Uganda today is like Netflix’s 2023 ‘Chimp Empire’

Uganda Wildlife Authorities officials stole Sh60 billion from gorilla permits, Daily Monitor told us on Monday. It said at least four officials have been arrested, and another 16 senior, along with their accomplices at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and Mgahinga home of the mountain gorillas, suspended.

The Sh60 billion heist invokes the incredible story of the resource and power grab among gorillas’ and our cousins, the chimpanzees, in Ngogo forest not too far from Bwindi, told in the Netflix series “Chimp Empire”.

Released earlier in the year, “Chimp Empire” is the uncomfortably human-like real story of betrayal, scheming, the violent struggle for power and resources, and defeat. For days it was the most-watched series on Netflix, and was named by critics among the all-time best 35 shows on the streaming platform ever.

READ: How UWA officials siphoned billions from gorilla permits

Wonderfully narrated by African-American actor Mahershala Ali, the series tracked the lives of the Ngogo chimpanzees, the largest group of chimpanzees ever known. It filmed their complex and messy social dynamics, the games between males and females, parents and children, and palace politics as rivals circled the throne. It also delved into the deadly struggles by the primates over territory and, ultimately, food.

Filmed over a year, the story opens with the Central chimpanzees (the Centrallers), the largest and most dominant in the forest. They hold most of the Ngogo forest, and the territory that has the most food. In part two we encounter the Westerners, their neighbours. A much smaller group, they get to eat full meals mostly when they take a risk and sneak into the Centrallers territory.

We all sense at that point that a decisive battle over territory will be the dramatic climax of the series. Big and well-fed, the Centrallers are not well led. Their leader is ailing and aging. There is intrigue and unfair social ostracism of some chimpanzees. There are camps and chimpanzees are hedging their bets over what a future regime might look like.

Much fewer, the Westerners are extremely disciplined, and led into battle by a tight ruthless high command. In a final battle, they hand the bigger Centrallers a deadly defeat, seize the food-rich parts of the forest, and expand the territory under their dominion. The Centrallers are dejected in defeat, licking their wounds, facing an uncertain future.

In many ways, it is the story of Uganda. President Yoweri Museveni, his band of National Resistance Army rebels, and its political arm the National Resistance Movement (NRM), were once the resurgent Westerners. Its vitality sapped by corruption (the thieving UWA officials are just children who watched their parents steal while they were strapped to their backs), violent rule, and the weakness of aged political leadership, it is now like the Centrallers.

When the history is written, it will likely say war, as in the Ngogo forest, is from where NRM’s fall came. The deadly wars in northeast and northern Uganda cost too many lives, and exacted a high price in social and cultural destruction.

But they were also a positive force inside the NRM and NRA (and later UPDF). They avoided the colossal mistakes and abuses that could turn the country against them, and drive the people into the hands of the rebels, as had happened in the Luwero Triangle while they fought as rebels against the Milton Obote government, and later the Military Council that in 1985 toppled the UPC leader.

With the Sudan government in Khartoum supporting the Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony, an external enemy loomed large, a godsend for the NRM government to rally the country around it on a fervent patriotic platform.

In Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo), especially after the alliance that defeated the Mobutu Sese Seko regime and installed Joseph Kabila as president in 1997 fell apart in 1998, Uganda faced serious adversaries. First, its former bosom ally Rwanda which handed it a bloody nose when they fought, and battle-hardened Angola and Zimbabwean armies. In 2007 when the UPDF went into Mogadishu to kickstart the African Union mission, it was its most daring military campaign. It basically crash-landed military planes in hostile Mogadishu, jumped out and fought to establish itself.

In Al-Shabaab, they met the most formidable insurgent group they had ever fought. Then a bruised Shabaab retreated, and combined with the political lethargy back home, the Somali mission slowly fell into a funk.  The NRM and UPDF have always needed a worthy adversary to better themselves.

In their latest incursion in eastern DRC, they didn’t fire a shot as they were entering. They were welcomed by beaten-down peasants waving leaves. Most of the eliminations of the ADF rebels have happened through bombings, not the kind of man-a-mano battles of years gone by in Mogadishu. So now, it sits diminished, as a once victorious conqueror in the middle of Ngogo forest. The Shs60 billion stolen here, Shs100 billion stolen there, is the soundtrack of  its season of anomy. 

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. 

Twitter: @cobbo3