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Tribes Vs War-lord In Uganda
Ugly truth; rebel Kony is a secret hero

Tribe Vs War-lord In Uganda

From The Monitor, Sept. 9, 1998

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

Will rebellion-plagued countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda eventually break up into tribal chiefdoms? Are the many African countries that are at war about to disintegrate, or "dissolve" to use the more cute word?

E. F. Kahuma in his letter "Tribal Chiefdoms On The Way?" (The Monitor, Sept. 5) thinks that given the chaos in the Great Lakes region, "...tribal chiefdoms are just on the horizon".

The best example we have in this region of such a disintegration into tribal (clan) chiefdoms is Somalia. The Somali-type break-up is however unlikely in Uganda because neither the clans, nor tribes here have the coherence or strength of the ones in Somalia.

Buganda, Uganda's great tribal kingdom, for example, is in utter disarray. To gauge this weakness, one has to look at Buganda, Tooro, and Ankole. Even though Buganda has formal organised state structures; a king, a "government", a parliament (Lukiiko), clans, it is still so disorganised and weak, it was simply knocked over in its campaign for federo, or more lately against the Land Act. Its leadership didn't have the credibility to rally the people partly because its ranks are riven by corruption and treachery.

In Ankole, Prince John Barigye's attempt to become Omugabe was steam-rolled by massive opposition from his own subjects-to-be, and he has been marginalised and is now struggling to find his daily bread as his various businesses have allegedly been squeezed by his enemies.

In Tooro, there is a shameful struggle for power and influence in the kingdom, as the child-king Oyo looks on rather bored by it all.

The lesson here is that even tribal chiefdoms need a leadership to consolidate them. In Uganda, they don't. Secondly, historically most tribal and clan leaders have been appointed by some kind of democratic process. But militarism and the political chaos of recent decades have also killed tribal democracy. In that sense we're are quite close to the Somalia situation.

Just like power is taken and kept by the gun in Uganda, the tribal rulers who will emerge if the country "disintegrated" will grab the leadership with the gun. This violent path is almost ensured because differences within tribes based on issues like religion (Catholics vs Protestants vs Muslims vs the rest) make any internal tribal consensus near-impossible to reach. So the chiefdoms would mostly be led by war-lords. And any such chiefdom would be weak, because the war-lord would be hated by the many people who would have been dispossessed or had their relatives killed in the war-lord's rise to power.

To survive, the new warlord-led chiefdoms would need to strike alliances. Defence alliances with the neighbouring war-lord for "security guarantees" like the ones Uganda says its troops are securing in eastern Congo; mutual pacts for free movement of weapons and food for the war-lord's army; and therefore some kind of access to markets to earn money to fund the military enterprise; and for the services of firms and people who can secure arms and related supplies since, unlike the old chiefdoms, the new ones cannot depend on bows and arrows but bazookas, grenades, mortars, tanks etc.

Here then is the point. That because the new tribal chiefdoms have to survive in much the same way a "modern" state does, we shall not have "tribal chiefdoms" as pessimists predict.

The troubled African states will therefore not disintegrate. They will most likely mutate instead. What is likely to change is less the substance, but more of the form.

What are we likely to see? It is not a happy prospect, I am afraid. I think groups like Joseph Kony's Lords Resistance Army which have fighters and a network of sorts are the ones that will gain. In this situation Kony would most likely dominate the north. The West Nile Bank Front II would rule over West Nile. The October Ninth Movement or National Salvation Front will take the East. Yoweri Museveni with a rump UPDF will take the south-west. The Allied Democratic Front would take the far west etc. Something would emerge in Buganda with people like Evaristo Nyanzi or Duncan Kafeero in charge.

To bring in weapons and goods from Mombassa, all the other war-lords would have to do a deal with Ninth October or the Salvation Front. To go for business in eastern Congo, you would to go through Museveni and ADF. And for the big one, the minerals, oil, and timber from a liberated southern Sudan, Kony and WNBF would collect the passage fees.

But soon it would become very chaotic for each regional war-lord to do a deal with the other. A coordinating council would have to be formed in the centre, with each war-lord and his representatives (ministers and MPs) sitting there to look after their interests.

The regional chiefdom which does well at the centre will be the one with smart and dedicated representatives. As the functions of coordinating become more complicated, the council's power will increase, and back home the calibre of war-lords and representatives will also have to be very high. People like Kony or that chap of the WNBF II will not be able to cope. They will be disgraced, and hopefully enlightened forces will rise to power in the regional chiefdoms.

The checks and balances in this power structure will be far more advanced than today, and the distribution of political and economic resources between the centre and the regions might also be far more progressive.

It might not happen this way of course. But then, who would have known just three years ago that today Uganda, one of Africa's "fastest growing economies" would be exporting NOT entrepreneurs, industrial goods, or even bread to Congo, but soldiers to a bleak fate in the jungles of that unwieldy central African nation?

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Ugly truth; rebel Kony is a secret hero

From The Monitor, October 16-18, 1996

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

They don't and won't because, though Kony has brought a lot of suspicion, prejudice, and death upon the Acholi he has, in a bizarre sort of way, also brought them something more important - RESPECT.

Let me explain. As I understand it, the Acholi are a people with a history of heroic military exploits. A proud people, they think it is dishonourable to be defeated on their homeland, as The Monitor's Editor-in-Chief Wafula Oguttu put it in an interview in the latest issue of the National Analyst.

The Acholi have played a prominent role in Ugandan politics which is disproportionate to both their numbers and level of education. This role has come from their strong position in the army in the past; first in Milton Obote's first government particularly in the period 1966-71; and then in Obote II between 1980 and July 1985.

Many people usually criticise northern leaders for not having developed their area. But they miss the bigger picture. The northerners used their access to the national cake by way of the army, not so much to build posh homes and so forth, but to educate their families and relatives.

The north contrasts sharply with places like Buganda where there was developed infrastructure and schools early, and therefore far more people had access to education. Thus minister A from Buganda is largely under obligation to educate mostly his children, his other relatives being generally prosperous enough to educate their own children. This means they more easily have the surplus to build themselves homes.

Northern politicians, on the other hand, have not only their families to uplift, but because of the historically backward conditions there, whole villages. The last and current generation of northerners therefore will never be rich, because they are not about to be free from their broad range of responsibilities to bring their people up. They are not about to have the surplus to "develop" their areas. It often passes unnoticed, taking into account the problems that the northerners (the Acholi in particular) have had and the colonially implanted disadvantages they still suffer, that no other Ugandan nationality has been able to educate as many of their own as have the Acholi.

The prominence of Acholi (and Langi) lecturers in universities and hospitals in Europe and North America, for example, is close to being at par with that of the Baganda.

I have written elsewhere before that when the "Northern" armies and governments were eventually defeated by Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army in January 1986, it was a triple crisis for the north in general, and the Acholi in particular.

First, they lost raw power. Second, with the loss of power, they lost access to the resources which they were investing in what was essentially an affirmative action project to "catch up" with the rest of Uganda. Third, a crisis of self worth set in since part of the Acholi identity was the view of themselves as great invincible warriors. Yet they had been defeated by what they saw as an army of lowly cattle keepers and matooke growers.

In other words, the Acholi had to accept that they were "nothing". The wars against the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (then still the NRA) by Angelo Okello, Uganda People's Defence Army (UPDA) and the witchcraft-driven Alice Lakwena were at their best an attempt by the rump northern establishment to bargain with Museveni to give them back a cut of the national cake they had just lost.

Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army came later, when all armed opposition to the NRM had been defeated, and the Acholi had endured many years of being denounced as backward, and marginalised by the government.

Thus, at the psychological level, the Kony war tapped into the need for the Acholi not so much to win back national power, but to restore pride and a sense of self worth in themselves.

The timing favoured them. The NRA was no longer its old self. Many of its star commanders had died or been disgraced. A large crop of them left with the Rwanda Patriotic Army to fight to return to their homeland. War weariness, intrigue, and in many cases downright corruption was now left to sap off the remaining vitality of the NRA. With the remaining top army commanders living in sinful luxury in gorgeous bungalows in Kampala, while some of the rank and file still toughed it out in grass huts and dressed in tattered uniform, the top brass lost the moral authority to inspire the troops. Beside, a government by the very fact that its bound by the constitution, often finds it impossible to adopt the extreme measures necessary to defeat some rebellions.

With the help of Sudan, Kony didn't require much imagination to give the UPDF a headache.

Of all the groups who tried to challenge the NRM, only the LRA has survived this long and inflicted significant damage on the army. Dozens of rebel groups, including renegade Maj. Herbert Itongwa's rag tag force were crushed.

Even purely political demands, for example by the Baganda hardline traditionalist for federo, and the political parties for Multi-partyism were defeated by NRM. Only Kony has so far not been overcome. There is then a sense in which Kony represents more than an attempt to get even with Museveni's government by some northern politicians. He is also drawing on the underlying frustration by the various groups that have lost out during Museveni's rule, and some of them must be getting private satisfaction from seeing the UPDF being humbled.

For this reason, I suspect that the support for Kony, even materially, could well extend beyond the north to various people and groups with a vested interest in bringing down Museveni.

It must be a source of some pride, even if it might be perverted, for many an Acholi that its one of them who has been the only one to nick Museveni's captainship, as Shakespeare's Enobarbus said of Julius Caesar.

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