Peace and progress in Uganda through regional autonomy
By Santonino K. Banya
October 16, 2006 — Attempts will be made to avoid any finger pointing in this argument, and it is hoped that readers will receive this opinion objectively and with open-minds. Regardless of past colonial hangovers, that left some sections of our country with an illusionary perception of being than others, the bottom-line remains: all Ugandans are the same. We are all exposed to the same level of poverty and backwardness that has chained us to thinking tribally, and regionally at best. Additionally, by virtue of our skin, whatever shades they are, we are all black Africans; a collective race of people that matters very little to the more “civilized” and progressive Northern World powers, which still remain our benefactors and masters through the manipulation of our political leaders and to which many of us would want to ascribe our “holier than though” status.
It, therefore, borders on total lack of sensibility that many of our people have failed to view one another as a people with a common destiny for ages. Uganda’s constant “we” against “them” mentality is akin to a baboon in the rear laughing at the rear end of its friend in the front. It is precisely this attitude that has denied our country peace since 1967, when the government was forced to overthrow itself.
Uganda’s present system of government has, more than all its predecessors, failed very miserably in establishing a feeling of common ‘loyalties’ and values among all Ugandans. At no time in the history of Uganda, has the “we” against “them” feeling been more intense. Witness to this is such statement from top people in government: “We don’t want the Banyanyas,” “We massacred them!” and so forth, said with pride and gleefully, in reference to the hatred and destruction of human lives of a people who are, by every right, citizens of Uganda. All this, because of the proverbial “us” versus “them” mentality, and yet we are supposed to a member of one independent African State.
In the absence of trust, mutual consideration, and respect for one another, there is no dynamic process of mutual communication, attention, perception of needs, and responsiveness in the process of national development. Instead, Ugandans find themselves bogged down in the self-destructive practice of blind hatred. It takes total disgust at oneself to hate another with the kind of intensity that prevails among many Ugandans, especially, among our political and military leaders. The utterances: “A good Muganda is a dead one,” and “Northerners are biological substances,” still ring loud and clear in our minds. Much as our civil servants try to get along, sharing “Ajono” tubes and enjoying bottles of “Mwenge Bwoogere” without a quarrel, for our politicians and the military, nothing ever changes. As a result, the military continues to massacre Ugandans with impunity on the orders of their politician masters.
Uganda’s pathetic state-of-affairs have been perpetuated by Ugandan leaders in cohort with their tribally controlled, brutal and semi-illiterate military field commanders. The end-results: untold destruction of Uganda’s human resources, suffering, abject poverty, diseases, death by the hundreds of thousands, and coerced acceptance of imaginary peace. By the same token, the present rulers have, for the last nineteen years, subjected civilians to psychological terrorism by preaching against both existence and nonexistence “enemies” from target groups within the country who might ‘spoil’ the mythical peace they have brought to the country. And while the ignorant masses listen to these blatant lies, the same leaders have engaged in the looting of the national treasury and stashing away millions of dollars of foreign aids money into their bank accounts overseas.
Given the above situation, it is clear that Uganda cannot and shall not have genuine peace and develop as a single entity. Ugandans’ notion of peace is archaic. To the majority of our illiterate village masses, who are the prey of our crooked politicians, peace is simply the absence of organized violent conflict. And even if thousands of their fellow citizens are driven away from their homes in one part of the country and are being killed by the hundreds every week, there is still peace in the country as long as those dying are not within and/or from their areas. What these illiterate masses don’t understand is that this kind of peace is temporary.
A progressive nation like Uganda, as claimed by the present leaders, requires real peace. Real peace requires total absence of preparation for war. But when a country is preoccupied with modernizing its military, creating new battalions, and spending millions of borrowed dollars on the purchase of military hardware and junk helicopters for fighting its own citizens and neighbors, there can be no peace in such a country. It is only a uniquely unthinking mass of people that can be persuaded to believe in such “peace” in the country.
Mere repression of disagreement and conflict by brute force only produces what Boulding calls, “unstable peace.” Unstable peace is enforced by violent retribution. This kind of deterrence has total disregard for the dignity and the humanity of those being suppressed, as can be seen in the forceful confinement of nearly two million Ugandans into unsanitary conditions in the “blessed” camps. Unstable peace is devoid of mutual relationship and respect for the victims of oppression. Ugandans have been made victims of this kind treatment year in and year out; there is no sign of this practice ever coming to an end from the central government.
Most unfortunately, the temporarily privileged group exercising and imposing this false peace would much rather coerce and/or bribe other unconscionable Ugandans into accepting the status quo instead of creating viable conditions for the attainment of real peace. With such repression and false peace over the last twenty years, Ugandans have been deprived of their political liberties; they have been rendered poor; they have been forced to die and/or live in wretchedness in their hundreds of thousands for the benefit of those in power and their families.
Presently, Uganda’s leadership oversees a state of structural violence. Structural violence is a non-war situation that is maintained by threats, intimidation, and coercion. This is assuming that we accept the government’s argument that there is no war in the North, although it continues to prohibit the civilians in the same region from going back to their villages. Parliamentarians, who are supposedly the people’s representatives, are paid millions of Shillings to coerce them into dancing to the drum-beat whose tunes oppress the very masses that elected them, in order to maintain the state of structural violence in Uganda. Equally worrying, is the knowledge that Uganda does not qualify as a security community. According to Karl Deutsch, a security community is defined as a group of people who have become integrated and attained a sense of community among its population. Any honest Ugandan will attest, the country has never achieved this status.
Our political leaders, including the most “patriotic,” have never come close to establishing relationships that were equal and symmetrical. Instead of harmonizing Ugandans, they have antagonized the various regions and their tribal groupings. Uganda’s leaders have failed to compromise their individual differences for the sake of the ordinary citizens and the country. They have promoted conflicts and embraced the use of brutal force to resolve conflicts, while subjecting Ugandans to injustices for their ego trips. For a country that boast of being civilized and progressive, the state of events and the conditions under which sections of our citizens are now being forced to live in camps, speak contrary to our claims of being a civilized people.
With the established lack of mutual respect for one another’s traditions and regions, the only way forward for a truly peaceful and prosperous Uganda is regional autonomy. Regional autonomy will not only curtail the structural violence that has become deeply ingrained into the central government system, it will demystify the myth of “economic backwardness” to which certain regions had been colonially condemned, and to which some of our colonial mentality still subscribe.
The beginning of actual economic independence between the regions will be a key factor in each region’s material stake in the prosperity and the stability of the other’s socio-economic and political system. At the moment, just as it has always been, despite certain regions serving as food baskets to the country, these regions have been denigrated and their contribution to the progress and the health of the country taken for granted and/or completely ignored. This is because anybody from the so-called “better” regions, can walk into those so-called “poor” regions, and grab the resources as if they were produced in their back yard without giving any respect to the dignity of the peasants who toil to produce the products.
Under regional autonomy, economic ties between the regions will be established and social communication increased. Simple logic dictates that in order to meet the needs of each other, there has to be a continuous flow of information between the parties involved. With each region depending on other regions for various needs, a new social fabric will be built from such bonds, as trade, cultural and educational exchanges would be conducted under a new light of regional and/or state respect. The fallacy propagated by many politicians and some corrupt business entrepreneurs that certain regions will drain resources from other “progressive” regions can only be laid to rest if and when the various regions of Uganda become autonomous. There should be no more pretenses of nationalism and/or patriotism under the present structure of governance.
Past evidences have consistently shown that some tribal leaders have hidden behind nationalism and/or patriotism only to take power for advancing the interest of their clans and tribes at the expense of nation. If the government now in power has the courage and the interest of Uganda at heart, it will steer Uganda towards regional autonomy and establish a new era of a truly progressive Uganda. Anything less is the perpetuation of tribal hegemony and cowardice under the pretext of popularity and patriotism. The freeing of various regions of Uganda to controlling their own economic progress and to determining their own destiny within a united and peaceful Uganda is the only sensible thing that any responsible and progressive government would want for all Ugandans at this time.
* Santonino K. Banya, Ph.D., a science instructor in Indianapolis, USA. He can be reached at
[email protected]