Teso hunger: Government and people partly to blame

For TV cameras to show people in Katakwi District in Teso sub-region plucking leaves from a wild tree to boil and eat is a solemn commentary on the lack of planning in our country.
From “up there to down there” we seem to live for now. Nobody, it seems, cares anymore for tomorrow. When disaster strikes we blame some supernatural forces. The simplicity of our thinking mirrors or even amplifies the simplicity and wretchedness of the livelihoods of the majority of our people.
Right now we blame global warming for the fierce drought ravaging many parts of our country. Yet global warming is mainly a result of both natural phenomena and our own activities. In our country such activities include brick-making, poor waste management, uncontrolled tree cutting, overgrazing in the cattle corridor, unregulated charcoal trade and use, and bush burning.

We do these things seemingly without a care for our own generation and the next ones. But our government looks on with boredom and aloofness as we cut the very branches we sit on!
By the time we hear voices from government we know people are dying. According to the state minister for Disaster Preparedness, Mr Musa Ecweru, crop failure in Katakwi stands at nearly 80 per cent due to the prolonged drought in the area, putting nearly half of the 165,000 residents of the district at risk of dying from starvation.

However, last year there were good rains. There were good harvests. What happened to the food? Most of it was sold off fresh from the gardens. Here is where our people must take the blame for their own lack of planning for the future.
Back in the 1960s and the 1970s when we were children, Teso was a sub-region that took the matter of food security very seriously. Not a single homestead was without idulai (granaries) for storing dry foods. There would be edula (granary) for groundnuts and others for cowpeas, amukeke (sliced and dried potatoes), cassava, millet, sorghum, beans, etc. It was culturally unacceptable for a homestead to be without granaries.
Indeed, so central was the notion of food security in the minds of our people that if you bothered a man or woman from Teso, chances were you would be asked a simple question, matter-of-factly: Anyami eong orekon? (Do I eat in your home?) Relief food was associated with shame.

Cultural anthropologists define shame as a violation of cultural or social values. Our people have thrown away the culture of storing food, opting to exchange it for money that will be used today.
In the nearly three years since I returned to live permanently in a village in Kumi District, I have watched helplessly as young men cut down trees for brick-making and charcoal-burning; then they blow much of the money on booze and gambling in trading centres. I have watched helplessly as city middlemen pay peanuts for truckloads of fresh food. And I am yet to see any value-addition by government or investors in the Teso agricultural economy.

Government, by abolishing graduated tax in 2005 for vote-catching purposes, injected an element of laziness into the mix. President Museveni argued that the tax was a colonial relic. Yes, the colonialists saw the poll tax, hut tax and other taxes as beneficial in broadening the cash economy and aiding the development of Uganda.
Now we are being sold the fairy tale that we can get to middle income status by spending endless hours betting in trading centres or riding bicycles with jerrycans of water! Irrigation, my foot! Dr Okodan is a lecturer at Kampala International University.