It is true. Boundaries or non-boundariness start in the head. If there are no boundaries in your head, you will not recognise any boundaries physically. You will extend your boundaries even where you have no belonging.

It is not a virtue to have a brain without boundaries where people are ecologically and bio-ecologically settled and their livelihood depends directly on the land. You are likely to be a source of all types of conflict. In Uganda, the most important and critical resource for the poor settled people is land. However, for the nomadic pastoral people who are not directly attached to the land but to grass and cow, the tendency to have no boundaries in their brains is exacting enormous stress to the settled communities since they see the crops of the people as more than grass.

Besides, the new culture of nomadic pastoral culture of the people  in power or connected to power penetrating the cultures in settle in lands where they do not naturally belong, is causing intolerable stress and suffering to naturally settled communities of Ugandans. They are losing their ecologico-biologically productive zones. Their futures are being erased from the face of the earth in the short- medium- and long-term. Their belonging is no more. They are foreigners in their own country. Independence, sovereignty, citizenship and self-determination are now ideas of remote meaning to them.

One thing is true. If you manipulate constitutionally, politically, deceptively and practically to grab the land of the settled poor, you are prescribing a path of extinction for them. You don’t want them to survive as a people. If the poor realise what you are doing to them – depriving them of livelihood by grabbing their land by first making them so impoverished that they are hapless and hopeless – you have no peace and belonging in the long-term, however much you want to belong.

It is a matter of time before the poor mobilise to reclaim what is naturally theirs (culturally, ecologically, biologically, socioeconomically, historically, eco-spiritually, environmentally, morally and ethically).

Power (political, military, social, economic) should not be both translated into and reduced to grabbing land where the powerful, and those attached to them, do not naturally belong. It is anti-people, inhuman and ethnocentric.

Displacing and dispossessing locals to grab land from them in order to convert yourself into a superior “nation” is ultimately catastrophic to/for you and your people.

Of course in the short-term you will be blind enough not to see anything wrong. The Uganda Constitutionv1995 decrees that any Ugandan can settle anywhere, which favours the nomadic pastoralists. They are exploiting this constitutional intent to buy land from the purposely impoverished, forcing them to move to nowhere but to mushroom into a floating population of internal refugees. However the concern of power in Uganda is not internal but external refugees.

In the long-term those displacing and dispossessing the local naturally settled people will wake up to see that all the time, energy and  money were invested in prescribing destruction for themselves and their genealogies.

The impoverished, deprived, displaced and internal refugees will be too hungry and too angry to reason. Recovery of their land and livelihood will be their collective goal. The guns will be useless when they rise. They are a sleeping but slowly arising giant.

Beware! The conflicts that have been arising will soon coalesce into one proliferating conflict in the whole country: the land conflict. It needs political action before it sprouts to uncontrollable dimensions. We ignore it to our own peril of turning Uganda into a perennial hotspot of war between the land owners and the land grabbers.

We demystified the gun. The gun will be central to proliferating conflict. The word of God reassures us that God was, is and will always be on the side of the oppressed.

For God and My Country.

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