Museveni is fighting crime and poverty with pie in the sky

I did not expect to write about crime and criminality in Uganda again this week, so soon after I had recounted an incident last week in which people in my village near Kampala, the capital city, had decided to take the law into their hands and fight back against the thieves who have been terrorising them.

Both the police and local leaders, to whom the law assigns the responsibility to ensure security, had proved incapable or unwilling to do anything to protect them and their assets.

In jest, I once asked a senior resident how it was that the police who have a detachment fairly nearby, were not helping. I don’t know how truthful his answer was, but it left me in stitches.

The officer in-charge at the detachment, he said, “is one of the last people to leave” the local drinking joint every evening. “Don’t ask me”, he added, “what state he is in by the time he is leaving.”

I understood what he meant. He may or may not have been exaggerating, but he had made his point: Trusting or depending on whoever is charged with ensuring that local residents and their property were safe, was pointless.

A few days after I had written about the mob violence in my village, in which locals killed a thief and burnt the car in which he and his accomplices had been travelling and into which they had tried to stuff the cows they had stolen that night, I chanced upon an old acquaintance in a popular cafe in Kampala.

“I have just been reading your article”, he told me. I responded with the usual smile I always put on in reaction to people telling me that they have been reading one or other article I have written. I then fixed him with a “So what do you think?” look.

This particular acquaintance is no ordinary Ugandan. He is one of the country’s “securocrats.” So he knows more than a thing or two about security matters.

For the first few minutes after we spotted each other, we spoke while standing. We then both sat down. It was clear he wanted to say a few things about what I had written.

No, he was not disputing anything in the article. What he wanted to say to me was that my village was not at all unique. To illustrate the point, he told me of a fellow security officer known to him personally, who had lost several cows to cattle thieves only a few days before.

Well, I already knew that my village not exceptional. A friend had told me only that morning that he had been attacked the night before as he drove through Naguru, one of Kampala’s upmarket neighbourhoods.

He had heard something hit his car and stopped to check for any damage. Four men on two motorcycles appeared from literally nowhere, roughed him up and fled with his phone. That happened only a few hundred metres from the headquarters of the Uganda Police.

Before I could ask the securocrat why the government and its security agencies were “doing nothing” about the situation, he volunteered an explanation for the wave of criminality sweeping across the country: “It is because of poverty; there is too much poverty in this country.”

What he was saying, at least as far as I could tell, was that the solution to the problem did not lie with the security agencies alone. Alongside combating crime, which was their job, someone else had to deal with the poverty challenge, and that is not their job. Soon he was gone.

My mind turned to something I had heard Ugandans discussing that same week: President Yoweri Museveni’s practice of dishing out money to this and that group as he travels up and down the country, usually on his perennial one-man anti-poverty campaigns.

That week, he had given out hundreds of millions of shillings to all manner of groups upcountry and in Kampala, some of which are rumoured to have been established only a few days before he went visiting.

Apparently, his advisors and assistants inform people wherever he is slated to go, to “form groups” if they want to be given money, for he prefers to give cash not to individuals, but to groups.

Members can then borrow the money and return with interest so that other members can also borrow and invest in “income-generating projects.” The idea is borrowed from an old approach pioneered by the so-called development NGOs that have been fighting poverty in Uganda and elsewhere in the developing world for the best part of 40 years now.

The approach can indeed work but only in instances where groups that receive such money have not been established as special-purpose vehicles whose members are interested only in getting hold of the cash and sharing it out, after which each one goes their own way, to spend their cut whichever way they please.

Now given that many of the groups President Museveni is gifting with cash are transient and often established by crafty and fairly well-to-do individuals, any notion that it will contribute towards poverty reduction and stem the tide of criminality is pure pie in the sky.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]