In Uganda of the 21st century, everything has been reduced to politics: politics of education, politics of health, politics of seeds or food, politics of exclusion, politics of conquest and politics of occupation. The list is long…

Politics of conquest and occupation are frequently associated with cross-border refugees or former cross-border refugees in power in Uganda. President Yoweri Museveni is part of the legion of refugees who arrived in Uganda as mercenaries, grabbed political power and anow they are grabbing all the resources hitherto owned indigenous Ugandans.

Politics involve exercise of power and different hegemonic political projects of belonging represent different symbolic power orders. Traditionally, power was understood and measured by the effects of  those with power had on others (Yuval-Davis, 2016). Today in Uganda power over others by those in power is most exhibited in relation to land ownership. Those in power have grabbed large tracts of land and individualised the ownership at the expense of traditional communities who land ownership and belonging have historically been customary. 

Uganda is one of the African countries, guided by the Land Act 1998, which strengthens individual land ownership and belonging rights and permits privatisation of rural community and/or public land. It is said that the government introduced individual land ownership for poverty reduction, wealth creation and socioeconomic development ostensibly to protect rural residents.

Yuval-Davis (2006) outlines an analytical framework for the study of belonging and the politics of belonging. Her article is divided into three interconnected parts. The first explores the notion of ‘belonging’ and the different analytical levels on which it needs to be studied: social locations; identifications and emotional attachments; and ethical and political values. The second part focuses on the politics of belonging and how it relates to the participatory politics of citizenship as well as to that of entitlement and status.

However, in Uganda’s parliament and in governmental practice, the political elites in power dismiss or circumvent traditional cultural claims to land and property rights. Accordingly, they are collectively all out to destroy customary land tenure, which they are selling as land reform.

Currently, reportedly with World Bank support, the government of Uganda, in the true spirit of using power to destroy customary land tenure system of settled communities, is under the Land Act CAP 227 compelling peoples who enjoyed land tenure security to convert from customary tenure to freehold tenure /grant of freehold.

Freehold land tenure is not culturally sensitive and is not as efficient as customary land tenure system in safeguarding the ownership and senses of belonging, which I wrote about in a previous article (i.e sense of community belonging, sense of biocultural belonging, sense of ecological belonging, sense of environmental belonging and, for that matter, human natural belonging, which has survived and persisted in the landscapes of belonging for centuries because it did not emphasise individual land ownership or belonging at the expense of the whole community.

In my view, what is happening is a plot against customary land tenure system and its holistic survival value, and by extension, against cultural claims to land ownership and belonging. While the Uganda Constitution 1995 recognises cultural institutions, whose survival is linked to land, the current plot against customary land tenure system undermines the cultural institutions and their constitutionality. In the long term, the governors have no interest in the longterm survival and sustainability of these institutions. Because the cultural institutions have been constitutionally depoliticised, they have no political rights or political power to resist what is going on regarding the conversion of customary land tenure system to freehold land tenure system.

This explains why a minister of state for land in the NRM government can afford to belittle the Kabaka of Buganda and even suggest that if the Kabaka wants land he must buy it.

Consequently, squatters on Buganda land (or Kabaka’s land) have far more ownership and belonging rights than the Baganda who owned land. Indeed, many heavy weights in the central government who grabbed land in Buganda and who were refugees in Uganda but now enjoy citizenship and dual citizenship rights, can now individualise, own and belong to the land. This way, they are delinking the Clans of Buganda from the land. This is also happening to other Clans of traditionally settled communities in Uganda. Ownership and belonging dynamics in Uganda are changing using the law and power. Privatisation of land is a pathway to stealing land from the poor and needy and public land. It is anti-people and anti-culture. It ultimately converts whole communities into labour reserves and community members into slaves.

In away, land individualisation or privatisation is creating individualised belonging accompanied ruling or governing by exclusion (e.g. Jesper Bjarnesen, et.al., 2023).The third part illustrates, using British examples, some of the ways particular political projects of belonging select specific levels of belonging in order to construct their projects. The politics of belonging has come to occupy the heart of the political agenda almost everywhere on the globe, even when reified assumptions about ‘the clash of civilizations’ are not necessarily applied (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Yuval-Davis suggested that a lot of both political and analytical work was still required for fully permeable politics of belonging to gain hegemony.

In the E-book Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa, published in 2006 and edited by Richard Kuba and Carola Lentz (2006), it is stated that recognising that land rights is ambiguous, negotiable and politically embedded. Case studies are presented to explore the long-term processes and recent changes in contemporary rural West Africa affecting the conversion of control over land into social and political capital and vice versa. They point to the colonial origins of what came to be viewed as ‘customary’ tenure and to the legal pluralism characterizing pre-colonial tenure arrangements.

Furthermore, they show the spiritual and ritual importance of land that can be converted into political power and economic prerogatives, a dimension neglected by much of the recent literature. Analyses cover forest and savannah, state and segmentary societies, facilitating comparison and insights across the Anglo-Francophone divide.

Hidden behind the current land reforms in Uganda involving conversion of customary land to freehold land is ethnicity. Those compelled to convert to freehold are Bantu or Nilotic who enjoyed cultural land security. Those benefitting are mostly people who belong to the nomadic pastoral human energy system that have grabbed land everywhere in Uganda and are now modern-day settlers and land owners where they have no biological, historical, cultural, ethical and moral ties. They have no sense of community belonging, sense of biocultural belonging, sense of ecological belonging, sense of environmental belonging and, hence, human natural belonging in their new environments of abode.

There is no doubt that the politics of belonging in Uganda is, and will ethnically be dominated by the nomadic pastoralists in and outside of power but linked in the new designs of land ownership, belonging and power over the settled communities of Bantu and Luo.

These new land owners where they did not belong have ushered in ne community, biocultural, ecological and environmental he ones making policies and other decisions at the centre have strategically imposed other peoples in the rural areas, mainly Indians and Chinese in rural settings, ostensibly to develop them.

Meanwhile they have allowed refugees from amongst the Cushites of Africa, of whom they are a part, to flock in almost unrestricted. While they have cast Uganda as the most welcoming to refugees, they have planned to give the refugees the best education at the best educational institutions in Uganda and abroad using public funds. Besides they allow them to compete for all opportunities with the indigenous Ugandan citizens on equal terns. Since they are already and will be better educated and skilled than the indigenes, the latter will not be able to compete. They will qualify to be shipped out of the country to slave markets in the Middle East. The land they leave behind is occupied by the refugees, who easily access Ugandan citizenship, nationality and sovereignty and all resources.

Many are already engaged in fishing and mining Uganda’s minerals, while Ugandans are being excluded. Besides many refugees or former refugees are active and almost preferred in the business world.

For God and My Country.

• A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.

About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)

The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).

Resources and Readings

Green, E. D. (2006). Ethnicity and the Politics of Land Tenure Reform in Central Uganda. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 44(3), 370–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/14662040600997148

Hunter, Emma (?)(Editor). Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present. Cambridge Centre of African Studies. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/ab7141e5-c6cc-49de-8366-97b714b13808/external_content.pdf Visited on 22 October, 2024 at 12.29 pm EAT

JESPER BJARNESEN, CRISTIANO LANZANO, HENNING MELBER, AND PATIENCE MUSUSA (2023). Creating Belonging or Ruling by Exclusion? Politics, Citizenship and African Governance. democracyinafrica.org, https://democracyinafrica.org/creating-belonging-or-ruling-by-exclusion-politics-citizenship-and-african-governance/ Visited on 22 October 2024 at 11.58 am EAT

LEBEN NELSON MORO (2004). Interethnic Relations in Exile: The Politics of Ethnicity among Sudanese Refugees in Uganda and Egypt. IN: Journal of Refugees, 2004.

MEYERSON, S. (2023). A Reason Not to Belong: Political Decentralisation, Intercommunal Relations and Changing Identities in Northern Uganda. Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

YUVAL-DAVIS, NIIRA (2005). Racism, Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Politics of Belonging. Article in Researchgate, July 2005. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304680649_Belonging_and_the_Politics_of_Belonging, Visited on 22 October 2024 at 11.12 am EAT.

YUVAL DAVIS, NIIRA (2006). Belonging and the Politics of Belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2006. Routledge. https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/document-7.pdf Visited on 22 October 2024 at 10.46 am EAT.

YUVAL-DAVIS, NIIRA (2011). Chapter. Belonging and the Politics of Belonging. Researchgate, January 2011 43 (3): 20-35. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304680649_Belonging_and_the_Politics_of_Belonging Visited on 22 October 2024 at 11.06am EAT.

Yuval-Davis, N. (2016). Power, Intersectionality and the Politics of Belonging. In: Harcourt, W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_25 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_25#citeas, Visited 22 October 2024 at 12.12 am EAT

RICHARD KUBA and CAROLA LENTZ (2006).   Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa. African Social Studies Series Volume 9, 20 October 2005. BRILL, https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/12010?language=en, Visited on 2 October 2024 at 11.23 am EAT.

SATHYAMURTHY, T. V. (1972). Ugandan Politics: Convoluted Movement from Tribe to NationEconomic and Political Weekly, Vol. 7, No. 42 (Oct. 14, 1972), pp. 2122-2128 (7 pages)Published By: Economic and Political Weekly