The challenge of both democracy and environmental democracy, and for that matter, environmental justice in Uganda and the larger East Africa, is real. This is being confounded by the rising tendency everywhere to monetise and commodify everything conceivable, including water and human life. 

Consequently, complex environmental problems (including the wicked ones such as Climate Change, which cannot be solved by applying the orthodox simple solutions of disciplinary knowledge and practice) and issues are being created on a continuous basis. Indeed, the solutions proposes become the new problems in the environment.

Nearly always when they arise, we have no solutions for them. We just let nature take its own course. This explains the ever rising, proliferating environmental decay and collapse, followed by disasters due to floods, landslides, hurricanes, earthquakes, pollutions and wars such as the one that has raged between Russia and Ukraine, which now threatens to abuse environmental democracy and environmental justice well in the future, perhaps bringing a third world war in focus.

For Uganda, the greatest threat to environmental democracy, and by extension to environmental justice, will be the government’s commitment to proliferating the sterile culture of money and drawing everyone into the environmentally-empty money economy. Virtually all the programmes and projects government has come up with to achieve this end can only be implemented by exploiting natural resources such as water and land.

Renewability of the environment is not inbuilt in the programmes and projects. Those supervising or implementing them are environmentally illiterate. We have seen in our lifetime the political power that be undemocratically deciding to erase whole ecosystem and habitats to replace them with extensive plantations of oil palm and sugarcane grasses.

Many more lands in northern, eastern and southern Uganda were at the beginning of the new millennium planned for opening up to oil palm grass growing, falsely arguing that it is a tree.

Elsewhere, land is being opened up to foreign trees best adapted to the hot deserts of Australia and the cold hemispheres of the globe. The false argument is that they are preventing desertification and combating climate change. But the plantations of those trees are themselves biological deserts. They do not allow anything else to grow amongst them. The best wat to fight desertification and climate change is to use local, traditional plants and methods of conservation. 

Besides, the over-dependence on foreign loans, particularly from China puts democracy, environmental democracy and by extension, environmental justice at risk. High-handedness in government will be increasingly exacted on the people to cause them to pay taxes to raise the money needed to pay the loans. Or else, the Chinese will do what they have done in other countries, such as Zambia, which have failed to pay their loans.

The Chinese will extend their ecological footprint into Uganda by seizing the countries environmental assets or resources, which will compromise democracy, environmental democracy, and by extension, environmental justice further.

Already, government’s exaggerated preference for refugees and former refugees is putting natural environmental resources and the indigenes themselves to stress. The refugees and former refugees, armed with government’s soft-spot towards them and the dirty money they have unfairly appropriated, are penetrating the communities and the traditional lands of the poor indigenes, already impoverished by environmentally unconscious laws and policies. They are forcing them off the land, either by buying them off cheaply or are driving them away to nowhere.

Many of the indigenes unfairly displaced are encroaching on natural resources such as national parks, swamps and forests to make ends meet. The refugees and former refugees are establishing ranches and monocultures of crops such as rice and coffee, completely oblivious to time-tested conservation systems inherent in the seven or eight agroecological farming systems, which have produced food and sustained indigenous communities for centuries.

Unfortunately, the agroecological farming systems also contain underground reserves of natural resources – a big motivation for the proliferating land grabbing by people with origins located outside the country. The agroecological farming systems are being erased from the face of the Earth by these people from the nomadic-pastoral human energy system. The country is likely to become a desert and hotbed of violence, of the type we are attuned to in Somalia, in case the indigenes wake up to reclaim what was or is theirs.

Therefore, if Ugandans were liberated, it was from those of their own who misused their power and misruled them, to those who are busy grabbing their land and land-based resources to uncertain futures. This is only possible where democracy, environmental democracy and environmental justice have diminished or are continuing to diminish.

There can be no freedom, meaningful development, transformation and progress in the 21^st century if a locality, country, region or our globe, is faced with rising undemocratic practices and diminishing environmental democracy and environmental justice. The majority of the people will be at the periphery of development, transformation and progress.

It is said that all development is people’s development, but this is so only when development is negotiated, justly shared and does not erode democracy, environmental democracy and environmental justice. Enforced development and destructive development, which is the case in Uganda, will not allow these essentials of meaningful and effective development to obtain.

So, development, transformation and progress jointly become a gigantic lie, diversionary and misleading. It is possible to achieve development, environmental democracy and environmental justice if leadership and governance do not exclude the majority of the people and honesty from the development process, and if greed and selfishness are not at the centre of development initiatives.

These are the conditions for sowing the seeds of corruption on a continuous basis. No amount of institutionalisation of the fight against corruption will erase it if leadership and governance promote and preserve exclusion, dishonesty, domination, segregation, injustice, greed and selfishness in the body politic of the country.

We must all allow democracy, environmental democracy and environmental justice to work in our favour if we want experience genuine development, transformation and progress in a clean, safe and secure environment. This should be the foundation of “Securing our individual, community and collective future” in this century and beyond. If not then we are living a gigantic lie with dire consequences. Violence will dominate our country well in future.

Virtually all violence in the past and currently can be ascribed to environmental failure in either of or across the dimensions of the environment – the ecological-biological, the socio-economic, the socio-cultural and the temporal. This is because democracy, environmental democracy and environmental justice have inadvertently been either eroded or excluded.

We must resolve to rethink our economic, political, social and ecological conduct and reintroduce ethical and moral values ahead of the monetary value in our environment, which is our only gigantic home on our only Planet where life is possible.

For God and my country – Uganda!                                                

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Science of the Makerere University, Uganda