not made to resolve the issue of the post-mortem report but rather is invested in trying to prove the family has no evidence to back up its claims except the undated Mulago out-patients department form indicating TBI (traumatic brain injury), which was displayed at their press conference. One would have expected NBS to point out that the family said at the same presser (which NBS attended three days before the broadcast) that they did have a post-mortem report that was read out at the funeral, as well as snapshots of the Discharge Form dated 25th July and other documents. NBS completely avoids any mention of Iran-Uganda Hospital and the treatment and diagnosis given there. It does not include the very first report alleging an accident given by an unnamed police source to BBC journalist Alan Kasujja stating that one finger was completely severed and another was hanging off.

What did most to undermine the credibility of #NBSSpecialReport was the manner in which it included a clip from the family press conference. The clip was presented with the NBS watermark as though it were part of their work. The fact is the media house only contacted the family after People Power activists challenged Mugume to do so before airing his much-advertised documentary. It was probably this that caused the 24-hour delay in the broadcast.

In the clip, Kiconco repeated the statement she made outside the mortuary nearly a week earlier; that her brother’s eye was so badly damaged it could not be saved. Which is neither “plucked out” (People Power) nor “intact” (Police). However, NBS created the impression that Mugume had caught the family in a lie. Alinda’s family has been publicly warned by the police to desist from withholding information from them and misleading the public with false information. On their part, the family plans to file suit against the police for defamation and against Mulago Hospital for negligence. They also plan to apply to the High Court for the institution of an inquest.

Uganda Police’s conflicting statements, along with their inability to explain how they concluded in the first instance that death was by homicide, only deepened existing public distrust. The “eye- witnesses” are widely believed to have been coached, especially during their visit to State House.

Following a Police announcement that hospital CCTV record had been obtained and was being “restored” at police headquarters, it took eleven days for them to actually produce footage allegedly of the deceased being brought to the hospital by good Samaritans. On examination, the first segment captured in traffic outside the hospital on the date in question shows two or three riders of a boda boda dressed in pale-coloured trousers. The second captured at the hospital gate gives a shot highlighted by the police of three persons on a boda boda. The middle passenger is a lady in a red dress. She sits erect and although she is helped off the bike, she is able to support herself as she enters the hospital. It is date-stamped 1st July 2019, three weeks before Michael Alinda was reported missing.

The laxity only reinforces the belief that he was dumped at Mulago by his torturers the way Francis Zaake MP was dumped at Lubaga Hospital with eye and finger and facial injuries following his abduction in Arua in August 2018.

All parties concerned could have been protected from speculation and injustice had there been an inquest – a public hearing with sworn testimony, named witnesses and an official record. Justice would have been served because written eyewitness statements would have been given in advance to designated interested parties.

Uganda is not alone in this predicament; the Tanganyika Law Society called for the reinstitution of coroners courts in Tanzania after the death of journalist David Mwangosya when police opened fire on a demonstration in 2012. Rather than appoint a coroner, the Ministry of Justice formed a commission of inquiry on which the police were given a seat.

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.

The Death of Michael Alinda: Why Uganda Needs Coroners’ Courts

By Mary Serumaga As a whole, public medical facilities in Uganda have been in the gutter for quite some time. In Kampala, the government attempted to shield us from this fact when it ambushed and took over the two new hospitals built under Jennifer Musisi’s tenure as Executive Director of Kampala City Council Authority. The city already had a number of health centres inherited from Kampala District; it was some of these that were to be transformed to branches of the National Referral Hospital.

Kiruddu and Kawempe hospitals are big, flashy and captivating at first sight but reality sets in once you enter them. They have essentially become the hospitals for the have-nots while the newly renovated Mulago has more or less been transformed into a private hospital catering to a different market.

The process was gradual, not based on consultation, and the changes were communicated in public announcements. Chiefly, that maternity care at Mulago Hospital, once free of charge, is now a chargeable service. Considerably higher rates were listed alongside the new charges in order to make them more palatable.

“Services will be classified as standard, VIP and VVIP; clinical services offered to all patients at all levels irrespective of pay. (Dr R. Aceng, Minister of Health). Charges at the Mulago Specialised Women and Neonatal Hospital begin at Shs.50,000 or US$ 13.57 for consultation, a sum equivalent to one-third of the minimum monthly wage and way above the actual average daily earnings of between US$1 and US$2. The upper limit for specialised treatment is Shs. million or US$ 814, which is twenty months’ pay at minimum wage. Accommodation alone costs Shs.80,000 per day. A Caesarian section goes for Shs.2 million ($542), with an extra Shs.200,000 for tubal ligation.

For neonates requiring surgery, charges are between Shs.1.5 and Shs.3.5 million. To clear a newborn baby’s airways costs Shs.300,000 (two months’ minimum wages) daily and to keep the baby on a ventilator (once the airways are cleared) costs Shs.1 million or US$271 per day. We shall return to the care of neonates later.

This arrangement was aimed at reducing maternal mortality, which is 336 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births compared to the global rate of 216 per 100,000 live births. The new Women’s Hospital built on the campus was meant to decongest Mulago National Specialised (formerly Referral) Hospital and enable women with complicated reproductive health problems to be treated and to reduce referrals abroad (Ministry of Health). However, since the launch of the privatised Mulago Hospital, the government has continued to fly public officials abroad for treatment, notably the Speaker of Parliament who was treated in Kenya for exhaustion.

Where the introduction of charges at Mulago has been successful is in decongesting it by driving women to the understaffed, under-equipped and overcrowded “national referral hospitals” at Kawempe and Kiruddu where between 80 and 100 babies are delivered daily.

This arrangement was aimed at reducing maternal mortality, which is 336 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births compared to the global rate of 216 per 100,000 live births.

Who are these displaced women? In 2003 the Health Sector Strategy review showed only about 20 per cent of women use government maternity facilities. These women are predominantly the poor without options, meaning that those displaced from Mulago are not the ones who would otherwise have opted for private domestic healthcare or care abroad. They are not in the market for in vitro fertilization and the other specialised treatments now offered at Mulago but primary health seekers. Their issues cannot be transferred out of existence. The rest of the birthing population who use hospital maternity services – say 80% if the statistic still holds – will continue to use private services and may or may not use Mulago or go abroad. A large number of women (25%) of those giving birth are simply not attended to by qualified birth attendants (2016, World Bank databank).

Kampala City Council Authority did not design Kiruddu and Kawempe Hospitals to take the spillover from Mulago, which explains the current crisis at Kawempe. Truth be told the situation has been dire for a while now. By the time the photograph of neonates stacked on beds and plastic chairs in nappies and nothing else except cannulas and nasal tubes caused a public outcry, medics who have been complaining about this for ages had grown weary and moved on. Following the outcry, the babies were transferred to Mulago Hospital and offered free services. Even then, there were complaints about the unaffordability of the meals, which remained chargeable.

The Ministry’s initial reaction was to deny the crisis and then raid Komamboga Health Centre III for cots, which did nothing to reassure the public and reportedly caused Komamboga staff to down their tools. When they finally bought cots it begged the question: if the money was available why were cots not bought in the first place?

It is hard to blame hospital management; since the hospitals opened, the directors and staff have strenuously reported their grievances to the Ministry of Health and other relevant authorities to no avail. That one photo has in many ways been a blessing in disguise; it has held a steady spotlight for longer than is usual on the state of health services.

The Labour Suite at Kawempe is unbelievably busy, having essentially inherited all the clientele that used to go to Mulago; most health centres (such as Komamboga and Kisenyi) refer their patients there. It is not uncommon for Caesarian section kits to run out, with expectant mothers still in the queue. Consequently, we are always overwhelmed by the huge numbers in the nursery/Special Care Unit/Neonatal Units. The inevitable result is that try as we might, even with triaging [prioritising the most serious cases], the general delays in patients’ seeking healthcare and the modes of transport of expectant mothers to hospital mean many babies are born with birth asphyxia. Birth asphyxia is basically poor oxygenation of the foetus occurring mostly during the period of delivery (parturition). Depending on its extent, the outcomes can range from Hypoxic Ischaemic Encephalopathy (HIE) Grade II which may leave the child with some deficits and conditions like epilepsy. In the worst cases, referred to as HIE Grade 3, if the neonate survives, the baby will develop cerebral palsy (CP). CP involves loss of muscle control which can affect mobility, speech, swallowing, bladder control etc. and is often accompanied by epilepsy. In our setting, in which support services are fewer than elsewhere, its impact on parents, whole families, not to mention the economy is devastating. While CP can be caused by diseases such as meningitis, cerebral malaria, encephalitis and even traumatic brain injury, in Uganda birth asphyxia is the main cause. One of the busiest children’s clinics at Mulago is the neurology clinic that sees children with CP.

Many babies are born prematurely due to dangerous diseases like preeclampsia. These and other neonates at Kawempe Hospital require delicate care: daily antibiotics, two-hourly feeds, and the cannulas through which they are medicated (seen in the photo) may need to be changed. Emergency cases need nasogastric tubes, which help breathing, along with respirator bags and resuscitation.

Impact on staff

All this often falls on the shoulders of just three nurses. Understaffing at Kawempe is exacerbated by the return of some midwives to the Women’s Hospital at Mulago. In fact there is a national shortage of midwives

On International Midwives Day 2019, the plight of the midwife in the current environment was revealed. A midwife at Bwizibwera Health Centre IV, which delivers an average of 150 babies a month, described their predicament. They face constant shortages of gloves and mama kits. Sometimes there is no fuel for the ambulance. All these are shortages to which the staff frequently contribute out of their own pockets and ask those mothers who can to pay, often leading to accusations of corruption.

“We need to be helped, I have worked for 15 years and what I have witnessed in health facilities is not good for us. They are always blaming midwives for charging money which in those cases it is unavoidable.” – T. Atukunda (New Vision)

The adverse effect on staffing levels is that many medics, specialists in particular, spend more time in private practice and research.

“I rotated through that place last year and it was horrible. I can’t say I enjoyed it because most of what we were doing was a charade. The morale of those that remain is low.” – (Doctor whose name has been withheld)

The Medical School has also been adversely impacted. While training used to take place at Mulago (close to the student accommodation), Obs/Gyn students must now make the trip to Kawempe and Internal Medicine students must travel to Kiruddu at a substantial cost. Had there been adequate consultation and planning, Mulago would not have been fully shut down for renovation, certainly not for five years. Or at least a whole new private structure like the Women’s Hospital would have been built alongside it. Government has secured the US$350 million to build such a structure – Lubowa Hospital – while the renovations at Mulago only require US$9 million to complete. It is claimed that the Lubowa Hospital budget could have enabled the renovation and equipment of all Uganda’s regional hospitals as well as Mulago. As it is, US$35,874,800 has already gone missing from the Lubowa funds and is the subject of an inquiry.

Health insurance

In theory the Health Insurance Bill tabled in August 2019 will address most of these issues by making the cost of treatment affordable to government. A first attempt with a pilot scheme under the District Health Project ended without success in 2003, principally because of issues internal to the project i.e. an unrealistic timetable that led to the abandonment of the pilot and unsuccessful roll-out of untried interventions. There was also a lack of a monitoring and evaluation component. In the event, none of the health insurance schemes turned out to be appropriate.

As a final nail in the coffin, the government failed to top up the US$45 million loan with the US$17.5 million co-financing required. The co-financing shortfall is exactly half the amount that has now vanished from the Lubowa Hospital construction account. If anything indicates the lack of political will to deliver services, it is the failure of the District Health Services Scheme brought about by the failure of government to finance it.

There has been criticism of the public response to the crisis. True it should have come earlier, for example when the health insurance scheme failed to materialise fifteen years ago, or more recently in mid-2017 when the Auditor General reported, “Health facilities were experiencing persistent stock-outs of the 11 sampled Tracer drugs. […] Noticeably, Mama [safe delivery] Kits were out of stock for 320 days.” The very few medics who have commented on social media confessed boredom at the (short-term) public outrage coming decades into the problem.

Given the graphic view of the impact of haphazard and under-funded health services afforded by the Kawempe Hospital babies, the new Health Insurance Bill should be scrutinised very carefully by medics and laypeople alike working together to ensure that the interventions proposed have been rigorously pilot-tested and that the design faults that existed in the unsuccessful District Health Project proposals have been adequately addressed in the current ones.

This article is based on conversations with a Ugandan doctor about his experience as a clinician in public health in Kampala. Mary Serumaga takes responsibility for the statistical and archival material incorporated and any errors.

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.

By Mary Serumaga

Who is Uganda’s enigmatic leader Yoweri Museveni? Since seizing power 33 years ago, his army has profoundly reshaped the politics of central and eastern Africa, and yet few outside of this region have even heard of him.

To some, Museveni is a visionary strategist who helped topple three brutal dictators, revived Uganda’s economy, fought the AIDS epidemic and played a steady-handed diplomatic role in a volatile region. But for others, Museveni is himself a brutal dictator, who deliberately provokes conflicts within Uganda and in neighboring countries, brutalizes Uganda’s political opposition and feasts on money stolen from Ugandan taxpayers and foreign aid programs, all the while beguiling naïve Western journalists and diplomats with his signature charm.

I’ve been reporting on Uganda for almost 25 years, and I still find Museveni fascinating. As a rebel leader during the early 1980s, his shape-shifting exploits were legendary. Again and again, his small band of rebels would menace and outwit Uganda’s much larger national army and then melt away into the bush. Ugandans joke that Museveni could turn into a cat and walk through roadblocks.

William Pike, who served as editor of Uganda’s government-owned New Vision newspaper from 1986-2006 has almost certainly had more contact with Museveni than any other non-Ugandan writer. Pike’s gripping new book Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda provides an insider’s view of the Ugandan leader and his movement.

By all accounts, Pike is a highly effective editor and manager. Former employees have described him to me as a gentle boss who ran a productive, disciplined newsroom. He wasn’t afraid to go after cases of corruption involving senior cabinet ministers and even sporadic cases of torture and extrajudicial killings carried out by Museveni’s security forces. Under his leadership, the New Vision soon became Uganda’s most popular publication. I’m personally acquainted with Pike and have always found him kind, intelligent and extremely likeable. His book is also very well-written.

Unfortunately however, Combatants presents an overly flattering image of Museveni’s regime that belies reality, overlooks recent scholarship that challenges Pike’s version of events and sometimes contradicts the findings of Pike’s own New Vision reporters.

***

Pike first met Museveni in 1984, when the young reporter snuck behind enemy lines during the so- called “bush war” against Uganda’s then-president Milton Obote. By then, Museveni’s rebels known as the National Resistance Army, or NRA– controlled a significant part of the Luwero Triangle, an 8000 square mile area northwest of Kampala that had been the site of intense fighting. Until then, the bush war was viewed internationally as a minor skirmish, but Pike’s articles for the UK Observer and Guardian newspapers helped bring Museveni’s struggle to the attention of western policymakers.

The Luwero Triangle is the rural homeland of the Baganda people—Uganda’s largest ethnic group. Soon after launching his rebellion, Museveni, a Munyankole from western Uganda, promised Baganda leaders that if he managed to take power, he’d restore their traditional kingdom, which Obote had violently crushed in 1966. In return, the Baganda allowed Museveni to base his forces in their villages. When Museveni’s men attacked army and police posts, Obote’s undisciplined and brutal soldiers responded with disproportionate force, killing anyone, including innocent villagers whom they suspected of supporting the rebels. During his visit, Pike was shown areas littered with human skulls. Quoting Museveni, he estimated that Obote’s forces had killed some 300,000 people—roughly half the population of the Luwero Triangle at the time.

The UK government, which supported Obote, was claiming that some 12,000 people had been killed on all sides of the fighting. If Pike was correct, Obote was responsible for genocide, and Britain’s support was unconscionable. By then, the Reagan administration was already distancing itself from Obote. While Pike was in Luwero, then Assistant Secretary of State Eliot Abrams told a congressional hearing that Obote’s regime had killed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people.

Normally such a huge figure would be referenced by a reputable source, ideally a forensic investigation, but like Pike, Abrams cited no independent source for those figures. When asked by Congressman Don Bonker where his source for the Luwero death toll came from, Abrams equivocated. “You wouldn’t be able to document those numbers,” he said. “There is no way of measuring directly, but there seems to be some kind of consensus that that is the order of magnitude.” Around the same time, the Washington Post also published a brief article on Uganda. Citing unnamed refugee monitoring groups and “official US sources” the author, who had not visited Uganda, also wrote that Obote’s forces had killed 100,000 to 200,000 people.

Since then, a more complex narrative about the Luwero skulls has emerged which Pike does not explore in Combatants. Not only is there no evidence that the death toll was as high as Pike and Reagan Administration officials claimed, Obote’s army, though undisciplined and brutal, may not have been responsible for all the casualties that did occur. Most deaths probably resulted from disease and hunger as a result of mass displacement. In 1983, the government launched a counter offensive against the NRA, and in the process rounded up more than 100,000 villagers into squalid camps without adequate food, water and medicine. The NRA then ordered the evacuation of those who remained in the area. As thousands of peasants trudged north with the NRA, more reportedly died. When the NRA retook those areas, the bones of the casualties of these operations could have been among those shown to Pike.

Former NRA soldiers have told me personally that they witnessed and even participated in such “false flag” killings, as have former NRA Kadogos—child soldiers–speaking with other reporters.

The NRA was also probably not blameless. Shortly after Pike’s visit, a journalist for the London Daily Telegraph visited one of the villages where the army was alleged to have massacred hundreds of people a year earlier. He found “nothing to support [these] claims.” The army had withdrawn to allow the Telegraph reporter to freely interview the chief and villagers. “The surprise these people showed when asked about a massacre could not have been an act,” he wrote. However, they did mention that Museveni’s rebels had recently killed three men and four children. Some of the rebels came from the area and locals recognized them, even though they were partially disguised in army uniforms. “They were dressed halfway,” the chief said. “I mean they were in army and civilian clothes, all mixed up.”

Former NRA soldiers have told me personally that they witnessed and even participated in such “false flag” killings, as have former NRA Kadogos—child soldiers–speaking with other reporters. In his 2011 memoir Betrayed By My Leader, former NRA Major John Kazoora describes an NRA massacre of Obote-loyalists belonging to the Alur tribe. “They would dig a shallow grave,” he writes, “tie you [up] and lie you facing the ground and crack your skull using an old hoe called Kafuni.”

In some cases, the NRA may even have killed its own. At first, Museveni mainly recruited from his own Banyankole tribe and Buganda, but after Obote brutally forced Uganda-based Rwandan Tutsi refugees into camps where many starved and died, some of them joined the rebellion as well. They grew close to Museveni, whose Hima people are closely related to the Tutsis, and soon began to dominate the force. Toward the end of the war, Baganda NRA soldiers began dying mysteriously and some suspected foul play. “We were fighting tribalism,” one Muganda NRA veteran told The Monitor newspaper, “but it was growing in the bush.” In 1983, Museveni warned all Westerners, including aid workers and diplomats, to leave Uganda at once. “We don’t possess the power to prevent accidents,” he wrote in a signed letter issued by his representatives in Kenya. Three weeks later, a Canadian engineer was gunned down on his doorstep in Kampala; four other European aid workers were killed a few months later. While the killers were never definitively identified, the NRA had kidnapped and released four other Swiss hostages and a French doctor around the same time.

***

In July 1985, Obote was toppled by his own army. The NRA continued to battle for power as desultory peace talks dragged on in Nairobi. Eventually, the NRA took Kampala from the disorganized, weak Ugandan government forces, and Museveni was sworn in in January 1986.

Back in London, a series of glowing tributes to Museveni appeared in the Observer and Guardian newspapers, many of them written by Pike. “Polite Guerrillas End Fourteen Years of Torture and Killing,” read one headline; “The Pearl of Africa Shines Again,” read another. According to his admirers, Museveni was Robin Hood, Che Guevara, and Field Marshal Montgomery all rolled into one.

As the war was winding down, Pike and Times of London journalist Richard Dowden toured NRA held areas, where villagers unanimously told them that all the atrocities were the fault of Obote’s forces; none were committed by the NRA, they said. However, both journalists were being escorted by NRA officers. Under the circumstances, it’s conceivable that villagers might have been afraid to report NRA atrocities, if they knew of any.

In recent years, opposition politicians including Kizza Besigye who served as Museveni’s doctor during the bush war, have called for a forensic investigation of the Luwero killings. Museveni has refused. Such an investigation would be very difficult in any case, since the NRA ordered locals to rebury the bones or gather them in memorial sites after the war.

Whatever the reality, the Luwero skulls provided Museveni with political capital early on. Shortly after coming to power, he escorted diplomats around the Luwero Triangle, pointing out the scattered remains and mass graves that Pike had seen. This helped bolster international support for Museveni, who came to be seen as Uganda’s best hope for a way out of the quagmire of its bloody history. Billions of foreign aid dollars would soon flow into his treasury.

During the 1996 presidential campaigns, the New Vision reported that Museveni’s main challenger, Paul Ssemogerere was planning to invite Milton Obote back from exile and appoint him to his cabinet. Ssemogerere vigorously denied this, but Pike insisted it was true. The article was published alongside a Museveni campaign ad with images of Luwero skulls heaped up in a pyramid and the following slogan:

“Don’t forget the past. Over one million Ugandans, our brothers, sisters, family and friends, lost their lives. YOUR VOTE COULD BRING IT BACK.”

According to historian Pauline Bernard, Pike claims credit for the article and the ad. But the inspiration for the skull propaganda may actually have come from highly controversial Museveni stalwart Roland Kakooza-Mutale, whose state-backed militia known as the Kalangala Action Plan attacks and terrorizes opposition supporters during political campaigns. After the fall of Amin in 1979, Kakooza-Mutale ran a pro-Museveni newspaper known as Economy. Shortly before the 1980 election, he published an anti-Obote editorial illustrated with drawings of skulls and the headline, “PEOPLE ADVISED TO VOTE AGAINST DEATH.”

More recently, Uganda’s tourism board has proposed creating a museum to commemorate those killed by previous regimes, including the Luwero dead.

***

Combatants also covers the early years of the war in northern Uganda that would give rise to the terrifying warlord Joseph Kony. But here, again, Pike paints an overly rosy picture of the NRA’s role. After Museveni was sworn in, his troops continued to pursue soldiers of the former Ugandan army, most of whom came from northern and eastern Uganda. In March 1986, former government soldiers in Acholiland—comprising the northern districts of Gulu and Kitgum—finally put down their guns. When the NRA arrived in Gulu they were “disciplined, friendly and respectful,” according to New Vision journalist Caroline Lamwaka. They requested the former army soldiers to surrender their weapons and some did so. Then in late April, the NRA began conducting raids on villages where they suspected guns were still being hidden. Property was looted, women were raped and unarmed people were shot and killed. Some Acholi ex-soldiers who surrendered were taken to Western Uganda and never seen again. As political scientist Adam Branch puts it, the NRA appeared to be launching “a counter-insurgency without an insurgency.” In August 1986, a few thousand former members of Obote’s army who had escaped over the border to Sudan invaded and attacked the NRA. In turn, NRA attacks against Acholi civilians escalated, and more rebel groups, including Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army soon emerged. Uganda’s twenty-year northern war was soon underway.

After the fall of Amin in 1979, Kakooza-Mutale ran a pro-Museveni newspaper known as Economy. Shortly before the 1980 election, he published an anti-Obote editorial illustrated with drawings of skulls and the headline, “PEOPLE ADVISED TO VOTE AGAINST DEATH.”

In Combatants, Pike attributes the NRA atrocities to a few bad apples in the ranks or to poorly integrated former rebel groups, including one named FEDEMU, that weren’t mainstream NRA. But the New Vision’s Caroline Lamwaka disputes this. “I do not agree with the common argument advanced by some NRM officials, as well as some Acholi,” she writes in her posthumously published memoir,

“that it was the actions of FEDEMU soldiers that caused the rebellion….the NRA proper is equally to blame for the mess. If it were only FEDEMU, war would not have broken out in Teso and Lango, or in the whole of Acholi. The government’s argument that the war was due to former [government] soldiers fighting to recover “lost glory” or the “soft and easy life” or that they were “criminals” who feared to face the law, also misrepresents and oversimplifies the complex causes of the conflict.”

Throughout Combatants, Pike emphasizes how Museveni’s government respected media freedom, and insists that he was never prevented from printing stories critical of the government. However, he does not mention that many journalists have received bribes and death threats from the regime, and some have been tortured, including his own employee Lamwaka, quoted above. In 1988, she was assaulted by a Ugandan army officer after reporting on cattle thefts by government forces. In her memoir, she writes that what she experienced was so humiliating she could not describe it in print.

Pike also downplays NRA abuses in eastern Uganda, where another rebel group emerged after the NRA, which was at first welcomed by locals, committed atrocities similar to those in Acholiland. He downplays Museveni’s involvement in arming the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, setting the stage for the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis. Pike also downplays Museveni’s responsibility for the Congo war which claimed over five million lives. According to Pike, Museveni ordered his troops not to engage in business on Congolese soil. He nevertheless fails to explain how Museveni’s own brother and son came to be linked to a company that traded in smuggled Congolese diamonds during this time.

***

During the 1990s, Pike and other western journalists helped create a new narrative about central Africa. By then, many of Africa’s independence movements were a mess–in part because of western Cold War meddling, but also because of the limited capabilities of some African leaders. But Museveni, along with Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, would be celebrated in the Western media as Africa’s great new hope. All had come to power by the gun and distained democracy, but made well-spoken promises to keep their countries in order and concentrate on development.

Western leaders from Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the President of the World Bank quickly bought into the idea that Africa needed “strong leadership” –a wiggle phrase which could mean anything from a firm stance on corruption to outright tyranny. Foreign aid and military hardware flowed into the coffers of the “new leaders”. But even as the chorus of praise was rising around them, they were using Western largesse to escalate wars with their neighbors, giving rise to an orgy of violence that would claim millions of lives from Eritrea to Uganda to Congo and southern Sudan.

***

In the end, Pike blames democracy for Uganda’s problems. After Uganda’s first presidential election in 1996, he writes, “The politicians triumphed over the technocrats,”; “loyalty had become more important than principle”; “incompetent or corrupt ministers were retained in office to cater to their constituents….”

Pike never questions whether Museveni’s harsh repression, not democracy, might have been the source of these problems; nor does he ask himself whether this repression might help explain why Uganda was so riddled with rebel groups in the first place. There is something tragic about Pike’s Combatants, which could have been a much more powerful book. Where it falls short is in the matter of empathy, like the half-hearted white religious leaders who supported civil rights in the southern United States in principle, but chastised Martin Luther King for what they considered his “unwise and untimely” civil rights activism.

“The Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner,” wrote King in frustration,“but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice…who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom….Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

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.

By Mary Serumaga

There was a time when the root causes of Uganda’s economic failure were so mercurial that one could never quite locate them. The evidence sometimes suggested incompetence; other times corruption; often a combination of the two. Examining the fiscal policy at a granular level reveals the method in the madness: there is now incontrovertible proof that incompetence is an essential part of – and is often allowed to flourish in order to facilitate – grand corruption. We are not talking about small players operating out of cramped government offices but about the country’s top leadership and their foreign and domestic partners.

In an old story, President Mobutu Sese Seko is said to have approached donors for assistance with Zaïre’s out-of-control external debt. By that time, his history of raiding the treasury was widely known and the donors facetiously suggested he lend the government the money they needed out of his personal resources. He is said to have answered, “I can’t trust them to pay me back.” (This is only funny when it is not happening in your own country.)

Uganda is in a similar situation. Unsustainable debt is rising in direct proportion to the wealth of the top leaders. When payment of the over UGX 3 trillion balance on over 20 loans (Table 1 below) commences in 2020, the country’s debt-to-revenue ratio will jump from 44% to 65%. In 2015, when Uganda’s debt repayments stood at 38% of GDP, between 26% and 36% of the population was undernourished. Undernourishment has made steady progress, rising by 1% a year between 2006 and 2011 and accelerating to two percentage points plus every year from 2011 (World Bank). Nothing has happened since 2016 to ensure undernourishment does not increase; in fact, it rose from 39% in 2015 to 41% in 2016. In contrast, world undernourishment fell 14 percentage points over the same period and is on a downward trend except for a short rise in 2015-2016.

Despite trends in the increasingly unsustainable loan portfolio, on the one hand, and erratic public administration on the other, the IMF has assessed Uganda as a low risk for external debt distress. It says the risk was not increased by significant risks stemming from domestic public and/or private external debt.

As a justification for further borrowing, President Yoweri Museveni and Ministry of Finance officials claim that the debt-to -GDP ratio is within the historically safe limit of under 50%. The Auditor General has been of the contrary view, saying debt levels are “unfavourable when debt payment is compared to national revenue collected which is the highest in the region at 54%.”

That argument has been overtaken by events. Current International Monetary Fund (IMF) projections show that debt-to-GDP will hit 49.5% in 2021. Furthermore, it is guaranteed to deteriorate as the outstanding balances on the loans will increase as the shilling continues to slide against the dollar and as further non-concessional (high-interest) loans are taken in the domestic market, such as the $104 million to be spent on security cameras and loans for ad hoc investments like the revival of Uganda Airlines at $388 million. Table 1: Uganda’s Unsustainable Debt

They went on to claim, “Uganda’s economic performance remains strong, but has moderated in recent years.” Further, “Government finances remain on a sound footing…” The only suggestion in the Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) that all may not be well (inserted no doubt as a basis for claims to due diligence to be made after the economy crashes) was “… though expenditure composition can be of concern.” Expenditure composition includes items not part of the National Development Plan e.g. a national airline and a network of security cameras. In the same year, the Auditor General pointed out a serious barrier to attaining development targets: loans were performing poorly. He could not have been clearer when he warned that interest payments were becoming unsustainable (Auditor General 2016 p. 14).

“Several loans appeared to be performing poorly, with some nearing expiry; while others reached the closing date without fully disbursing. As at 30th June 2016, committed but un-disbursed debt stood at UGX 18.1 trillion [approximately US$5 billion]. Such low levels of performance undermine the attainment of planned development targets and render commitment charges of UGX20.9 billion (US$5.9 million) paid in respect of undisbursed funds nugatory [i.e. wasteful or of no value] (Auditor General 2016, p.72).” In other words, borrowed funds were not being put to use.

The problem has persisted in 2017 and 2018. This gives the lie to the IMF’s DSA 2016 finding that Uganda is scaling up infrastructure for future economic growth. The IMF admitted a risk to growth goals would be “failure to realize the envisaged growth dividend from the increased investment is a key risk”. What they did not mention was that the contingency had already materialised. A 2015 special audit of the Uganda Support to Municipal Structure Development (USMID) project (financed with a $150 million loan) showed under-utilisation of loan funds accompanied by incomplete projects requiring funds. The risk is that idle balances will eventually be diverted, as has happened in Hoima Municipal Council.

The current situation is that 95% of the UGX100 billion disbursed under USMID for municipal development and capacity building grants remains idle (Auditor General 2018, p. 5). Understaffing in specialised technical areas is one reason municipalities are unable to utilise infrastructural development loans. (Understaffing is a result of a cap on recruitment enforced by the IMF.) Yet for the past three years the Treasury has only been able to release UGX417 billion of the UGX800 billion required annually to maintain the feeder roads so crucial to farmers (Auditor General 2017, p. 33).

Uganda’s fiscal policy is ‘a moving target’

In 2019 the IMF is leaning towards the Auditor General’s point of view. They now say that rising interest payments reduce resources available for education and health (human development). Their latest assessment states, “The current ratio of interest payments to revenue is comparable to what countries with high risk or in debt distress typically face.”

We are not far from a full admission that Uganda is in debt distress although there are still the persistent and irrelevant claims of on-target economic growth (of 6.3%). Irrelevant because it was during the past periods of alleged high economic growth that universal primary education was degraded to the point where the drop-out rate was 60%. During high economic growth, inequality, and especially rural-urban equality, deepened. High economic growth preceded the current phase of social unrest. According to the IMF, “In each of the last three macroeconomic assessments of Uganda, the projected debt path was revised upwards. Having a clear direction for fiscal policy would help budget planning and execution.”

Nevertheless, the IMF continues to claim that the risk of debt distress remains low, provided domestic revenue can be mobilised. The set target under the National Development Plan II and medium-term Sustainable National Development Plan is to increase the tax-to-GDP ratio from 14% to 16% by 2019/20. If this cannot be achieved through job creation, it can only translate into more taxes and austerity measures.

The question arises: With Uganda’s history of poor public administration and disastrous debt management, corruption, and increasing civil unrest and repression, what was the basis of the IMF’s optimism? The organisation has a permanent office in the Ministry of Finance and its headquarters sends multiple missions every year to monitor economic progress. To solve Uganda’s perennial economic distress, citizens must first understand the IMF’s mission in Uganda.

In any event, the grace period on over 20 loans expires in 2020 and debt is now of concern. On top of expenditure on projects in the Public Investment Plan, there is significant expenditure arising from unplanned projects, such as the revival of Uganda Airlines, requiring $380 million. Lubowa International Hospital, initially planned as a public-private partnership with Finasi (a commodities trader) it eventually became a contract for Finasi to build and operate a hospital funded 100% by the Government of Uganda.

Incompetence in industrialisation and job creation

A recent round of commissioning of factories and other infrastructure has proven that infrastructural development is a chimera. The Isimba Dam launched in March may generate but does not transmit power. Together with Karuma, to be launched later in the year, it cannot do so without further expenditure of $3.5 billion to extend the grid. The Nile Bridge had to undergo major remedial work owing to poor construction only days after commissioning. The president’s electioneering took in at least one factory many years old and employing a miniscule number of Ugandans. Nile Agro Industries Ltd has been producing soap, wheat flour, cooking oil, bottled water, lint bales, and fortification and industrial plastics since 1999. Yet it was commissioned and “launched” on 7th May 2019.

The Soroti Fruit Factory was founded in 2014 and funded by the government and a grant of $7.4 million from Korea. Last year’s audit listed the factory as un-operational after accumulated public investment of UGX 13,353,129,943. The factory was commissioned by the President on 13th April 2019. It was reportedly closed on 10th May owing to a lack of operating capital for fruit from about 1,000 farmers and salaries for the 123 Ugandan employees. The government’s investment arm, Uganda Development Corporation, has been advised annually for at least three years by the Auditor General against making investments without feasibility studies but in Soroti it was the usual case of ignoring professional advice and pandering to the president’s whims.

“The corporation incurred expenditure amounting to Shs.9,000,026,869 during the year in undertaking industrial development investments in the areas of fruits in Luwero, Soroti and processing in Kabale and Kisoro. However, the Corporation did not undertake investment strategic studies assessment prior to undertaking investments for purposes of assessing the marketability and commercial viability of the final products processed from fruits like mangoes, oranges and tea plantations. The investment may not achieve anticipated results.” (my emphasis) (Auditor General 2016 p. 519)

Apart from Soroti Fruit Factory, other warnings have related to Kampala Industrial and Business Park, Namanve, where UGX 1,000,000,000 for a feasibility study was diverted. Over UGX 131 billion is outstanding on loans for four industrial parks, including Namanve. Although National Information Technology Authority-Uganda (NITA-U) carried out a feasibility study for Commercialisation of the National Data Transmission Backbone Infrastructure (NBI) and E-government Infrastructure (EGI), it did not factor in the costs of its maintenance. “As a result, it was difficult to assess the economic sense of the project as Management lacked sufficient benchmark to assess the bid proposals on contract aspects such as the cost of maintaining the NBI, revenue sharing ratios and price of internet services.” (Auditor General, 2017, p. 53)

It is indicative of the general problem pointed out by the Auditor General, who concluded that ignoring planning procedures is a major weakness within the Ministry of Finance “and presents a risk of funding projects which are not feasible and are not aligned to the National Development Plan (NDP).”

New projects are required to undergo four stages prior to being included in the Public Investment Plan (PIP) and commencement: (i) Prepare a project concept in line with NDP, (ii) Prepare a Project Profile demonstrating key results, (iii) Undertake a pre-feasibility study, and (iv) Conduct a feasibility study. But the auditor found that “some projects obtained project codes and admission into the PIP without proper project vetting as stated in without vetting them”.

Foreign direct investment

To attract foreign direct investment (FDI), many countries around the world privatised their telecommunications sectors – some voluntarily and others, like Uganda, under an IMF structural adjustment programme. In the UK in the 1990s, public awareness-raising of the move involved repeated assurances that after unbundling postal and telecoms services, 51% of shares in British Telecom would be sold to the private sector but with the proviso that 34.3% would be sold to the general public. Furthermore, in the interests of promoting share ownership, the shares were priced at £130, a price considered below their value.

Kenya sold its telecoms sector, reserving 60% of the shares for the Kenyan state, of which 30% were later sold directly to the public. The new entity, Safaricom, went on to become the most profitable private company in the East African region.

Cross the border into Uganda where income from the lucrative telecoms sector is enjoyed only by a narrow oligarchy. Although the government was to retain 49% of the shares in Uganda Telecom, it currently holds only 31%. Much has been written about how MTN went from being the second national operator to a virtual monopoly and regulator of the sector.

MTN is the biggest player, with 54% of the telecoms market. Only 5% of MTN shares are Ugandan- owned, (the Ugandan being an individual with board membership in at least two privatised entities, including the defunct Rift Valley Railway.) It is only in the past few months that the president began to press MTN to make some of its shares available to the public.

Uganda Telecom, the entity that was supposed to retain residual rights in the sector, was only created after Celtel and MTN (the first and second national operators) had been running for a while. This has meant that MTN has the technology to permit or bar new indigenous competitors from the market, which reportedly it does. Indigenous Ugandan start-up Ezeemoney, a mobile money platform designed to allow banking over different platforms (i.e. between MTN, Africell and other service providers), was awarded over two billion shillings in a suit against MTN for refusing to provide them with access to the network.

Tax evasion and illicit transfers

Returning to the objectives of privatisation and incentivising foreign direct investment, greater efficiency and cash inflows may have been achieved but the benefits have been annihilated by illicit outflows mainly facilitated through tax evasion.

Another 13 foreign investors have been found to have used a lacuna in the law to avoid taxes for years, a fact the IMF was in a position to know. Thirteen of the investors owe UGX 353.5 billion. Some have been beneficiaries of FDI incentives, another has been operating in Uganda since 1969 (and therefore not in need of incentives). One is in possession of the infrastructure that is the privatised Nytil textile manufacturing plant (founded in 1954). A fourteenth is a joint venture once touted as the only manufacturer of ARVs in Africa. It was founded to supply ARVs for domestic consumption and export to Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Cameroon, Comoros, Namibia and Zambia. The majority shareholding is foreign-owned; the three major Ugandan shareholders own less than 10% of the shares and 18% were sold on the stock exchange in 2018. It turns out that the company may really be in the business of acquiring government tenders for a parent company in India.

In response to the discovery that opportunities to increase the tax-to-GDP ratio are being systemically undermined by tax evasion by investors, the Ministry of Finance this month tabled a proposal in Parliament to give the offenders a waiver of taxes owed on the basis that it would be unwise to drive FDI away by collecting the arrears.

Returning to the Mobutu story, it is not just African despots who have sufficient illicit funds to make a significant dent in their countries’ public debt; the taxes owed by foreign investors could clear it. MTN’s tax arrears (of UGX 2.8 trillion as extrapolated from data recovered during litigation) could clear 73.6% of the current UGX 3.4 trillion outstanding balance on the loans which Uganda will begin to repay in 2020.

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The Death of Michael Alinda: Why Uganda Needs Coroners’ Courts

By Mary Serumaga Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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The Death of Michael Alinda: Why Uganda Needs Coroners’ Courts

By Mary Serumaga

Uganda does not have a constitution; it has a career-distributing patronage device disguised as one. This device serves the important function of immunising the presidency from serious challenges from what was historically a very cantankerous and militant middle class. Instead, this class has been tranquilised by all the jobs, careers and postings created by the 1995 document.

The just-concluded proceedings in Uganda’s Supreme Court – in which a petition against the 2018 passing of a law that removed the constitutional requirement for a presidential candidate to be below 75 years was heard and dismissed – is the latest proof that the constitution was never going to deliver constitutionalism, nor was it designed for that purpose.

The petition was in itself an appeal against the same ruling made by the Constitutional Court the previous year. That first petition was itself borne out of the very unconstitutional manner in which the Ugandan Parliament had passed the amendment. First –and not for the first time – there were obvious material inducements offered to the parliamentarians before their decision. Second – and more critically – the supposed sanctity of Parliament was violated through an invasion by Uganda’s Special Forces Command, who proceeded to violently carry out the core group of MPs opposed to the amendment who were attempting to impede its progress through filibuster. Third, legal minds had already also weighed to counsel that, given the country’s singular experiences with unrestrained presidents, an amendment of such importance should perhaps first be put to a public referendum before it is tampered with such a historically-birthed rule.

This also came three years after the same court heard a petition against the Ugandan Electoral Commission’s declaration of President Yoweri Museveni as the lawful winner of the 2016 election.

Naked bias

The retired Supreme Court judge, George Kanyeihamba, has described the age-limit ruling as “an exhibition of naked bias, cowardly disregard for rights and an orgy of contemptuous indifference to democratic principles”.

But this game has been going on for a very long time. I recall one incident over fifteen years ago, in which the government side got around the obstacle of a parliamentary rule of procedure that required a period of weeks before a motion they wished to have discussed could be debated. They simply mobilised their numbers to first vote to suspend that procedural rule, then tabled, debated and passed their motion, and then voted to reinstate the troublesome rule.

And of course, Uganda’s MPs had already famously voted to remove presidential term-limits from the constitution in 2006, in time for President Museveni to stand for a previously not permissible third term in 2006. This time round, on top of removing age limits, they voted to reinstate the two- term limit that had been removed in 2005. At the same sitting, the court found this reversal to be “unconstitutional”.

We are going to have to look again at “democracy”, and think about the quest for representation that underlies it, instead. It is clearly possible to hold a presidential election, and not get the candidate everybody voted for, but still have the entire process dubbed “legal” and constitutionally above board. What is presented as democracy can actually fail to be actually representative of anyone.

This entire fraud – which effectively began with the 1996 presidential election – has been continually buttressed by the “constitutional” rejection of all complaints by the courts. Basically, of the three arms of governance, the Executive does as it pleases, and neither the Judiciary nor the Legislature can stop it, nor can they help shield each other from the its rampaging effects.

This situation is rooted in two things. First was the merging of the powers of the executive Prime Minister with those of the ceremonial president, and the abolition of the Prime Minister post by the self-appointed president, Milton Obote, in 1966. Thus, a highly centralised presidency was born, and lives on to this day. It was in keeping with this spirit that the members of the then Parliament were menacingly obliged to vote in favour of the 1966 document before being allowed to read it.

Over-centralised presidency

As long as you have an over-centralised presidency, then you basically will still have the 1966 constitution and the 1967 one in which federation was also abolished. The 1995 constitution is, therefore, basically the 1967 document with donor-designed and funded upgrades in which some “civil society” scaffolding was arranged around the Executive. Uganda’s pre-eminent problem remains political exclusion, or the monopolisation of power for the purpose of enabling the material enrichment of a few. This is literally what colonialism was. Such exclusion necessitates political repression, which leads to the subversion of justice and the undermining of the judicial system as a whole, which, in turn, begets human rights violations across the board.

A key adjustment, whereby a president’s electoral destiny was determined separately from the rest of his party, only cements this further. (In the earlier pretence to democracy that was the 1980 elections, it was the leader of the party that won the most seats in Parliament who became president. He also had to have won a parliamentary seat.) This presidency has always been able to reach through the scaffolding, and over-ride any other aspect of the constitution at will.

Before the military infringement on parliament, there was a long list of extra-constructional shenanigans being carried out by the Executive against the other constitutional branches:

In November 2005, soldiers invaded the High Court premises in an attempt to prevent rebel suspects being granted bail. In an epic showdown during October 2011, the Executive flatly refused to subject the details of oil contracts to proper parliamentary scrutiny. Various well-connected individuals who become key suspects in serious crimes regularly have their files delayed or missing when required by court, leading to delays or abandonment of the cases. A local government minster and well-known bush war veteran once invaded a district local council meeting, and forced it to abandon a tabled motion regarding the handing back of land under its control to the original owner (the Kingdom of Buganda). As a factotum of the presidency, the former Inspector General of Police, General Kale Kayihura, built up a prodigious record of violations against all constitutional provisions regarding policing. Bail terms, bond terms, detention lengths, media rights, stipulations against torture and the like were all repeatedly trampled by his operatives. This culminated in the 2011 mobilising of a mob to assemble outside a magistrate’s court where a civil case against the IGP had been lodged. Court officials hid, and the case was never heard. Ruling party MPs hold their caucus meetings regularly at State House, the official residence of the President.

In short, whatever aspect of this constitution that has not been violated is simply whatever aspect has not yet come into conflict with the intentions of this unrestrained Executive.

Monopolisation of power

Uganda’s pre-eminent problem remains political exclusion, or the monopolisation of power for the purpose of enabling the material enrichment of a few. This is literally what colonialism was. Such exclusion necessitates political repression, which leads to the subversion of justice and the undermining of the judicial system as a whole, which, in turn, begets human rights violations across the board. Ultimately, constitutional order itself has to then be violated so as to enable the regime to hold on to this exclusionary power by entrenching itself above its provisions. An unrestrained Executive becomes the whole state.

This is Uganda today. Once again.

The historical challenge has been to find the means by which Ugandans do not find themselves under the rule of yet another unrestrained Executive. This, in fact, was the aspiration behind the crafting of the new constitution between 1993 and 1995. As the Daily Monitor writer, Ivan Okuda, has pointed out, political documents of such magnitude do not come about in the abstract, but rather are shaped by the political history they seek to now legislate for. It is for this reason that the preamble to the 1995 constitution sternly proclaims:

“….Recalling our history which has been characterised by political and constitutional instability; Recognising our struggles against the forces of tyranny, oppression and exploitation;…”

The authors naturally felt they had every right to see the moment as significant: it represented an opportunity to turn the corner on all the spectacular political failures of the past.

But it was doomed from the start. Stillborn.

To understand that, let us remember the process briefly. It began with a Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice Benjamin Odoki, which gathered views countrywide through a template known by all and accepted by the authorities. The resultant Odoki Report represented then the most up-to-date information on Ugandans’ political views. Its findings were then presented to the country, and in 1993, an elected Constituent Assembly was convened to design the new constitution.

In 1995, Uganda received the design of its new constitution. The critical point here is that while this new constitution contained many things, new and old, it conspicuously lacked the two key findings of the Odoki Commission: multipartyism and federation.

The failure to base the constitution on Odoki’s primary findings – and not even reflect them – was like an unwell person going to hospital with an ailment, then being treated for everything else except that ailment, and then also being discharged with new illnesses picked up from the ward.

What had started out as a well-meaning exercise was revealed as a project benefitting a confluence of elite interests: a section of the local middle class, the regime, and the Western Empire deeply entrenched in Uganda’s economic affairs.

“As it stands, legislative processes, right from 1966 to 2019, have stood in favour of those who controlled the means of coercion and state power and the courts have found nice English to cover up politicians’ mess,” observes the journalist Ivan Okuda.

This latest Supreme Court ruling simply confirms that the constitution does not have anything to do with the presidency, which functions fully according to its own necessities. This is not in itself new. The office of the colonial governor was basically what we call a president today: their “Excellency” title is the same, as is their official residence. In this period of extreme neoliberalism, they even answer directly to the same Western powers. Like the colony before it, the neo-colony can only be effectively governed for its owners by such over-centralised means.

In the sense that it is not fooling anyone any more, it has reached the end of its useful life. This realisation is a final step in a long process. We began with the ritual dismissals of all four petitions brought against the twenty years of five sham elections, then the dismissals of petitions against the removal of constitutionally-provided-for term limits; and now this. The Empire strikes back

The constitution has performed three functions: it serves as a fig leaf protecting Western donor pretensions to “democracy and good governance”, while covering up the dictatorial machine the West needs. The Empire gets guaranteed access to the resource wealth that brought them to Africa in the first place; other donors acquire a blank slate upon which they can practise their social engineering; and it diverts a significant part of the political elite from their historical role as fomenters of anti-dictatorial agitation. This last factor has been achieved through stage-managed elections, and also the creation of a very wide variety of jobs for the political elite to aspire to. Add up all the boards, commissions, inquiries and the like enumerated or made possible by the constitution “document”, and one ends up with a very long list of actual and potential vacancies that can be filled only by a certain type of educated citizen.

There have now been elite individuals bouncing around from one appointment to another as minister, judge, ambassador, director of some authority, or chair of some commission for the last two decades or more. These functions are an act of sedation, whereby the only thing they see worth agitating for anymore is how high up the command chain there is an awareness of their CV.

This started life as the colonial-era strategy that derailed the original independence movement, which was done because the movement was rooted not just among ordinary people, but also organised around economic demands expressed through various unions, trader associations, and peasant societies. Such demands went to the very core of the raison d’être of the colonial project: money.

The strategy had the following key features: suppressing the radicals, isolating the masses, and undermining native institutions. In this way, a noisy and energetic type of middle-class politician was placed centre stage in the unfolding process of decolonisation. These types of politicians became the “owners” of post-independence politics, which they went on to ruin through continuing the culture of any one faction in power always seeking to exclude all others.

Governor Andrew Cohen, appointed in 1952, was given the task of addressing the crisis caused by the violent anti-colonial “disturbances” that erupted under the rule of his predecessor, Governor John Hall. Cohen laid out his strategy out very clearly. He advised his bosses that not all African nationalism should be seen as a bad thing. He pointed out that much as there was a lot of agitating and strong language, not every strand of nationalism was fundamentally opposed to Western rule and Western lifestyles. Some, he said, were simply in disagreement over the pace of change, but shared values and goals “that were not fundamentally different from our (the British) own”.

He therefore advocated identifying the key voices in this tendency, and working with them to deliver a more manageable (“responsible”) independence movement.

Such elites were to remain pre-eminent in this way in the two decades after independence. Up until the emergence of the peasants (Joseph Kony and Alice Lakwena before him in the late 1980s), virtually every coup, attempted coup, exile movement and armed rebellion was planned, resourced, led and organised by individuals from this elite class. And even then, Lakwena and Kony only came to leadership as a result of the slow-motion collapse of the initial anti-Museveni armed rebellion in northern Uganda led by former Obote-era Prime Minister Eric Otema Allimadi, who had thrown in the towel and accepted a government amnesty.

Salary-based political process

Prof Amii Otunnu describes our political culture as one of “using fear if not violence to access State resources for upward socio-economic mobility and in some cases for the sheer physical survival of social groups.”

Consider just one law: The Local Government Act, which is an outgrowth of the constitution. A quick analysis tells us that as is the practice, each new district usually produces three members of parliament: two directly elected from constituencies created therein, and one as the district woman MP. In addition, the district must convene an elected council, as well as a technical administrative structure headed by a Chief Administrative Officer. By these means, at least eighty new jobs will be immediately created, all to be supported by the public purse. As result of this, Uganda’s districts have increased in number from 33 in the 1990s to 127 today.

And as a result of that, Uganda’s Parliament now has 426 members, who in total consume 11.4 billion Uganda shillings ($3,041,349) monthly as pay and allowances for MPs. Their mandatory extra perks cost extra.

In general terms, the same demographic group that provided logistical support to armed rebellion now uses the same skill-set to feud over parliamentary seats, local government seats, and tenders.

The establishment of the 1995 constitution can, therefore, also be understood as an act of mass demobilisation of these historically troublesome elites from their historical activity through their mass co-option into a salary-based political process. Through its members in the main going along with the hollowing out of the meaning of the Constituent Assembly process by dodging Odoki’s findings, the Assembly became essentially an exercise in which the middle class wrote the job descriptions for their future jobs, and laid the foundations for their now two decades of well-paid public careers.

Cohen’s strategy has thus had a very far-reaching impact on Uganda politics. Basically, what we saw under him was the creation of space in which only a non-threatening, modernising form of “acceptable” politics was enabled to thrive. The 1995 constitution now essentially performs the same function.

With a middle class finally rendered docile, it is natural that the current dictatorship should go on to have the longest run of any dictatorship in the country’s history.

Maybe it is a good thing, in terms of what is called “peace-building”. But what is “peace” if there is no justice?

The 1995 constitution was a document that – despite the aspirations cited in its preamble – did not really see our history. It simply did not take cognisance of Uganda’s governance failings, and attendant dramas of the past, to create real representation.

Back to square one. Uganda is going to have to try again. 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.

The Death of Michael Alinda: Why Uganda Needs Coroners’ Courts

By Mary Serumaga

28 March 2019 was a good day for the Ugandan people. In fact, the entire week will go down in history as the one in which Government was forced to back down from an attempted fraud. There has been a whiff of scandal in the air since the President announced plans to revive Uganda Airlines last year. Created by statute in 1976 and privatised in 2001, the plan was to revive the airline through a Public Private Partnership scheme. With the public still reeling from revelations that an intended PPP for the construction of a private hospital has been transformed into a $300 million build-and-operate contract awarded to a shady Italian firm called Finasi, and wholly financed by a promissory note from Government, last week was the wrong time to attempt the flying crane heist. The country is notorious for disastrous PPPs. In 2017 the Auditor General reviewed the functions of the PPP Unit and reported: “The position of Director (head of the PPP Unit) had not been substantively filled despite its critical importance to the functioning of the Unit and the PPP Committee. The current Head of the Unit has been in acting capacity since 2015. In addition, the key positions of the PPP unit such as communication expert, project finance expert, legal expert, technical expert, and technical specialist were also vacant. This means that the PPP unit cannot provide the technical, financial and legal expertise to the PPP Committee and project teams established by contracting authorities as required under the Act.” [Emphasis mine]

Who owns the new Uganda Airlines? It does not appear on the books of Uganda Development Corporation, the investment arm of government. The Auditor-General does not include it in his tables of State enterprises, either active or dormant.

This writer commented at the time that keeping all the key technical positions vacant enabled the junta to override the functions of the PPP Unit and implement projects over which there has been no technical, financial or legal oversight.

As with the contract to build Lubowa Hospital awarded to Finasi, so with the formation and financing of Uganda Airlines. No procurement procedures were apparent when aeroplanes were ordered, two of which are to be delivered this April at a cost of UGX 280 billion ($75,380,200.00). Nobody could or would answer the question: who owns the new Uganda Airlines? It did not appear on the books of Uganda Development Corporation, the investment arm of government. The Auditor- General did not include it in his tables of State enterprises, either active or dormant, loss-making or profitable.

Privatisation has generally been a massive looting exercise by the junta that rules Uganda. Various family members own or owned various assets divested by the State. Caleb Akandwanaho (aka Gen. Salim Saleh), the President’s immediate younger brother, was forced to resign his seat in parliament after fraudulently acquiring Uganda Commercial Bank.

An old rumour has resurfaced that Sam Kutesa, the President’s brother-in-law and Minister for Foreign Affairs, acquired the brand ‘Uganda Airlines’ and required billions of shillings in compensation to surrender it to the State. Kutesa’s censure by parliament in 1999 for the irregular acquisition of the once State-owned cargo and ground handling service company, the only profitable part of the privatised Uganda Airlines was still fresh in people’s minds. That same year, a parliamentary committee was set up to investigate the sale of the ground handling service to Kutesa’s Entebbe Handling Services (ENHAS) and the sovereign routes.

“At the time, the World Bank noted these and other serious flaws in the privatisation programme. It said a number of privatisation transactions had been unsuccessful and “the program has been widely criticised for non-transparency, insider dealing, conflict of interest and corruption.” Besides this, the Privatisation Unit, the agency responsible for carrying out privatisation, was unable to collect many outstanding payments for firms which were sold on a deferred payment basis, and questions had been raised about the use of the funds in the divestiture account.” Bringing affordable telecommunications services to Uganda: A policy narrative and analysis W. Wakabi, 2009.

The current re-nationalisation is proving to be just as opaque. The facts relating to the ownership of the resuscitated Uganda Airlines only began to emerge when the Ministry of Works had to submit a request for a budget supplement to complete payment for the planes. Although the order had been made months earlier, there was no provision for it after Export Development Canada pulled out of negotiations in September 2018. At the time, Canada’s action was thought to be related to the state brutality that erupted in Arua in August. Whatever the reason, the aircraft were ready for delivery this April after payment. The public maintained pressure on government via social media and two opposition MPs Joy Atim Ongom and Winnie Kiiza led the charge in the House. The Ministry tabled its request before a belligerent Parliament. The first objection was that the State had been allocated only two out of two million shares (0.0001%) in Uganda National Airlines Company Limited, (UNAC) the new entity that was going to run the airline. The 1,999,998 unallocated shares became the focus. To whom did they or would they belong? Is UNAC in fact a State Enterprise?

The first objection in Parliament was that the State had been allocated only two out of two million shares (0.0001%) in Uganda National Airlines Company Limited, (UNAC) the new entity that was going to run the airline.

The risk was that having passed UNAC off as a State enterprise thereby securing State funding, the drivers of the project – who remain unknown – could then allocate shares to ‘investors’ via the usual middlemen. The experience of Uganda Telecoms is indicative of this modus operandi.

In the beginning, the State held a 49 percent stake in UTL, selling 51 percent to investors. UTL also retained residual rights to license value added services. Currently the State holds only a 31 percent stake. Furthermore, no value-added service provider can operate without getting past MTN, a potential competitor allowed to begin operating before UTL , formerly the telecoms segment of the old state-owned Uganda Posts and Telecommunications Company, had been relaunched. With its history, infrastructure and brandname, MTN therefore holds a massive advantage in the telco market.

Minister Azuba Ntege gave an uncharacteristically embarrassed response for the NRM government and withdrew the submission to ‘correct the errors.’ The Speaker allowed her a day. The following morning the Minister arrived with fresh forms, updated to allocate 100 percent of UNAC shares to government.

“The sale of the 18 percent public holding was queried by the Public Accounts Committee not least because it flouted the requirement that the shares be valued by at least three qualified valuers (and not a mere broker) and advertised for sale to attract the best offer,” explains Wakabi in his report. The Uganda Airline operators, whom the Ministry of Works is fronting, have been less fortunate. Minister Azuba Ntege gave an uncharacteristically embarrassed response for the NRM government and withdrew the submission to ‘correct the errors.’ The Speaker allowed her a day. The following morning the Minister attended the Budget Committee with fresh forms, updated to allocate 100 percent of UNAC shares to government. At that point the registrar of companies, Uganda Registration Service Bureau (URSB), announced that the updated articles and memo of the company were null and void. One reason for this was that the share allocation did not reflect the history of the initial allocation of two shares.

During the UNAC debate, Movement MPs pleaded that the State was days away from penalties for non-payment; an earlier deadline had been missed in December and the $27 million deposit stood to be lost.

It seems the effect was that a new entity was being formed with an initial allocation of 100 percent of the shares to the State. If so, that would have raised the question: who ordered the Bombardiers in 2018? It could not have been a company formed in March 2019. The question remains unanswered. Another mystery centres on the entity called Uganda Airlines Limited registered in 1999 and which has had no operations since. URSB even wrote to government in 2017 advising them that Uganda Airlines Ltd could be operationalised. Government preferred to register the new entity, UNAC Limited, in January 2018.

During the UNAC debate, Movement MPs pleaded that the State was days away from penalties for non-payment; an earlier deadline had been missed in December and the $27 million deposit stood to be lost. None addressed the issue that the State was in fact not liable in the event of UNAC defaulting.

A third set of papers was presented with effusive apologies from both ministers: “The registration process had gaps and I regret on behalf of myself, ministry and government. I beg to withdraw those documents,” apologised Minister Ntege. They now held all the shares in their capacities as public servants and not individuals. The government had no option but to accept radical amendments to the report of the Budget Committee that had spearheaded the defence against this latest attempt to raid the Treasury.

We are not out of the woods yet. There remains the issue of the two Airbus A330 aircraft ordered from Rolls Royce. It must be pointed out that the vendor, Rolls Royce has a long record of engaging in the kind of business practices for which Patrick Ho was convicted.

The ownership issue was sorted out with a resolution to transfer UNAC to Uganda Development Corporation. Ground handling services are to be re-nationalised regardless of the fact that Kutesa has allegedly sold ENHAS to NAS, allegedly a Kuwaiti entity. It is worth noting that there were rumours of this transaction around the same time that one Patrick Ho was being indicted in a New York court in 2017 for bribing both Kutesa and the President for oil and other business rights. (When Enhas was mentioned in parliament, Beatrice Anywar MP, who recently deserted the Opposition front bench for the NRM, was seen to leave her seat and in highly unorthodox fashion, whisper in to the ear of the Deputy Speaker. He waved her away).

We are not out of the woods yet. There remains the issue of the two Airbus A330 aircraft ordered from Aerospace and powered by a Rolls Royce engine. In this case there should be more time to scrutinize the business case for the investment, something not done with the earlier ones because of the payment deadline. It must be pointed out that Rolls Royce, which issued a press release welcoming Uganda’s decision and looking forward to developing its relationship with Uganda Airlines, has a long record of business practices for which Patrick Ho was convicted.

Following an investigation by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, it was found that Rolls Royce exchanged bribes for business with officials across the globe. The operation continued for 24 years before Rolls Royce reached a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) in 2017 under which individual officials would not be prosecuted but Rolls Royce would pay penalties of US$800 million for bribery in Angola, Nigeria and South Africa as well as Azerbaijan, Brazil, India, China, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.

The judge found:

“v. […] substantial funds being made available to fund bribe payments.

vi) The conduct displayed elements of careful planning.”

Due diligence demands that Ugandans ask: Who negotiated with Rolls Royce for the Airbus aircraft? Did they receive a bribe? Having interrupted a burglary in progress, they need to be on the lookout for other attempts to milk the Treasury through this enterprise. The greatest weakness is that private operating capital will have to be found because Isimba and Karuma Dams are ahead of the airline in the financing queue and have not yet found the public funds needed to transmit the power they will generate. There is also the proposed oil pipeline and refinery for which investors are either not forthcoming or remain cautious. How the shares are sold and to whom is key.

Regarding any compensation for ground handling, if this service was illegally carved out of Uganda Airlines and in fact led to its collapse and sale, there should be no obligation to compensate NAS. It would be interesting to find out if in fact NAS is not Sam Kutesa in disguise.

With respect to the Airline, parliament adopted a business plan that they have not seen and whose profitability is questionable. It may have made sense for private individuals to own 99 percent of it, and operate a business for which all funding and liabilities are borne by the government, but it may not make sense for government to own 100 percent, and operate an airline when other regional airlines are struggling. Previous efforts by private entities in Uganda have not been successful, all but one failing for lack of cash, a shortage of which, incidentally, is also haunting Government.

In 2020, the grace period on 19 loans (including for the Entebbe Airport expansion and the Expressway) will expire requiring government to allocate 65 percent of her revenues to debt servicing. With 44 percent of revenues currently being devoted to debt service, the economic situation is already untenable for the majority who use neither the airport nor the expressway. The fiscal crunch is characterised by drug-stock-outs in health centres and lack of teaching materials in State schools. Feeder roads by which smallholders (80 percent of the population) transport their produce are in a dire state. Their maintenance requires UGX 800 billion ($215 million) a year but the government was only able to manage a fixed amount of UGX 417 billion for the three years up to June 2018. In A brief chronological history of Uganda Airlines, Kikonyogo Douglas Albert gives an insight into the vicissitudes of the air transport sector. In 2001 Africa One opened and closed within the year owing to limited capitalization; East African Airlines with a single ageing Boeing 737-200 running flights within East Africa, to Dubai and South Africa lasted five years before an investment shortfall forced it to close in 2007. Royal Daisy Airlines founded in 2005 lasted five years.

Government ventured back into the industry in 2006, investing in a 20 percent share of Victoria International Airlines regular flights to South Africa, Sudan and Nairobi. This venture too suffered from inadequate capitalization and closed after only 2 months. Finally, the Aga Khan Group’s Air Uganda started regional operations in 2007 and stopped in 2014 after the International Civil Aviation Authority Organization November raised technical queries.

Signs of incompetent management have manifested sooner than expected. Although the Ministry states 12 pilots have been recruited at UGX 42m ($11,307) a month and 12 co-pilots at UGX 38 m ($10,230.17), and promised Parliament to table their professional records, on 31 March it transpired the airline may actually not have pilots. Documents were leaked to NTV Uganda investigative journalist, Raymond Mujuni, showing that owing to a dispute over pay, they have not reported to work objecting to salaries apparently lower than those of Kenya Airways and Rwandair pilots. The pilots also want permanent terms (which would make them eligible for massive pensions – Uganda has no public service pensions fund and billions are owed to Uganda Communications Employees Contributory Pensions Scheme (UCECPS) pensioners in arrears).

The airline immediately tweeted a disclaimer urging the public to ignore the report. Given the choice of R. Mujuni, a competent investigative journalist, and the shady airline company, a vigilant public might be more inclined to believe the pilots are on strike. Now that it is a public enterprise, the Auditor General and Inspector General of Government will need to pay particular attention to the Flying Crane. An important line of enquiry is whether the jobs were advertised and whether or not the recruits are beneficiaries of the controversial State House scholarship scheme, the educational arm of the junta.

As it is, the airline is to be launched in April. So far there has been no marketing of the maiden flight. The challenges ahead notwithstanding, after 33 years of fiscal abuse by Yoweri Museveni’s regime, Uganda was able to stop another heist of public funds. What made it even more beautiful was the fact that the methods used were parliament and the media.

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.

By Mary Serumaga

Well into its fourth week, the bewildering showdown between Rwanda President Paul Kagame and his Ugandan counterpart, Yoweri Museveni, had predictably produced a heart-rending headline. The news reports said that a woman several months pregnant, an Elizabeth Mukarugwiza, had been chased across the border from Rwanda into Uganda by either the Rwandan army or police.

Eye-witness reports said that Ms. Mukarugwiza, 37, just about beat the Rwandan security to the border. Whatever it was had driven her, and we can only speculate (a prenatal visit to a clinic?), would have been that urgent. Had this episode occurred inside Rwanda itself, what happened next would not have been reported. Were we to hear of it, it would have come as rumor, a thing said of a closed country that without voices or images to back it up, quickly loses steam.

Take the story of three sisters:

As reported in The Observer newspaper, the sisters, daughters of a pastor Deo Nyirigira who lives in Mbarara in Western Uganda, had completed their studies at Ugandan universities and then returned to find work in Kigali. Their father, part of the group extruded from Rwanda in the 1959 upheaval that brought Paul Kagame himself to Uganda, had one time returned to the country after the genocide. After only a handful of years, Mr. Nyirigira realised that he could no longer live in his country. For a second time, he left Rwanda for Uganda. Given his influence as a pastor, the authorities in Kigali grew weary of him and wanted him back. Attempts at kidnapping him are said to have led to the shooting death of one of the suspected Rwandan kidnap squad. Eyewitness reports said that Ms. Mukarugwiza, 37, just about beat the Rwandan security to the border. Whatever it was that had driven her, we can only speculate that it had been urgent (a prenatal visit to a clinic, perhaps?). Had this episode occurred inside Rwanda itself, what happened next would not have been reported. Were we to hear of it, it would have come as rumour – a thing that quickly loses steam without voices or images to back it up.

Back in Rwanda, and back in the present, with the rise in political tensions now, Mr. Nyirigira’s daughters, because the government could not touch their father, have reportedly been stripped of their jobs. In Rwanda, children may be punished for the infractions of parents; in the worst of times, the unborn were not spared either. One sister was already married with a child. The husband was ordered to divorce her. It was when their father sent them sustenance money that they were apparently taken into custody. But we hear of these events secondhand.

The fate of Ms. Mukarugwiza too would have been rumor were it not for the Ugandan media. But alas, escaping the Rwandan forces counted for naught. No sooner had Ms. Mukarugwiza made it across the border than she collapsed and died, she and her unborn baby.

A moment crackling with significance; there you had the picture, shared across social media, of what appear to be two Red Cross responders, white latex gloved hands, stooped forms, shocked, horrified faces wanting to have a look. The body covered in red, green, then blue and red Maasai blankets. The scene is slopping ground, a wooded glen, heavy jackets giving an idea of altitude and weather. Armed men hounded the expectant mother to death; just like in a gothic, B Movie, the fetus must not be born. It was as if 1994 were reclaiming the soul of Rwanda.

Trying to see it from the perspective of a Rwandan, to not miss-judge the act, however carking, was hard, the central question refusing to go away; in what way does the death of a pregnant woman contribute to the greater good of Rwanda? At 37, Ms. Mukarugwiza would have left behind other children. They will remember, so does that now make them targets to a regime that lives in fear of its victims? (“He who kills Brutus but does not kill the sons of Brutus,” a researcher once quoted the mantra to me). How many times in that country was it justified by saying that the child will be born an enemy? Too rebarbative to contain, and yet human sacrifice, after thousands of years, has still not lost its repugnance. Fascism, the conclusion went, had sunk deep roots into Rwanda, its president, irretrievably fallen to the dark side.

Ugly underbelly

The one link I could use to comprehend what happened to Ms. Mukarugwiza was two decades out of date. The first and last time I was in Rwanda, a few years after the genocide, was March 2003. The first thing I did in Kigali was look up my old classmates who had returned home post-1994. But the once humble, amiable schoolboys of the late 80s and early 90s, I failed to find in the men they had become. In turns brash, and rude, then commanding, suddenly distant, then calm, then uncommunicative, their mercurial, unstable character had caught me off guard in 2003. I took it with whatever fortitude I could muster at that age, rationalizing that few peoples had endured what the Rwandans had gone through.

But for a few years after that, and already disabused of my then, post-genocide, World Bank- sponsored naivety, garnished with western media manufactured facts about post-genocide Rwanda, I paid closer attention. I tried my best not to fall into the binary, this side good, that side bad routine. I read into each report, into each TV segment, the calamitous shift in the character of my old school friends. It was as if once you had seen into peoples’ souls, no mere shift in ideology nor mass media spin, can fool you.

We were not many in the newsroom, so on top of my other beats, I was dispatched to northern Uganda countless times where I spent time with refugees. Covering Rwanda and Congo was one of the most upsetting times of my career as a reporter. The end of the genocide had been heralded as a grand moment, yet in many respects, it signaled the beginning of other horrible events.

And then I paid too much attention. The years starting from 2003 would culminate with my departure from the media in 2006. They were the years of the unravelling of whatever post-Mobutu hiatus might have been in Congo. Congolese refugees were streaming out in all directions. And it seemed back then that the region was on fire. One of the worst massacres in the northern Uganda war came in that span of time. Sudan had just concluded its penultimate, bloody stage of civil war. Garang died in a plane crash. Back then, being a reporter meant that by default, you were a war reporter.

We were not many in the newsroom, so on top of my other beats, I was dispatched to northern Uganda countless times. I spent time with refugees. Of Rwanda and Congo, there began one of the most upsetting times of my career as a reporter. The ending of the genocide had been heralded as the grand moment. In many respects, it had been the beginning of the worst. In testimony after testimony, I heard something else besides what was said of the region. I was cruelly disillusioned about where this region would end up. I met the ugly underbelly of what was a disturbing, ethno- racial war. The silence of guns, if that ever came, would mean this zero-sum war being fought by other means.

We were all in it, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, so that events in any part of Congo would have meaning in all four countries. Those stocking the flames of the northern Uganda war saw it as a continuum for the outcomes in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, etc. How, as a reporter taught to not identify subjects by race or ethnicity do you approach that without also withholding the truth from the public? Calculating that if the combatants and their invidious backers in Kampala, Kigali and who knows which other cities quietly believed in their own ethnic superiority, why should the rest of us watching in confusion not know their full intentions?

Because Rwanda could rely on it, it took Uganda’s friendship for granted. However, by 2017 something had gone amiss. Kigali, it seemed, had overstepped its boundaries by interfering with the power dynamics of Uganda at a sensitive time when Museveni was struggling to assert his power.

It is one thing to fight a war of self-defense. It is another to wage a war of hegemonic ambition. The one is understandable; the other is a crime. I went for it. I reported what was a parallel, darker narrative to the sanitised news routine; the common approach was not courageous enough to tell the truth; rather than tell the world what accounted for the blinding human cruelty being meted out for what the perpetrators saw as payment for past ethnic traumas, it endlessly asked in faux naïveté, why people could be so inhuman.

The backlash

It was then the backlash started. The war may have been in Congo, but doors began to be shut in my face in government offices in Kampala. Shielding behind media ignorance and international lack of curiosity had enabled them wage wars in four countries with the comfort that the usual tropes of reporting Africa would shield them. The furiousness with which the reactions came left me stunned. I began to hear of the moves to get rid of me from the newspaper long before it happened.

Back in the day, the newspaper I worked for had yearly run country supplements of Rwanda. After a series of stories, on the troubles in Eastern Congo, the supplement hung in balance, the expected hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising threatened. As a reporter who may never earn that much money over a career, there is not much choice between your journalism and a paper merchant’s profits. I recollect the hostility at the paper itself, the kvetching from advertising salesmen who saw my reporting as financially ruinous. My notebooks disappeared. Journalist colleagues whose relationships to Kigali you had taken as a joke, took on a different character. Kagame’s reach, we understood, was everywhere, and newspaper offices are great places to plant eyes and ears. The failure of my paper to stand by me as a reporter, and the increasing telephone harassment, plus the decision I was reaching to become a fulltime writer, led me quit the media. If your editor and publisher cannot stand by you, there is little you can do about such matters.

I got busy finding ways of being a writer, including spending 3 years in Kenya. Rwanda receded from my mind. But I had gained a further insight. Legitimate, even useful scrutiny, let alone criticism, is not allowed in Rwanda, even if its well-meant. I immediately understood that Kigali’s temper tantrums would ensure that Kagame never ran out of enemies. Seeing enemies everywhere you look is not great leadership. There is a psychological term for it. I had not learnt anything new, really. I had merely joined the ranks of those familiar with the ugliness of our region’s politics, the people who expect any day to have to run into exile. I was not in bad company. I calmed down and moved on.

Till October 2017. That month, the big story (the month before Museveni had trashed the parliament) was that five Ugandan police officers had been arrested for the kidnap and extra-judicial deportation of Rwanda dissidents.

You had to have followed Rwanda closely enough, or been to school with some of the characters close to the show to have understood what that headline meant. There had always been much talk about the vaunted Rwandan security and intelligence, of their capacities and determination. I had always doubted that, particularly after enduring run-ins with a handful of them and taking note of how amateurish they were. I had also been in class with some, and they were not what you may describe as top of the class, as it were. They are good when you don’t fight back. When you do, they do precisely what Kagame has done; draw down the barricades and get nasty. Closer to the truth was that Rwanda is too small a country for others to spend energy worrying about. Some residual sympathy had perhaps led others to look the other way. It wasn’t that they were better; it was that others were benevolent towards them.

Toxic anger

I doubted that when it came to it, Rwanda could match the intelligence capabilities of say South Africa. Or Uganda, when it came to it. Slinking about dark corners and spiking people’s tea, sticking knives into “enemies” is one thing. The net effect is to get you marked out as evil and untrustworthy. It is another to have the economic and diplomatic clout of countries dramatically bigger like South Africa, or even small ones like Uganda whose economy you actually depend on. The problem of toxic anger the junta is afflicted with means they fail to tell friend from foe.

Because it could rely on it, Kigali took Uganda for granted. Either way, by 2017 something had gone wrong enough. Kigali, it seemed, had overstepped its bounds at last. You easily guessed that they had interfered with the power dynamics of Uganda. At such a sensitive time over his hold on to power, Mr. Museveni would have been unhappy.

This unease is to the extent that nearly everyone – not just politicians, lawyers and journalists, but even mobile money booth owners – is afraid to receive phone calls, especially from strangers, but also from anybody who is not an immediate family member. Friends are now suspecting friends. Like Rwanda, Uganda is an overripe boil.

We still do not know the full details of the matter. But former Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura, perhaps the most unqualified man to have ever held the post, was said to have inadvisedly played a role in the matter, as rumor had it, getting too close to the Rwandans. His erratic behaviour in 2017 may now be clearer in hindsight. In effect, the general had appointed himself the government of Uganda, making the kinds of commands way beyond his ken, as if he had become prime minister, speaker of parliament, chief justice and chief executioner. Not even president Museveni exercised that much authority. It remained for even his boss to join the dots, follow the lines linking him with Rwandan high command to smell something off. What did a police inspector need a political base for; why did he need a foreign policy? Was CID so inadequate that he had to have his own intelligence network? The drama of Kayihura’s downfall added to the political unease in Uganda.

We live in a state of fear. Phone calls bring unease; who might be listening, who is reading the emails? Friends suspect friends; colleagues in offices are unsure of each other. Like Rwanda, Uganda is an overripe boil. Rwanda appears to be falling over the cliff first. We are not far behind.

The central charge against the five officers, and which charge in reverse facsimile ricocheted from Kigali as “Uganda detaining Rwandan citizens without charge” – Kagame’s primary casus belli, was that they were arresting and extra judicially deporting Rwandan dissidents.

For over two decades, Mr. Kagame had won wars in which the other side was not really shooting back, and waging undeclared espionage wars others weren’t too interested in. The risk of going too far was always there, of waking up governments with vaster reach and resources.

And that is what has happened. The blowback started in South Africa. We do not as yet know the extent of this drama unfolding in Uganda, but the alacrity with which Kigali reacted (remember the adage – whatever you do, don’t make any sudden moves) would seem to indicate that the Ugandans knew exactly where to go and which tender spots to touch. By barricading himself and the people he leads in, a move with serious repercussions, no matter which way this story heads, Mr. Kagame has betrayed his state of mind. What he has done is beyond serious. He has drawn unkind attention from the world, who read in this move, not sophistication, leadership, cool-headedness, but cruelty. It behooves a leader not a drop of good to be seen as cruel. It’s not the time to build walls, or close borders with countries to north and south of your country. You remind the world of what and who it wants to forget.

That’s the wider world for starts. In East Africa, this has drawn the scrutiny of people in Kenya and Tanzania for whom Rwanda was far away, a country to be sympathized with. The interruption of regional trade is touching constituents that once could be counted upon to remain distant and unconcerned which way things happened over there. In Uganda itself, Kagame’s action is bringing up sentiments that had plateaued into disinterest. It has also curiously given Mr. Museveni some boost of badly needed sympathy in Uganda. It’s a strange thing, nationalism. Now some of Mr. Museveni’s opponents suddenly understand that it is okay for them to criticize him; they don’t like it that much when a foreign president does the same. Kagame is attacking, not just the Museveni government, but their Museveni.

We can’t tell how it’s going down inside Rwanda itself. But there, the issues are immediate. Rwanda needs Uganda for education, for health, for food more than Uganda needs Rwanda. The drama has been coloured by stories, such as that of the three sisters, whose lives have been imperiled by the closure of borders.

Then, in the middle of it, word came that Mr. Kagame had also closed the border with Burundi.

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda is centuries old. As with the current character of Uganda, the bits of the ancient story we understand starts with the narrative of the ancient empire of Bunyoro-Kitara, when at the height of inter-Africa migrations, peoples ran into each other. Scars from the dim mists of time fester today, with broad implications for inter-ethnic divisions in Uganda and beyond.

Whichever way these reactions go, it is still early days, the opening pages of a book of raw emotions. The real story is still to hit its stride. Part of the reason we cannot tell where it will end is because we may be too horrified to begin thinking of it.

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda

But do we not lose perspective by getting caught up in the moment of the drama? Do we care enough to know the story of Rwanda?

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda is centuries old. As with the current character of Uganda, the bits of the ancient story we understand start with the narrative of the ancient empire of Bunyoro- Kitara, when at the height of inter-Africa migrations, peoples ran into each other. Scars from the dim mists of time fester today, with broad implications for inter-ethnic divisions in Uganda and beyond. The peoples of Rwanda-Burundi, including bits of Eastern Congo, played parts in the stories of the formation of Ugandan kingdoms, and they did not emerge winners. But that is ancient history. Of immediate relevance is how Rwandans ended up living in Uganda in such numbers.

The colonial wars that the British fought in Uganda were some of the most serious in the region, along with the wars the Germans brought to Central Tanzania. By the 1920s, it is reported, the population of Uganda had been growing negatively for three decades. The religion-inflected civil wars in Buganda (which were actually class wars), the Bunyoro genocide, the wars of conquest in the East and North, and the collapse of pre-colonial medicine, along with the interruption of agriculture, more Ugandans had died than were born for close to three decades. Nothing new; all of it very British. They simply did not care that black people were dying because of their imperial strategies. It is what they did in the Americas, in Australia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, etc. Hence, the introduction of the cash crop economy foundered under severe shortage of labour. The British actively encouraged immigration from Belgian holdings. There are dramatic pictures taken at the time of the way stations doling food, medicine and shelter along the migration route from the Rwandan border into central Uganda. Shirtless, barefoot Rwandans, their beddings rolled up on their heads, are captured in grainy images making the two week walk from the border to central Uganda.

Writing in his book, Kampala-Uganda in 1951, the late American anthropologist, Edwin S. Munger, who died in 2010, wrote that “For thirty years, the principle labor (sic) migration route has been that travelled by the Banyruanda and Barundi from the Belgian mandates into Buganda. Historically, Ruanda-Urundi’s high, steep-sided hills have produced more people than food to feed them. In many years the issue was blunt: go or starve…a carryover from the old days of hardship is the attitude in Ruanda-Urundi that one mark of manhood is a trip to Uganda. The traditions of battling with lions and elephants, of fighting bandits, living off the country, and surviving where many died still give the emigrant prestige on his return home.”

The image in Uganda from the 1920s onwards of Rwandans and Burundians (the difference was subsumed under the generic “Banyarwanda”) that emerged was unfortunate and unfair. Xenophobia in Uganda, particularly in Buganda, served to see these immigrants not as victims of cruel colonialism as the Ugandans themselves were, but as peripatetic, woebegone itinerants who worked for a meal. There were many eager to blend in, to become integrated, if only to avoid the unkind stereotype.

Life in Belgian territories was unpleasant, even by the unpleasant standards of colonialism. Arriving in late colonial Uganda, with somewhat better amenities, was for other reasons beside just food and work. “Perhaps here is partial confirmation of the physical hardships of the route from Ruanda- Urundi to Mengo (now greater Kampala) District,” Munger goes on. “Whole wards of Barundi and Banyaruanda are hospitalised with tuberculosis and general malnutrition.”

The image in Uganda, from the 1920s, of Rwandans (and Burundians, the difference was subsumed under the generic “Banyarwanda), that emerged was unfortunate and unfair. Xenophobia in Uganda, particularly in Buganda, served to see these immigrants, not as victims of cruel colonialism as themselves, but as peripatetic, woebegone itinerants who will work for a meal. And many were those eager to blend in, to become integrated, if only to avoid the unkind stereotype. They were escaping similar circumstances, but in one of the failures of African societies, those they ran to did not treat them well.

Particularly in the metropolitan Buganda, where a mix of aristocratic and racial hierarchy (not unknown in Rwanda) had created a caste system under the British, the immigrants, penniless and ill, were despised, and the timidity this produced is to be found today, three generations later. And as Munger notes, intermarriage tended to happen mostly at the social margins, because the Rwandans (and the women later followed the men), meant lower dowries demanded at nuptials.

The Buganda government, under the indirect colonial rule which left it in charge of broad swathes of its subjects, viewed the arrivals ambivalently. They were refugees; they were badly needed labour. After a few years, the Kabaka’s government began to tax them as its other subjects, a tacit act of admission. Those who could, integrated swiftly, taking on new identities and names.

The more urgent immigration into Uganda, of Rwandans and Burundians, was yet to come. But it resulted in a multi-layered extra-Rwandan diaspora. There are the integrated, who bare Ugandan names, have Ugandan parentage and are largely unhappy about the way the later immigrants served to tarnish their image, to say nothing of complicating hard-won relationships.

Amongst those that broke off from the Ugandan army and returned to Rwanda, the spearhead group were not from this earlier exodus. This group of latter immigrants came in 1959.

Throughout, the Ugandans had not behaved well towards their guests. The country had not come without its share of pain. The love was not bottomless. And today, the integration is so profound that any Ugandan saying anything anti-Rwanda, may well be insulting a grandmother. They had learnt that not being accepted was not the worst that can happen. Keep your head down and blend in. Loss of identity was not the worst. And the worst did come. The 1959 migrants did not keep their heads down. The entire region paid a steep price for their indiscretion. The second wave of migration and its consequences

With agricultural reform, by chiefly terracing the hills to stem soil erosion, the Belgians had managed to rein in famine in Rwanda. But the Belgians had ruled by divide et impera, elevating to the dangerous levels of ethnicity, what some have described as a class system, “Hutu” and “Tutsi”. They had favoured the “Tutsi”, for much of their colonial rule, with the “Hutu” treated as underdogs, who for instance were not allowed to acquire higher learning. By the racist means of the time, anthropologists and sociologists had said were non-African, non-negroid. But it was a difficult question. Nazi conquest and racial theory was so repugnant that the Belgians themselves abandoned the racialist bifurcation of their Rwanda-Burundi colony. Unfortunately, rather than create a level, unifying policy, they started to favour the Hutu instead. So that when it came, they handed over independence to the majority Hutu.

Almost immediately, the Hutu began to persecute the Tutsi. And it this crisis that led to the second wave of migration, in 1959. They were a different group now, not really peasant, but with a grudge in their hearts. In Uganda, Mr. Museveni recruited many from this group into his rebel army that fought against the Obote II government in the early 1980s. When Museveni overthrow the sclerotic Tito Okello junta that had itself overthrown the Obote government just six months early in 1985, he appointed many Rwandan refugees into government and the army. There was uproar in Uganda over the inclusion of foreigners in sensitive positions. Kagame himself had been head of a spy agency in Uganda.

Under pressure from Ugandans, Mr. Museveni understood he had to let them go. Hence, when they broke away in 1990, after helping set fire to Uganda, there was something of doom about it. They clearly weren’t coming back. But the worst was at the other end. Much as it has always been said that Mr. Paul Kagame, who inherited leadership of the Rwanda Patriotic Army rebel group after the death of its leader, Fred Rwigyema. After four years of fighting, which started in 1990, hardliner Hutu leadership unleashed the 1994 genocide. The militarization of politics in Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and Congo, has meant that the four countries have been in one form of warfare or the other for nearly 60 years.

The matrix of governing a country with sharp divides, and doing it by force, is not one that Mr. Kagame’s temperament seems suited for. It may be gratifying to defeat your enemies. But you have to be a Nelson Mandela to win them over. You must win them over, for these conflicts are circuitous. Soon the other side can, and will, rise to power. It’s a question of time.

Increasingly intolerant governments have characterised Uganda and Rwanda, at a time when all over the continent, countries are settling down to stable governance. What is the point? What plans do Messrs. Museveni and Kagame have this region? Much as it is clear to all who pay attention that the unfortunate weaponising of ethnicity has perhaps trapped both men in power, it is still puzzling because there seems to be no end game in sight, except endless corruption and more militarization, which will require even more corruption to maintain the patronage system, and more militarization to fend off the disaffected. We have become trapped in a loop without exits. Decades ago, the citizens waited patiently because it seemed that real change could come. But if after these many years a pregnant woman has to sneak across a border, that begs the question, as Oliver Cromwell once asked of the British Parliament; have you not sat here too long for any good you can have done?

Shutting down the border is symbolic of the increasing pointlessness of the two regimes.

They came into power at the time that the cold war was ending. The period of rapid coups and countercoups in Africa, funded by the rival capitalist and communist power blocs ended then, with the result that whoever had been in power at that time, tended to remain so for a bit longer. Put simply, the power balance that might have kept the two men honest was not there. Crucially then, these quakes we now feel in Uganda and Rwanda, are not casual. They are the deep rumblings from shifting global tectonic power plates. In the past, when they were at loggerheads, the British Foreign Secretaries jetted in to knock their heads together. Agony “Aunts” Lynda Chalker and Claire Short, British ministers of the 1990s and 00s, would have been here already. But the British now have their hands full back home, and need benevolent foreign secretaries to go knock their heads together, enduring the cruel reversal of the foreign policy technique they so perfected, of keeping countries they wished to rule at each other’s throats.

The absence of steadying British and American hands right now, in this conflict, has exposed the lack of political and management skills in Kigali and in Kampala. It has exposed the fact that Uganda and Rwanda have for decades now been run as client states. In the absence of the Anglo-Saxon power-meisters, Museveni and Kagame are learning cruelly the difference between monkey and organ grinder. It is left to the East African Community states, Tanzania and Kenya, to try and sort the situation out. But it takes a fool to bet on that strategy working. Twice, first in 1985, then in 1994, both Kenya and Tanzania attempted to sort political problems in Uganda and Rwanda out. But the rebel leaders then merely inked their names to agreements reached in Nairobi and Arusha, whilst using the interim to move their forces closer to the capitals. With spectacular disasters. Those rebels? They are now called President Museveni and President Kagame.

How does that now happen? Did Nairobi and Dar es Salaam ever forgive the slight? Do they trust the two men? But, that is the wrong question. The question is, what power backdrop are the two men now banking on? If we can answer that question, maybe we can predict how they plan to plunge us into new rounds of war. Global power dynamics have eroded the neoliberal economic system they had learnt to game. What is emerging now requires skills beyond wearing military fatigues and firing AK 47s at target boards.

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.

The Death of Michael Alinda: Why Uganda Needs Coroners’ Courts

By Mary Serumaga

The world, including Africa, has arguably never been more capitalist than at the current juncture. And yet, the scholarly and public debates in and about Africa, as far as I am aware, are nowhere near in tandem with this reality. In countries such as Uganda and Kenya, that I both regard as capitalist countries, there is hardly any explicit public debate about how capitalism shapes and alters these societies. The very basic question (are we a capitalist society?) does not get discussed in public forums.

This low intensity of an explicit capitalism debate is not necessarily unique to these two countries or the region. Colleagues who do research in Central Asia tell me the situation is similar in that region too. And in my home country, Germany, this topic is hardly ever discussed head-on by government officials and mainstream parties either; official discourse there circles around the term “social market economy”.

In Kampala, despite the capitalist character in the culture of everyday life that is intensifying by the day, public debate is about almost everything except capitalism. Government officials, public servants, technocracts, political, religious, and business leaders and national observers and commentators rarely use the C-word in their public analysis, speeches or statements. President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni once in a while offers a brief take on the matter by declaring that Uganda is pre-capitalist and the analyst Andrew Mwenda from time to time touches upon the topic too. Plus there is a group of other public intellectuals who are making various aspects of capitalism the explicit focus of some of their analyses, including Fred Muhumuza, Moses Khisa, Charles Onyango- Obbo, Kalundi Serumaga, Mary Serumaga, and Yusuf Serunkuma. But that, more or less, is basically it in terms of focused, explicit articulations on the matter in the analysis that makes it into the (English language) media space. To date, the weekly prime time talk shows on NTV and NBS as a rule of thumb do not frame debates in terms of capitalism, neither does the weekly media roundtable. The general silence regarding capitalism in Africa (CiA) doesn’t stop there, or on the continent for that matter. It also extends to university campuses where it suppresses intellectual creativity (as I have argued previously).

And yet, many African countries are by now capitalist societies and analytically need to be treated as such. A number of social phenomena in these countries can be seen to be typical of a capitalist society, such as inequalities and uneven spatial development. These are to some degree comparable to similar phenomena in other capitalist countries across the world, including the Global North. There are striking similarities now across the North-South axis when it comes to some of the experiences of capitalist everyday life. Let me go deeper here…

Sometime ago, I attended the grand finale of a best comedian-type competition show of a Ugandan TV station (NBS The Comic, Season 2) in a big packed show tent in my neighbourhood in Kampala. It was a live event that had major elements of similar TV show competitions that I have viewed back home in the UK: prominent judges; an excited, participating large (young) audience that votes for their winner via mobile phones; ecstatic prominent organisers/MCs; corporate sponsorship; stars’ performances; votes of thanks to the sponsors; proud winner with a cheque and new car to go home with, etc. Witnessing the event reinforced my view that an intensified analysis of CiA is needed and that I had to focus and sharpen my analytical lenses and fully recognise and make sense of the fact that these social phenomena are typical of contemporary capitalist societies everywhere. In other words, these different social phenomena and the societal order as such need to be recognised analytically and studied empirically from the perspective of “capitalism”.

And further, that capitalism is not peripheral or irrelevant but central to these phenomena. That phenomena x, y, z (say, this national, corporate-sponsored comedy competition) cannot merely, or predominantly or easily, be grouped under some of the most widely used analytical frames in what is called African Studies or Development Studies that together dominate scholarly debate about the dynamics on the continent: development; democracy/democratisation; security, (post-)conflict; poverty; crisis; politics; authoritarianism; and so on. Instead, these phenomena need to be analytically categorised as capitalism i.e. as phenomena of capitalist economy, polity, culture, and society. The comedy show, for example (and many similar shows), can be seen to be part of what can be called entertainment capitalism in Africa, part of the advertising and marketing complex of global capitalist culture. This show has, of course, not only highly cultural but also political dimensions, functions and effects, in the way shows such as The Voice in the UK and elsewhere in the North have within the capitalist societal context there. That is to say, there is a cultural political economy at work in these cases.

My heightened attention to and search for everyday phenomena of capitalism in Kampala and Nairobi led me to think about the available analytical categories and options. Consumerism? Commercialisation? Uneven and combined development in capitalism? Market society? Corporate state? Market state? Competition state? Economic and cultural globalisation? Cultural diffusion? Cultural mélange? Capitalist social order? Afro-capitalist civilisation?

The one term I have used for years to orient and frame my research is “neoliberalism”. I have explored the embedding of neoliberalism in Uganda i.e. the making and operation of a capitalist market society there. But maybe there is a need for a different, more suggestive term – a term that reflects more the particular glocal character of the current phase of CiA of this continued spread, intensification, institutionalisation, reproduction and modification of the capitalist social order (CSO). Could one say that many of the examples I had noticed more and more, and so intensely, during my extensive stay in the two capitals in 2018 were pointing to the continuous building, expanding, locking in and managing of CSO, including capitalist culture? That the advancement of what we academics term as “market society project via liberal reforms and programmes” was a crucial part of the contemporary advancement and consolidation of ““capitalist civilisation’ (Immanuel Wallerstein) of ““market civilisation’ (Stephen Gill) in Africa or Afro-capitalist civilization.

“Civilisation” is a particularly loaded, tricky and controversial term, and is linked not only to the recent “clash-of-civilisations” argument (Samuel Huntington) but also to the discourse of the advancement of “Western civilisation” on the continent during the colonial period. Still, well-known analysts of capitalism, such as Wallerstein and Gill, have, as I have indicated, brought the term civilisation into the analysis of capitalism. Also, Erik Hobsbawm’s Age of Capital, 1848–187 is published with a History of Civilization label at the bottom of the book cover; while Fernand Braudel titled one of his major books The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization & Capitalism 15th-18th Century.

So capitalism/markets and civilisation have been linked in scholarly debates (see also the work of Karl Polanyi and Max Weber). But can one talk of Afro-capitalist civilisation (ACC), Euro-, South Asia-capitalist civilisation, and so on (in order to highlight region-specific origins, trajectories and specificities of capitalism)? Can one analyse how ACC is related to global capitalist civilisation? Can one argue that the neoliberal era has also been about the further expansion, build-up and management of ACC?

One term that has been used is “africapitalism”. It is suggested that capitalism can be turned into something very positive for the African continent and its people (including the subaltern classes) if a, b, c (e.g. indigenisation of capitalism) happens i.e. that the private sector wants and can contribute to socially progressive, sustainable, long-term development on the continent. A blog piece about this philosophy is titled “Capitalism with African values”. The Nigerian banker, entrepreneur and economist, Tony O. Elumelu, who coined the term, runs The Africapitalism Institute. I haven’t delved into the respective literature yet (see here, here and here), but the term’s definition seems rather business and management speak.

That said, however, as much as one is intrigued by the contemporary features of CiA and tries to grasp the specifics of the current era of capitalist restructuring and reality on the continent, the process of spreading and embedding CiA goes back very far. There has for long been a flow of capitalist tropes, ideas, norms, and practices of financial capital, labour, and commodities, an expansion of commodity production and circulation, and so on. That is to say, not everything we see in neoliberal Africa, especially culturally, is new as such.

But again, my argument is this: In countries like Uganda, capitalism is now more broad-based, established and advanced (i.e institutionalised) than during earlier periods. And this difference has analytical significance. The neoliberal era has made the country more capitalist, and, crucially, normalised capitalism further i.e. rendered capitalism more (not absolutely) natural, ordinary, hegemonic. This process, as James Parisot detailed for the case of America, is particular to any country that goes through capitalist restructuring.

The neoliberal era has arguably brought about an acceleration and deepening of commodification, commercialisation, and marketisation in many countries in Africa, especially in urban areas (above all in the big cities/capitals). Scholars call the latest phase in this process “Neoliberalism 3.0 i.e. the “deep marketisation in the South’. In short then, a country like Uganda has arguably never been more capitalist, and is becoming ever more capitalist by the day. And some of the ways in which Uganda or Kenya and the social classes there are integrated into global capitalism are specific to the current era; some of these are cutting edge capitalism (e.g. M-Pesa).

The neoliberal project of social engineering has made a significant difference in this regard; the policies, programmes, discourses, technologies, and practices accelerated and shaped the process of the institutionalisation of CSO in Africa in the current period. Neoliberalism here and elsewhere has put in place or resulted in “a new institutional architecture for managing capitalist social relations”, as Damien Cahill and Martijn Konings put it. Crucially, neoliberal capitalism has seeped deeper into Ugandan culture and transformed part of this culture in the process, including crucial matters of moral-economic order (values, norms, subjectivities, practices etc.). Capitalism makes and shapes everyday life, including moral economies of earning a living, more and differently now than prior to neoliberal reforms.

In Kenya too there is a major capitalist wave, thanks to the effects of the period from the late 1980s onwards, the period of embedding and locking in the neoliberal variant of CiA. This significant and hard to reverse institutionalisation of capitalism – i.e. making capitalism more embedded, pervasive, powerful, normal, acceptable, cherished, and desired (yet at the same time still ridiculed, critiqued, and resisted) – in African countries such as Uganda and Kenya is perhaps one of the most fundamental outcomes of the ongoing neoliberal era, as is highlighted in a new book that I co-edited with Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco.

Looking back at the last three decades from this angle then, one can conclude so far that – as Graham Harrison and others told us early on in the process – neoliberalism was never just about a particular policy, a right or a ballot, or a style of people-state communication (as donors and other proponents of liberal reform told us). It was about something more fundamental and contentious: about hammering capitalism into Africa for good and thereby moulding class, property and power relations and patterns of social domination, surplus appropriation, and resulting social inequalities and conflicts. Picture a living room with all sorts of furniture. Neoliberalism has brought about a massive moving around of furniture, and throwing out of some and bringing in of other furniture. There is more capitalist furniture (the pillars or institutions of CSO) in the room now (while non- capitalist furniture is still there too of course). And a good share of that furniture was put there by foreign actors, including Western governments, donors, and corporations.

That is to say that pro-capitalist forces and actors in the country are more numerous (especially local ones), powerful and resourceful now, three decades into neoliberalism. In various issue areas, they have the high ground. Capitalism (or its manifestations) is to a considerable degree common sense and taken for granted. Various Ugandan actors – directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously – embrace, endorse, advance, celebrate and/or defend it (or versions of it), in the name of development, modernisation, competiveness, growth, productivity enhancement, entrepreneurship, poverty reduction, survival, empowerment, national sovereignty etc.

The argument is not that capitalism swept everything away (and that it is all there is now) but that it has expanded and advanced and thus become more influential in shaping societal and personal life, again, especially in urban areas. It is significant that the national football league, the Uganda Premier League, now has a multinational corporation as a sponsor (Chinese technology and media company Star Times that operates in 30 African countries), and TV rights and the rest of it are part of the package, while members of the national men’s football team take part in betting adverts. Sponsors of the team include Betlion, a mobile betting company, Airtel, National insurance Cooperation, Nile Breweries, Bidco, Rwenzori and Eco bank. In other words, commercialization of this popular sport is advancing in Uganda, and elsewhere in the region. It is significant that a multinational bank runs and sponsors interventions in the education system (e.g. a national school competition). And that Coca Cola has made it into the State House.

Notably then, some of the pro-capitalist actors are creations of neoliberal intervention and to various degrees orchestrated, designed, financed, supported and/or empowered by foreign actors. The Private Sector Foundation Uganda (PSFU), founded in 1994, was (and remains) a key vehicle for World Bank interventions in the country concerning private sector development. The PSFU was part of the Bank’s strategies to ensure the acceptability of capitalist restructuring and to prevent policy reversal: “The mix of sensible …. policies which have been introduced in recent years will need to be maintained. Private sector confidence and the credibility of government’s handling of the economy take a long time to be established, and would be lost far more quickly should policy reversals be made. … [T]he Government will try to widen support for the measures being adopted. This is not a technical problem, but rather requires achieving a wider degree of understanding and endorsement of the strategy, amongst key interest groups and the population at large, to build the support needed to sustain sound policy over the longer term. Tools to perform this task are included in this project (i.e. the Private Sector Foundation Component).” Set up during the neoliberal era were also other things like “investment clubs” in schools (from primary level up) boosted by banks, government and others in the name of advancing financial literacy and entrepreneurship amongst children and youth.

I had noticed (and studied) capitalist social phenomena in Uganda in previous years too. I first came to the country in 2004 but it became more noticeable in 2018. The show scripts, the adverts, the economic protagonists, the corporate-speak and propaganda, the discourses of the powerful, the social media rhythms, the aspirations and emotions concerning money and individual success on display. For example, the TV shows I came across had (partly not surprisingly) a global feel i.e. strong parallels with show formats elsewhere. (Look for instance at this format called DFCU Battle For Cash’. I am far from being an expert of these sorts of reality shows, but it instantly and strongly reminded me of Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice. Then here other Ugandan shows: Make My Home; The Property Show; (see here and here for Kenyan equivalents); Money and Markets; Supa jackpot show; NSSF Friends with Benefits; and finally Be My Date. Also check out Nairobi Diaries.

Also listen to minutes 0:55 to 1:12 of this clip: “Uganda is ready for business as a country. We value investors. The investor and the customer are the most important people in Uganda. People who bring capital, create jobs and bring revenue for the state,” says Uganda’s Prime Minister, Ruhakana Rugunda, there.

In addition, people with android phones in London, Berlin, Kampala and Nairobi now use fairly similar apps on their phones (and perhaps somewhat similar news feeds from global news providers, Twitter etc.). Some of the most widely used apps are designed and managed by major capitalist corporations. In other words, sections of Ugandan and Kenyan middle and upper classes enjoy some consumer patterns that are similar to their counterparts elsewhere

Let’s look once more then at examples. Again, this is my basic observation: in countries such as Uganda and Kenya, and especially in their major cities, one can find plenty of (cutting edge) social phenomena that are typical of contemporary capitalist society across the world. The mix and type (and concurrency) of similar phenomena is striking. This is significant in the larger history of the spread of global capitalism, and the march towards a “world market of a genuinely global scale” (Paul Cammack).

Some of these phenomena are captured in aspects of the notion of and debate about Afropolitanism; here, as one analyst put it, there is “an image of an Instagram-friendly Africa…African versions of American or European cities. Afropolitanism it appears is grounded in the ability to engage in the same pastimes one could expect to enjoy in a Western capital…you can now have the Hipster Africa Experience”. On top of that, we have the core characteristics of capitalism present anyway: capitalists owning the means of production, workers selling their labour and being exploited by capitalists (both local and foreign), class conflict between workers and bosses, private ownership as a core legal institution, etc.

Conclusion

I have argued that despite all the global and local differences and inequalities, historical and current local specificities, and the uneven geographical development in global capitalism, there are striking similarities (and concurrencies) now across the North-South axis when it comes to capitalist everyday life. My point here is not to insist on a particular pattern of similarities and differences concerning social phenomena of CiA and capitalism elsewhere, to discuss these phenomena along binaries of good/bad, better/worse, to suggest which analytical terms are most useful, or to say whether this is about “catching-up” or “leading” vis-à-vis certain phenomena. My point is that current capitalism is altering African countries such as Uganda and Kenya in significant ways and that it is these alterations that need more analytical attention, explanation and discussion.

We are witnessing the operation of a more fully fledged, institutionalised, normalised capitalist social order, and an intensification and deepening of processes that will render these countries, for the time being, even more capitalist. Capitalism is now more fully operational and thus, so to speak, causal i.e. it needs to be taken into account when discussing the drivers and characteristics of contemporary life in African countries.

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.

The Death of Michael Alinda: Why Uganda Needs Coroners’ Courts

By Mary Serumaga

With the rejection of the Tory government’s Brexit proposals by Parliament, a no-deal Brexit looks more likely than not. The immediate effect of a no-deal or “hard” Brexit would be an increase in Britain’s balance of payments deficit.

Now that it is confirmed that post-Brexit Britain will no longer benefit from the preferential trade terms offered under the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union (EU) and Africa and the Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACPs), Britain will have to strike out on its own and seek trade agreements with those countries. Under those new agreements, Britain will be looking to increase her exports and obtain favourable import terms in order to maintain her standard of living. (Britain only produces half the food she consumes and imports 40 per cent of the rest from the EU.) In order to maintain normal supplies during a potentially messy aftermath before new trade agreements have been reached with EU and other countries, the Health Secretary has instructed pharmaceutical companies to stockpile pharmaceuticals and is willing to pay the storage costs. Furthermore, the military is putting in place plans to help distribute emergency supplies should it become necessary.

Since 2017, members of the House of Lords have been making efforts to transform the crisis into an opportunity for British businesses. Members of the House of Lords, led by Lord Popat, have been engaged in a fishing expedition, seeking to open new export markets in the old Commonwealth. That relationship, always unequal in terms of power and benefits derived, finally fizzled out when Britain joined the EU in 1973.

However in 2017, Lord Popat, opening the debate on Exports: Africa and the Commonwealth debate said: “Before I delve into the economic potential of Africa and the Commonwealth, I will briefly explain why this debate is so important. Britain has run a balance of payments deficit for decades. Quite simply, we do not export enough to pay for our imports. Possibly the greatest victim of our insular approach has been the great continent of Africa. Only a few decades ago, Britain could boast of having 25% of total trade with Africa; now it is barely 4% [.…] it is clear to me in hindsight that our membership of the European Union was detrimental to the Commonwealth.” (Lord Popat, Hansard)

There are difficulties ahead for Britain. Lord Popat’s delegation to Uganda won a contract to build Kibaale International Airport to serve newly discovered oilfields. UK firms were shortlisted to build an oil pipeline worth 700 million. These projects would be financed by a loan to Uganda under the UK Export Finance programme (UKEF).

However, they are not the only projects for which Uganda needs credit; Uganda will have to prioritise projects if it is to be granted another package of loans on concessional terms by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). So far Uganda has been unwilling to concede to pre-conditions set by the IMF and the pipeline may not become a reality.

A senior Ugandan official states that the government is not able to comply with the IMF’s terms regarding suspending or cancelling infrastructure projects. It is unlikely that Western countries will undermine the IMF’s authority by offering concessional credit. The IMF would like the proposed pipeline and oil refinery dropped. It would like a moratorium on non-concessional loans of the type offered by China and domestic banks. The electricity grid to distribute power from newly completed hydro-electricity plant at Isimba may get the green light but Karuma hydro-plant was finally put on hold in late 2018, and the standard gauge railway (SGR) was quietly shelved in 2017. There is also the road network in the Buliisa oilfields, all of which have yet to attract investors. Preferential loans from Britain and even the EU are unlikely to go ahead without IMF approval.

Even if Uganda did secure funding for British-financed projects, her ability to repay is undermined by the fact that existing loans have taken the debt-to-revenue ratio over the historically sustainable limit of 40 per cent to a precarious 54 per cent. Much of it is in the form of non-concessional loans from China and also from domestic commercial banks. By 2020, when many external loans become payable, repayments will require 65 per cent of projected revenue collections. Sovereign default has been considered as an option and will likely be discussed again in 2020.

From Uganda’s point of view, the expiry of the EPAs with the EU in 2020, together with Brexit, represent an opportunity to hold out for better terms of trade, including facilitation of the export of processed goods rather than cheap raw materials. Although a stated goal of EPAs is to “contribute, through trade and investment, to sustainable development and poverty reduction”, there was an admission in the House of Lords debate that existing terms of trade under current EPAs are highly unfavourable to ACP countries.

None of Uganda’s post-independence governments responsible for signing poor trade agreements have attempted to fulfil the independence goal of industrialisation. The National Resistance Movement (NRM) government led by Yoweri Museveni is currently promoting urbanisation and employment in the services sector, especially tourism. Employment in foreign-owned factories (when they are eventually built) is also held out as a possibility for the youth, the majority of whom are currently unemployed. As the president said in the 2018 comments on the budget, low cost of labour (read poverty) is an economic strategy. In short, Uganda is being transformed from a nation predominantly of smallholders to a tourist destination with some large foreign commercial farms growing food for export, a sprinkling of factories and the export of oil.

Poor governance (lack of public oversight) on Uganda’s part and exploitative trade practices on the part of development partners and investors is the underlying reason for perpetually poor trade treaties. “Honest Accounts 2017 – How the world profits from Africa’s wealth” by Mark Curtis and Tim Jones illustrates how sharp practice has undermined development. The trend is likely to continue; an examination of the British firms being promoted by the House of Lords in the Commonwealth shows that these firms are serial offenders in bribing foreign officials for commercial favours and have been penalised in the past. An official from BP was charged with 19 counts of receiving bribes in return for business in March 2017. Petrofac is undergoing a corruption probe by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office. Rolls Royce paid penalties of US$800 million for bribery in Angola, Nigeria and South Africa, as well as in Azerbaijan, Brazil, India, China, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. BAE Systems was fined US$400 million by the Serious Fraud Office in 2010 for bribery charges in Tanzania and Saudi Arabia. (See The Revival of the Commonwealth: an Opportunity for Further Exploitation or a Time to Correct Past Wrongs?, Counterpunch, December 22, 2017). As Museveni’s government approaches its end in 2022, his circle of family and friends is likely to continue and even accelerate taking bribes from investors such as these.

If the NRM government is unwilling or unable to wrest better trading terms for Uganda from Britain, the People Power movement can – by demanding all new trade agreements and investments be subject to public scrutiny. Lord Chidgey notes the lack of public debate in negotiating trade deals and the lack of competence of public service negotiators. A senior Ugandan official confirms the lack of competence stating, typically, a Ugandan delegation of say four generalists will travel to China to be confronted by a roomful of Chinese experts, including specialists representing key economic sectors. “Apparently, EPA deals had been struck behind closed doors by professional and highly skilled negotiators from the EU, which the best efforts of their African counterparts just could not match. There was little or no input from the Parliaments they were dealing with, and no public debate. Apparently, the conditions imposed in the EPAs were not scrutinised, and there was no analysis of the long-term impact that their restrictions would have on the economies of the countries they were dealing with.” (Lord Chidgey, Hansard).

However, as the 2021 general elections approach, heightened tension discourages open discussion. Alternative policy formulation by the opposition is being actively prevented by the Government of Uganda. Opposition politicians and activists require police permission for gatherings of more than four people. Since the Directorate of Crime Intelligence circulated a memo, reading in part, “You are instructed to compile and submit reports of all events, functions and ceremonies in your A.O.R (area of responsibility) from January to July 2019. Reports should reach this headquarters not later than January 18, 2019”, gatherings of all kinds are under police surveillance. Meetings and demonstrations, the very stuff of political discourse, are routinely broken up and the threat of or actual state violence is ever-present.

As long as Britain continues to support repression with grants to and training for rogue regimes and their armed forces, the status quo will remain. In turn, Britain will be able to balance its books. In this way their austerity will continue to be exported to Uganda and other African countries characterised by weak public administration, little public oversight of government, and a widespread culture of bribe-taking in international commerce – all underpinned by repression. Any reversal of this position, in place since 1893 in Uganda, would require legislation to enable citizens to audit existing debt and to oversee both the debt creation process and negotiations for international trade agreements.

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By Mary Serumaga

It is that time of the year when the Auditor General’s annual report, released at the end of December, is drip-fed to Ugandans, query by query. The majority of the population will only ever know headlines such as “Uganda’s Public Debt Worrying”. Along with the news that Uganda’s public debt has risen by 22 per cent, the latest report carried the first official confirmation that the country’s sovereignty has been put at risk by the terms and conditions of some loans. These two alarming pieces of information received minimal response from the public.

What did not make the news was that significant amounts of the petroleum fund set aside for infrastructure development is being used instead to fund the recurrent budget (wages, consumables, transport etc.) amounting to UGX.125.3 billion ($34,137,671).

Revenues receivable from oil developers amounting to UGX 12,877,415,932 ($3,508,073), have not been collected. A number of other entities have failed to collect monies due to them and it is possible the receivables have been diverted. Outstanding Receivables

There is a real risk of loan default given that borrowing and on-lending to parastatals has increased by 975 per cent, from UGX 431 billion ($117,409,571) in 2015/16 to UGX 4,634 billion ($1,262,612,871) in 2017/18 even as parastatals continue to fail to repay earlier loans. Parastatals have traditionally been conduits for public funds in to private hands.

The debt to revenue ratio is now 54%, the highest in the region and projected to rise to 65% in 2020 when some loans expire. Historically, nothing above 40 per cent debt to revenue ratio has been sustainable. Interest payments as a percentage of revenue collection, at 17 per cent, are also above the accepted threshold of 15 per cent. The AG first flagged unsustainable interest payments in 2016 when they were still at 16 per cent of revenues.

Other areas of deterioration in financial management reported are: a rise in contingent liabilities (including potential court awards) to UGX 9.4 trillion ($2,560,731) from UGX 7.5 trillion ($2,043,187) a year ago; unpaid court awards and compensation against the government have risen to UGX 655 billion, from UGX 648 billion ($176,509,616) in 2017. Interest on a section of judgment debts is UGX 124 billion ($33,790,210). Yet awards made in favour of the government amounting to UGX 20.6 billion ($5,611,883) have not been collected.

The country has continued to fall short of the amounts it is required to contribute to donor-aided projects. In 2017, the shortfall was UGX 43 billion ($11,714,056) and rose to UGX 1.6 trillion ($435,891,546) in 2018.

The Youth Livelihood Programme attracted more attention than the debt situation, with its salacious details involving revolving loans being made to youth groups, 67 per cent of which do not exist. A small minority will find out from Twitter that 79,000 army veterans haven’t been paid their pension and gratuity arrears worth UGX 500 billion ($136,211,575) or that UGX 65.6 billion ($17,843,484) was released by the Treasury for pensions but was returned after the recipients could not be verified or were being deliberately frustrated by ministries, departments, agencies and local governments. (The latter is more likely. This writer was involved in arm-wrestling the Education Service Commission and the Ministry of Education for an elderly friend’s gratuity. A Ministry of Education official demanded an unspecified “share”; it was denied to him, and so the gratuity was not paid.)

The full report will come into its own with daily television coverage later in the year when the Parliament Accounts Committee (PAC) gets round to debating it. There will be further scrutiny if and when COSASE, Parliament’s committee on commissions, statutory authorities and state enterprises, debates its management. COSASE might spend some time trying to understand why out of the 11 public enterprises in which the government has invested UGX 70 billion ($19,067,642) only Kalangala Infrastucture Services is operational. KIS first came up for mention by the AG in 2016 when it was discovered that it had been paid UGX 16 billion ($4,358,994) to run two ferries between Ssesse Islands and the mainland while the nine other ferries countrywide were operated on a combined total of UGX 10 billion ($2,724,196). The AG pointed out that a new ferry can be acquired for UGX 14 billion ($3,813,865). KIS has never declared profits since the project began in 2012.

All except two of the government’s non-operational commercial enterprises are in the agricultural sector and were designed to transform smallholdings into commercially viable farms (See the State of the Nation Address 2018), fruit and sugar factories and tea factories and growers.

Non-operational Projects. Source: Auditor General’s Report, December 2018

This should come as no surprise given that the AG had earlier warned against these investments made without strategic plans or feasibility studies;

Lack of guidelines for strategic investments

“The government, through the Uganda Development Corporation, is undertaking investments countrywide in the areas of fruit processing and helping others to set up industries in Soroti, Luwero, Kabale and Kisoro districts. These investments cumulatively amounted to UGX 26.6 billion ($7,246,598). However, I noted that there was no policy to guide the establishment of these investments.” The Auditor General’s report of 2016 also shows that some of the investments have been undertaken without feasibility studies on marketability and commercial viability.” (Auditor General, 2018)

The competence of parliament and the general public to oversee public expenditure is also in issue. Kira Motor Corporation (KMC), recently in the news for test-driving a car supposedly made in Uganda, was audited and is listed as non-operational in 2018.

It was only noticed when in February 2019 a parliamentary committee visited KMC and found that the plant does not exist. Where foundations and scaffolding worth UGX 15 billion ($4,087,095) had been expected, there was only bush. Like other presidential initiatives announced to fanfare and outside the NDP, KMC is being revealed as a scheme for gaining access to Treasury funds that have been embezzled.

Nugatory expenditure is a useful indicator of competence in the public service. The AG defines it as avoidable and therefore wasteful “expenditure that does not achieve any result”. In 2017 UGX 2.74 billion ($746,508) was wasted on “delayed settlements of obligations arising from contracts for construction services, court awards.” In 2018, the Ministries of Water and Education lost UGX 1.6 billion ($435,900) on “interest charges including on interest on delayed payments, litigation costs for wrongful termination of contracts and refund of embezzled funds”.

Masked corruption

However, the details are no longer important and not many more can be taken in by an exhausted polity. It is more productive for Ugandans to focus on the underlying incompetence in public administration that gives rise to audit queries such as these and to devise means of increasing public oversight of the Treasury. Some audit queries arise out of incapacity but most mask corruption.

Take wetland management. It has been government policy for at least a decade to halt encroachment on wetlands. The reasons are both to prevent environmental degradation and to maintain access for communities that derive livelihoods from them. The Wetland Management Department has not updated the inventory of wetlands since 2000; they are neither demarcated nor gazetted. This omission is convenient for those who acquired illegal title in the wetlands in anticipation of the planned standard gauge railway and the compensation that would have to be paid for them being vacated. In 2017 the National Environment Management Authority announced that the titles were to be cancelled. In 2018, the AG found that the cancellation exercise was not funded and therefore did not take place.

The target of restoring 12 per cent of destroyed wetlands by 2020 is unlikely to be met. Degradation of the wetlands outpaces restoration, with only 0.3 per cent of the targeted restorations having been implemented.

Furthermore, it has been found that reclaiming wetlands as part of irrigation schemes has led to enclosure of the irrigated land and exclusion of the local populations dependent on them for their survival. Land management generally is in similar straits with two million hectares belonging to the police, prisons and Ministry of Agriculture encroached upon. At the time of writing a massive tract of wetland is being filled with earth on the Bombo Road – a highly visible highway leading north out of Kampala. The public is mystified.

Thirty-four per cent of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) and local governments are understaffed. The level in 2016 was more or less the same – 119 local governments were understaffed by over 40 per cent. “This affects service delivery as a majority of these are critical jobs like doctors, clinical officers, Professors, Commissioners.” (Auditor General). The most affected are public universities and local governments. Following[1] is a sector by sector list of audit findings for MDAs highlighting the understaffing and other difficulties they face.

Then there is the usual corruption, such as the case of six officials in Apac District receiving over UGX 2 billion ($544,883) without supporting documents; financial controls are still being overridden because the twenty-year-old IFMIS has still not been rolled out country-wide. Where it does operate, controls have been by-passed to allow UGX 369 billion ($100,531,084) in expenditure not related to the relevant budget line (up from 168 billion in 2016), unaccounted for expenditure of 21.7 billion ($5,912,119) and nugatory expenditure of 66.9 billion ($18,226,765). Undisclosed arrears, which may or may not be genuine, amount to UGX 377 billion ($102,707,560).

Overall responsibility must be ascribed to the top leadership of the public service, the planning departments of the Ministry of Finance, line ministries and local governments. Unfortunately, that is where the largest gaps exist between expected services and outcomes.

In 2016, a large number of MDAs failed to submit strategic plans “as a result most sector plans and targets are not aligned with the National Development Plan (NDP) and assessing service delivery and level of implementation of the NDP is difficult without service delivery standards and regular interviews.”

Low debt absorption is understandable now that it is clear that money is borrowed without plans. In 2016, UGX 18 trillion ($4,903,604,818) was committed but was not disbursed. The Treasury paid UGX 20 billion ($5,448,388) in wasted commitment fees for those loans. In 2018, the trend continued; municipal councils under the Uganda Support for Municipal Infrastructure Development failed to utilise UGX 95,006,243,857 ($25,881,547) while the project support unit did not utilize UGX 6,722,829,229 ($1,831,386). This occurred against the background of “various incomplete and abandoned works due to non-payment of contractors. Work on Mbarara-Nkenda and Tororo-Lira transmission lines was delayed for almost 8 years resulting into cancellation of the loan by the funder with an undisbursed loan amount of USD 6.5m”.

The same loan was audited in 2016 when the unabsorbed amount was UGX 94.783 billion. Officials at that time attributed the failure to a lack of specialised staff (understaffing), which in turn limited their capacity to procure specialised equipment, such as for land surveys.

A minor but interesting detail is that 115 properties under the management of the Departed Asian Custodian Board (DAPCB) have been repossessed by their former owners who were compensated for these properties in 1999. These properties may be lost to the State once the winding up of the DAPCB is complete.

Class action suits

Returning to the issue of an appropriate response to the Auditor General’s findings, the aggrieved have a number of options. The most promising would be to file class action suits for negligence and any losses consequent upon that, be they avoidable deaths in hospital or those caused by bad roads.

Where funds have been available and commitments made, the failure to transmit electricity for eight years and resulting loss of industrial capacity and simple comfort of the affected population is similarly actionable. Nugatory expenditure is actionable in its own right but various communities can demonstrate in lawsuits how it has adversely affected them and obtain compensation.

It is the right of affected populations to petition the Ombudsman, individual MPs, as well as COSASE. If they appear toothless, it may be because the public they represent has abdicated responsibility for the economy.

[1] ANNEXURE II: SUMMARY ENTITY FINDINGS OF MDAS Table 2.1 Adverse Opinions

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The Death of Michael Alinda: Why Uganda Needs Coroners’ Courts

By Mary Serumaga The American engineered regime-change taking place in Venezuela should be of interest to Africa and especially those countries which like Venezuela have experienced sporadic episodes of social unrest over a protracted period. President Maduro, like Presidents Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe and Museveni of Uganda has responded with wanton brutality. The actions of all three countries featured in in-depth reports by Human Rights Watch in 2017 alone. Maduro is the only one of the three so far who has attracted the ultimate sanction of regime change.

The Ugandan regime, hopelessly in debt and facing growing disaffection, is vulnerable to a take-over similar to Maduro’s. So strong is the disaffection and so likely are the youth to succeed in displacing the National Resistance Movement in a fair election, the United States cannot afford to be complacent if it wants to maintain the status quo. The only potential barrier to a second phase of structural adjustment (SAP II) is the fact that support for the new and most popular opposition leader, Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine, is rooted in the most excluded and disaffected and not the elite who would benefit from the continuation of the status quo.

Going back to 20th-century history, Africa and Latin America formed part of the Tripartite set up in the sixties to represent the global interests of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The high point was the 1966 Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The bloc expanded the then existing alliance known in the United Nations as the Afro-Asian Bloc and solidified at the Bandung Conference of 1955. The bloc was considered a threat by the United States and Europe as it voted against American interests on matters such as allowing Communist China to sit in the General Assembly. The Afro-Asian bloc enjoyed at least the nominal support of the Soviet Union (the depth of that support was tested by the Congo crisis during which the Soviet Union did not in the end support Patrice Lumumba who was assassinated before the colonialisation of Congo resumed unabated).

In the following years, much of Latin Africa signed on for their first phase of IMF development assistance. The results of the austerity that followed have been much written about, and culminated in the ‘IMF riots’ of the 1980s and 90s. Recent austerity protests in Zimbabwe continue this trend. Enter Hugo Chavez and his socialist intervention. President Maduro’s mentor gained popular support from the poorest and most marginalised for his anti-imperialist platform, enough even to recover from being deposed in an earlier American coup d’état in 2002. As Craig Murray put it, “Hugo Chavez’ revolutionary politics were founded on two very simple tenets:

People ought not to be starving in dreadful slums in the world’s most oil-rich state The CIA ought not to control Venezuela”

Murray was referring to the twelve Latin American coups organized by the CIA between 1954 and 2019. Neither Chavez nor Maduro were able to rise above corruption and autocracy. Neither has President Trump, but unlike Donald Trump’s America, Venezuela needs outside financial support.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union left African countries in the lurch, still in need of access to capital for development, under pressure to continue to supply primary commodities and yet no longer able to play one superpower off against the other. In addition, the 1980s debt crisis forced most of them to sign onto the IMF’s structural adjustment programme. Austerity-induced social unrest is the enduring result. Uprisings in all three, that is Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Uganda, are a response to extreme and worsening economic conditions of high unemployment, hunger and rising taxes. Endemic corruption and economic sanctions only worsened the situation (and were designed to do so) in Zimbabwe. There are no examples anywhere of the success of structural adjustment in achieving its stated goals of deeper democracy, greater rule of law, higher respect for human rights, good governance, civil service reform, improved service delivery, an enabling environment for FDI and a rising, prosperous middle class. On the contrary there are only examples of countries having to receive further assistance to achieve the unattained goals of the first phase of IMF and World Bank intervention, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya being a few.

There are no examples anywhere of the success of structural adjustment in achieving its stated goals…

Structural Adjustment did achieve the objective of liberalising economies. This ensured Western access to cheap primary commodities not otherwise available to major IMF shareholders. The removal of restrictions on exporting capital has meant foreign investors whose role was meant to inject capital into assisted economies, can now freely transfer profits illicitly earned. It is an indisputable fact that there is a net outflow of capital from Africa of $41 billion every year – that is, the difference between loans, grants and FDI received and the cost of tax evasion, repatriation of aid, environmental damage, land-grabs and other features of the SAPs.

The IMF as an organization ensured its own profitability by locking borrowing countries into unsustainable debt.

When in Uganda political dissent was met by a massive and sustained wave of brutality by the state, in August 2018 Ugandans called on the United States to intervene by withdrawing their material, diplomatic and moral support from President Museveni. Uganda’s constitution like Venezuela’s provides for the removal of the president on various grounds of incapacity. The United States did not invoke the article against Museveni as they have done against Maduro.

The IMF as an organization ensured its own profitability by locking borrowing countries into unsustainable debt.

Washington did the opposite, effectively endorsing the NRM regime by placing the responsibility for the crisis on the opposition, and pressuring on its leadership to reach an agreement with what is ranked as East Africa’s second most corrupt government. They have been assisted in creating a façade of legitimacy for Museveni by organisations such as Transparency International whose global leader handed him an award for his ‘fight against corruption’ in 2018 – in the same week that he was being cited in a New York court for having taken a $500,000 bribe.

This unstinting support is useful in maintaining the economic status quo. Ironically, it is Museveni’s rash behaviour that is tipping the balance in favour of regime change. The United States has turned to Kenya for some of its security needs, transferring a lucrative military base from Entebbe to Kenya.

Washington has been assisted in creating a façade of legitimacy for Museveni by organisations such as Transparency International whose global leader handed him an award for his ‘fight against corruption’ in 2018 – in the same week that he was being cited in a New York court for having taken a $500,000 bribe.

In the first phase of the state’s brutality against its citizens, the regime allows the drama to be broadcast. This has the important function of instilling fear in the population. It is a signal to the world of the regime’s impunity. Later on, rumours circulate of house-to-house invasions by the armed forces in which young people are dragged out of their homes and beaten, ostensibly for supporting the uprisings.

Leaders of both countries have resorted to unconstitutional means to acquire and maintain power. There was the bloodless coup in Zimbabwe during which the uncooperative and China-embracing Robert Mugabe was ousted. President Museveni simply altered the constitution to allow him first to exceed the two-term limit to the presidency and later, the age-limit. Members of parliament were paid to support both constitutional amendments.

In the first phase of the state’s brutality against its citizens, the regime allows the drama to be broadcast. This has the important function of instilling fear… It is a signal to the world of the regime’s impunity.

This brings us to the reasons the United States, backed by the EU, is intervening in Venezuela – why it can justify its intervention of breaches of democratic principles in Venezuela but continue to support Museveni whose method of governance is similar. Officially it is to end President Maduro’s undeniably repressive rule and to prevent him from (further) embezzling and squandering Venezuela’s resources. There is little point in arguing a defense of President Maduro. However, the fact remains that his removal can only be sanctioned by a ruling of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice that the required constitutional ground/s have been met. There was no such ruling before Guaidò declared himself president. So much for the rule of law.

The answer is that Museveni’s continued domination of Uganda until recently met the economic objectives (often cast as security prerogatives) of the United States and Europe, the IMF and the World Bank. However, he is now struggling to remain relevant in global financial circles. The groundswell of opposition to NRM rule renders the enabling environment for extraction and extortion so risky as to be a bad investment. Should the opposition succeed in ousting Museveni and his cabal, there would be no guarantee the IMF’s regime would survive the transition.

In Venezuela’s case, Guaidò is already committed to the IMF and Western goals. His economic advisor, Ricardo Hausmann has been a political exile in the United States for years and has been in talks with the IMF. In January 2019 he made some of his proposals known. Although he has warned that an immediate resumption of debt servicing would not be possible, Hausmann does not call for a debt audit to determine whether lenders were duly diligent in lending to past regimes that he opposed on the basis of their alleged corruption, or whether the proceeds of the loans were injected in to the economy.

In Venezuela’s case, Guaidò is already committed to the IMF and Western goals. His economic advisor, Ricardo Hausmann…has been in talks with the IMF.

“For Hausmann, the key to any turnaround is a swift and massive injection of cash from the International Monetary Fund – to the tune of $60 billion or more.”

“Venezuela is the most over-indebted [sic] countr[ies] in the galaxy,” Hausmann said. “First, second and third priorities have to be the recovery of the country. There’s a humanitarian disaster. There are millions of Venezuelans flooding into other countries. If you want to fix the problem, you can’t take money out of the system to pay yourself back. It will take years to start servicing debt.” (Ben Bartenstein, Bloomberg January 30, 2019)

He does not say that illegal, unsustainable, illegitimate or odious debt should not be paid but merely proposes rolling payments over to a later date. If Venezuela agrees, she will become the new darling of the West.

In return Guaidò has received support unprecedented for a foreign opposition leader. On 24th January, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo and the Treasury Department announced sanctions against any persons that continue to do business in Venezuela’s oil industry; on January 25th John Bolton, President Trump’s National Security Advisor announced US intention to shift oil production in Venezuela to American companies. Ambassador John Bolton tweeted, “The United States will not let Maduro and his cronies continue to loot the assets of the Venezuelan people.” And finally, the rule of law in Venezuela was further flouted on 29 January when the United States sequestered Venezuelan bank accounts held there or insured by them, and put them at Guaidò’s disposal.

On his part, President Mnangagwa signed up weeks after ousting Mugabe. He will enjoy continued support as long as he too remains committed to repaying Zimbabwe’s unsustainable debt. His problem is he is simply unable to implement structural adjustment austerity and obtain a new package of concessional loans. The reason being that although Zimbabwe’s outstanding dues to the IMF were paid in 2016, there are unpaid arrears to the World Bank, the African Development Bank and other international financial institutions and development partners. The rules require that these be paid before any further lending can be considered. As their spokesperson pointed out, the IMF “stands ready to help the authorities design a reform package that can help facilitate the clearance of external payment arrears to international development banks and bilateral official creditors and that then would open the way for fresh financing from the internal community including potentially the IMF. But, again, just to stress as we said before, potential financial support from the Fund is conditional on the clearance of those arrears to the World Bank, the AFDB and financing assurances from bilateral official creditors (emphasis mine).”

On his part, President Mnangagwa signed up weeks after ousting Mugabe. He will enjoy continued support as long as he too remains committed to repaying Zimbabwe’s unsustainable debt.

Clearance of those arrears which amount to just over US$5 billion would mean austerity even beyond the conditions Zimbabweans’ experiences today. This outcome is not acceptable either to opposition politicians or the general population. In 2017 when the government tried to arrange financing to clear the arrears, opposition politician Tendai Biti stated: “That will not help much or anything at all in reality. The biggest challenges facing Zimbabwe cannot and will not be addressed by paying off arrears on which we defaulted almost 20 years ago; what really needs to be addressed are structural economic issues, de-industrialisation and unemployment. That money could be better used to fund industry revival to create jobs and boost production, as well as increase exports and improve liquidity.”

Although Uganda has a track record of cooperation with Western financial institutions, it has reached a tipping point. The auditor-general points out that…in 2020, total debt repayment will require 65 percent of all revenues collected.

Similarly, although Uganda has a track record of cooperation with Western financial institutions, it has reached a tipping point. The auditor-general points out that when the principle for some loans becomes repayable in 2020, total debt repayment will require 65 percent of all revenues collected. Mass demonstrations against austerity are likely to escalate. By December 2018 the IMF had made it clear that no new concessional loans were forthcoming until certain steps are taken to rein in overspending, restore fiscal discipline and control corruption. SAP II requires the suspension of infrastructure projects financed by non- or partially concessional loans (mainly from China). Although Kenya agreed to this condition to its own SAP II package in 2018, Uganda still hopes to find alternative funding for the projects. It is unlikely to be found because the IMF works in tandem with bi-lateral lenders – acting as a debt collector for them, even in cases such as Mozambique where funds were borrowed illegally (without parliamentary approval) and subsequently stolen.

If support is withdrawn from either Museveni or Mnangagwa it will not be as punishment for their human rights abuses. It will be because their development partners calculate that their own objectives would be better achieved through alternative proxies.

If support is withdrawn from either Museveni or Mnangagwa it will not be as punishment for their abuses of human rights and democratic principles and public demand that they depart. It will be because their development partners calculate that their own objectives would be better achieved through alternative proxies. The United States and her acolytes will back any candidate that will agree to their terms. Self-proclaimed president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidò is a clear example of that.

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.