By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
Uganda is a country where Agriculture, once a socioeconomic, socio-ecologic, bioecological and cultural human energy system, has been converted into a political weapon to disempower and impoverish the settled communities of mainly Bantu and Luo ethnicities in order to render them helpless and hapless enough to be ruled by the armed pastoral-nomadic ethnic group.
If we are serious analysts, we may say that all the programmes that have targeted the settled communities and divided them were destined to fail. They were never really intended to pull them out of poverty but plunge them further into poverty, which has indeed happened
Which country in the world has given people .obey to develop like is the case in Uganda?
Another way of looking at is that the programmes were meant to generate communities overdependent on the centre, dominated by people, from the pastoral-nomadic human energy system, for handouts that can never enrich them but unfairly make a few select individuals deceptively rich only to collapse back into poverty because they do not have the knowledge, experience and wisdom to remain rich.
As part of the project to make the poor and needy of the settled communities poorer and overdependent on the centre and more governable, their land is being grabbed from them by people of power and connected to power at the centre.
It is pertinent to ask: which communities will be enriched under the new Parish Growth Model simultaneously with disempowering, impoverishing and making them overdependent on the centre.
The developing collective mindset in the settled communities is that the centre gives and then they have. When what is given is finished then they have to wait to be given. Hard work, which used to characterize and define the settled communities has been eroded by the men of power at the centre.
The collective thinking among these communities is that the Centre has and they don’t have, yet in the past their hard work made them have and they gave part of the excess to the centre
The people of the settled communities must reject the situation they have been forced into. If the Centre introduced “Resistance” to them they must use it as a tool to rediscover themselves. They must agree that things like Operation Wealth Creation will never make them wealthy but will continue to make their creators stinking rich. This could explain why they have converted agriculture into an armed industry.
For God and My Country
The Writer is a Ugandan Scientist and Environmentalist
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