Forging ahead after the Kony war: A mixed report card

President Museveni commissions the Olwiyo-Gulu-Kitgum road in February. PHOTO BY Cissy Makumbi

What you need to know:

  • From infrastructural development, to education, better living conditions, dotted with youth unemployment, the last part of our series looks at how the road to recovery for the war-torn northern Uganda still remains one to tread carefully lest all is lost.

Gulu Town is bustling with activity. Pedestrians compete for space on the dusty roads with cyclists and motorists, sports betting blossoms and buildings are rising. A modern market has been launched and shopping malls have opened. Trucks loaded with merchandise release fumes into the space as they zoom to South Sudan, although the recent outbreak of fighting in the new country has slowed down business on this front.

In February last year, President Museveni commissioned the Olwiyo-Gulu-Kitgum and Misingo road, covering a total of 229 kilometers. Five months later, the President commissioned the Shs89 billion Gulu-Atiak-Nimule road that connects to South Sudan. Several other roads have been worked on and roadworks are ongoing in many areas. Private construction is booming too.

Infrastructural development of this nature is what was envisaged when the two-decade war in northern Uganda ended, in order to bridge the gap between the north and other areas, especially central and western Uganda. The prolonged war had only added to the earlier exclusion which the north had suffered during colonialism.

It was, therefore, going to take much more than what has happened in northern Uganda to erase the legacy of war and build a truly prosperous region with a proud people, according to the retired Kitgum Bishop Baker Ochola.

“Many people think that because there is absence of the gun, then there is peace (in northern Uganda),” says Bishop Ochola. “This is not true. What we have is only relative peace in Acholi and the entire northern Uganda. Many people are still languishing in abject poverty while several people are still traumatised.”

Mr Ronald Reagan Okumu, the Aswa County MP and Chair of Acholi Parliamentary Group, largely concurs.

Mr Okumu says: “The guns may have gone silent but the war is not over because war is a factor of many factors. There are a lot of things that can ignite it: poverty, lack of reconciliation, underdevelopment, and unemployment. You have a whole wasted generation of people born in captivity.”

Many of the people of the “wasted generation” Mr Okumu refers to spend a lot of potential working hours walking the roads of Gulu and other towns of northern Uganda, although the trend of unemployment is similar with most parts of the country. There have been suggestions, however, that northern Uganda leads in terms of petty crime, although there are no reliable figures to back this claim.

Mr Okumu says there are “software” aspects that have been neglected, which in his view are key to engendering genuine peace and stability, which he calls “the bedrock” of development. Here he is talking about “national reconciliation where both parties, especially the State, acknowledges its failures and the crimes committed by its operatives during the war.”

Mr Okumu says developments like roads “have nothing to do with the local people affected by the war but are a link to neighbouring countries like South Sudan for ease of trade with the government in Kampala.”

Recovery operation
Mr Okumu, also the vice president of the Forum for Democratic Change for northern Uganda, does not say how, however, the government would uplift the living standards of the people of northern Uganda without looking to stimulate the economy.

The government and donors have launched a number of projects to lift the economy and social wellbeing of the war-ravaged area, including the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund (NUSAF) and the Peace, Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP).

In his 2016 re-election manifesto, President Museveni made a number of promises to the people of northern Uganda, including provision of ox-ploughs to support the commercialisation of agriculture, compensating those who lost cattle, and construction of multi-purpose water reservoirs, among others.

The people who had been herded into camps eventually returned to their villages, thanks to the largely donor-sponsored programmes, to continue the search for a better livelihood. But the projects have been criticised as insufficient and largely serving to shield the sitting government from making direct support to the region.

“PRDP and any other such development projects were supposed to be top-up but the north has remained exclusively on PRDP, the other development projects have been diverted elsewhere,” Mr Okumu says.

Ms Francesca Amony, the LC5 councillor for Pece Division, Gulu District, says government has to streamline how people benefit from government programmes, bearing in mind the turbulent history of the region.
“The youth livelihood funds are lying idle in the banks because the intended beneficiaries cannot access the cash due to the many strings attached to it,” she says.

Bishop Ochola says whereas PRDP “was a good programme in the beginning”, its implementation became problematic.
“It (PRDP) went to even areas that never experienced the war, including areas on the border with Kenya, leaving the intended beneficiaries with nothing to benefit,” Bishop Ochola says. “We still have war returnees, widows, and child-headed families. And those who were mutilated and are living with splinters, yet there is no direct support rendered to them.”

He stresses the obvious point that northern Uganda still needs more health centres, school and also water in order to improve the people standard of living.

Handout vs Hand up
Ten years after the war, former Leader of the Opposition in Parliament Prof. Morris Ogenga Latigo says the culture continues to pervade the region. “Government needs to put people back to work. Young people, especially spend most of the time drinking and playing cards. We need to remove the people from a camp mentality where you sit and wait for provisions to a life where you stand on your own,” he says.

The Agago North County legislator says there is need to help the people of the region rebuild social structures that existed before the war so that they can catch up with the rest of the country.

The former Mayoral Aspirant-Gulu municipality, Mr Martin Aliker, concurs with Prof Latigo. He says the government has to move beyond infrastructural development and focus on what he calls the software component of the people in the region.

“Unless the government prioritises the software component of the long-term impacts of conflict like its human development index; northern Uganda will remain marginalised and will remain susceptible to degenerating into war,” he said.

In their 2016-2021 manifesto, the NRM government lists the provision of “psycho-social support and other related services to girls and women in post-conflict situations with special attention being given to child-headed households through the PRDP.”

To Ms Amony, the government’s promise is long overdue. “The lack of Psycho-social support has remained a setback as far as development is concerned,” she says. For example, Ms Amony says, there is absence of rehabilitation centres for those affected by the war.

Prof Latigo says the absence of such facilities is “a deep-seated” problem that has not been addressed by the politicians. “Until we remove politics from the rehabilitation of the north,” Prof Latigo says, “The recovery process will not deliver as it should.”

The memory of the conflict is waning in the minds of many observers but the consequences for those who experienced war firsthand remain real. Ten years after the failed agreement, much still has to be done.

Regarding how well the reconstruction of northern Uganda has gone over the past 10 years, the verdict depends on who you ask. Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, who led the government team that negotiated with the Kony rebels starting in 2006, says the government “has done very well”.

Going into the third phase of the PRDP programme, Dr Rugunda says the government is looking to “ensure that Northern Uganda rapidly catches up with other parts on Uganda in terms of development so that Uganda can develop as one entity with similar developmental targets.”

He acknowledges, however, that northern Uganda still has “significantly poorer indices in terms of health, education (and) infrastructure.”
That is a good starting point, at least. And, while at it, it is fair to say the report card on the reconstruction of northern Uganda after the Kony war has been mixed.

Peace and recovery development programme

The government of Uganda started the Peace, Recovery and Development Programme for Northern Uganda (PRDP) in 2007 as a framework through which development support would be channelled to northern Uganda. In December 2009, the British government approved support for the PRDP through the UK Department for International Development (DFID) under the Post-Conflict Development Programme (PCDP) in northern Uganda.

At the same time, the DFID also established a partnership with International Alert, the Refugee Law Project and Saferworld to support the formation of the Advisory Consortium on Conflict Sensitivity (ACCS). The overall aim was to assist the DFID and its partners to strengthen the potential of the PRDP and the recovery process to address the causes of conflict and contribute to sustainable peace and stability.

In fulfilment of its mandate, Alert developed peace and conflict indicators (PCIs) to measure the peace dividends accruing to the implementation of the PRDP and the PCDP. A research was thereafter commissioned to monitor the extent to which interventions under the PRDP, particularly those funded by the DFID, succeed or fail in achieving peacebuilding aims in northern Uganda.

Over the last two decades, GoU, with support from several development and humanitarian partners, has implemented several programs and sector-based projects aimed at improving the population’s welfare. \The PRDP was prepared on the basis of lessons learnt from implementation of a plethora of programmes in the North by various actors to address a number of key issues:

• Support ongoing political dialogue and existing commitments.
• Conflict, growth and prosperity: an extraordinary effort to reverse decline in welfare and growth by achieving peace.
• Organising framework: adapted to the conflict contexts in the North which will ensure better coordination, supervision and monitoring of ongoing interventions.
• Political, Security and Development Links: by adopting a conflict framework it is expected that socio-economic investments will be better linked to changes in security approaches;
•Mobilising of resources to address gaps: analysis of current international and national interventions suggests that there are gaps in response to the conflict.

Stephen Kafeero, John Okot, Julius Ocungi & Cissy Makumbi