UGANDA

THEMATIC ISSUES
lack of peace cannot be explained solely by the presence of violence and visible conflict.
Unanimously, they pointed at the biting and increasing presence of poverty in society
as a major impediment. As one participant in Tororo explained; “A man with an empty
stomach cannot have peace.”
In Arua, a participant said;
“People go to war because it’s the last attempt of survival. If
70% of the people here are poor and do not have any source
of livelihood, how can you talk about peace?”
While not using academic terminology, they were alluding to what some academics
describe as ‘structural violence’. 69 Despite a number of initiatives to tackle poverty under
the NRM Government that participants commented on – such as NURP I & II, NUSAF
I & II, PRDP, UPE and youth loan schemes - they argued that poverty is unmistakably
increasing in Uganda. They pointed to the Walk to Work protests and teachers’ strikes
that were ongoing during the time of the field research as indications of this.
Poverty was not considered an individual misfortune, but an unnecessary societal
injustice. Participants insisted that it is within the Government’s power to reduce such
needless suffering. People used a variety of terms to explain and illustrate the concept of
poverty, such as ‘delayed development’, ‘economic marginalisation’, ‘unequal distribution
of the national cake’, ‘unfulfilled promises [by the Government]’, and ‘corruption’, all of
which imply state responsibility. In northern Uganda in particular, participants claimed
that poverty in their region is the outcome of a deliberate Government policy to “subdue
the people of Acholi [and] rule the people well by making them poor.”
Poverty was considered both a cause and an impact of conflict. As such, it was regarded
as a fundamental driving force in Uganda’s vicious cycles of conflict. It was considered
a cause in that poverty as perceived marginalisation and deliberate disempowerment
has prompted people to take up weapons in anger and in an attempt to access wealth
through securing power.
It was also considered an impact in that protracted conflicts around the country have
caused delayed development in the regions where they were felt most heavily. In Soroti,
for example, participants traced the gradual descent of the Teso sub-region into poverty
from the Bush war, through brutal NRA counter-insurgency, through Karimojong cattle
raids, to the LRA attacks. In Lira, participants commented on how the direct effects
of conflict can also perpetuate poverty indirectly and less visibly, be it through the
breakdown of the education system, the prevalence of mental illness or the fact that
many families are headed by children. These effects prevent people from meaningfully
engaging in the economy.
Similarly, poverty can emerge as an immediate consequence of conflicts of a shorter
nature, such as land disputes and resulting land dispossession. At the same time,
69 See Galtung, J. (1960) Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research, 6 (3) pp. 167-
191
57