Uganda should act with urgency on Rwanda issue

It is more than two weeks since Rwanda closed the Gatuna border point to merchandise from Uganda and blockaded its citizens from travelling to Uganda. Massive effort has been made to ensure that ordinary Rwandans don’t use shortcuts to enter Uganda, it has been reported.

Since the border blockade at the end of last month, Rwandan officials, including president Paul Kagame, have betrayed a willingness to talk the issue over, seeming to suggest that the authorities in Uganda are less inclined to working towards a solution.

There is very little to read out of Uganda’s response to Rwanda’s action of closing its border since no official statement has addressed the matter in depth. Also, very little information can be gleaned from what Uganda is doing to resolve the impasse.

The biggest effort we have seen yet is of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta travelling to Rwanda to meet president Kagame and then to Uganda to meet President Museveni. About a week after this happened, there are no tangible results that are available for the public to talk about.
The border point remains closed to merchandise from Uganda getting into Rwanda, and businessmen are licking their wounds.

Businesses and livelihoods that depend on trans-border interactions between Uganda and Rwanda – from hotels to buses and related service providers – are badly hit.

What is more worrying is that the ordinary people who are directly affected by the disagreement between the leaders of Uganda and Rwanda have no indication of when their ordeal will end more than two weeks since it started.

This is why we need to see movement from Kampala towards resolving the border impasse and generally improving relations between our brotherly countries. Whereas we don’t expect that the government will conduct its bilateral business with and about Rwanda in the public space, it is our considered view that the people of Uganda, especially those who are directly affected, deserve an explanation about what is going on, and assurance that the government is doing everything in its power to end it at the earliest opportunity.

It is 2019, and the two countries cannot go to war. It is not a possibility that is, or should be available to our government. What we expect our government to do is to work around any complexities that may exist and build on the already existing good relations between Rwandans and Ugandans to guarantee our prosperity as a region. This is what the ruling party and President Museveni have promised on many occasions.