Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
I have been spellbound by CCTV footage that emerged a few weeks ago showing gangs of young men attacking and robbing people in the streets. Some appear to act alone while others attack in a pack, but the sequence is eerily similar.
After they identify their target, usually some hapless fella who just happens to be the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, they approach quietly from the back. Without warning, the muscle in the gang then pounces forward and suddenly introduces his right foot into the unwilling face of the victim.
Crime in the city:Kampala is now in the bloody hands of gangsters
The lucky ones drop stone cold, allowing the assailant or their fellow gang members to rifle through their pockets and dispossess them. The unlucky ones who don’t pass out respond to their instinctive need to hang onto their possessions, which invites more kicks to the head and to the face and, ultimately, the loss of consciousness, property and sometimes life.
In another variant, the attackers come on motorcycles, surround their victims and introduce a paving block or machete to their heads. The outcome is almost always the same. I admit that part of my interest comes from a place of personal trauma. Eleven years ago this month my brother Andrew was knifed to his death outside the gate of his rented accommodation in Mbarara. All for a basic phone and whatever spare change he had left in his wallet. Total value of the heist? Probably a hundred dollars. Cost of the heist? A priceless human life.
Yet my interest is also intellectual and comes from a place of seeking answers and understanding, especially of society-wide issues. After the recent attacks, police said they had arrested some of the suspects involved, and dutifully paraded them. I was struck by how young they were; the police gave the ages ranging from 14 to 21. The oldest outlier was 24! The young man accused of being the gang’s quarterback – the one with a steel foot – was said to be just 17. Seventeen, ladies and gentlemen!
I don’t know about you Dear Reader but, me as me, at 17, I was still scared of talking to girls; how did we get to a point where 17-year-olds are going out into the night to rob people? A country with a population as young as Uganda will, invariably, have young people in most randomly distributed spheres, including crime, but there’s also something to be said about folks who have been left behind cross-generationally.
The mass layoffs from the civil service and state-owned enterprises in the early-to-mid nineties as part of the Structural Adjustment Programme caused widespread social and economic dislocations. A few lucky ones successfully went into business, or found alternative employment in civil society, or private practice. Many, however, were pushed to the fringes of society literally, metaphorically and geographically to the emerging ghettos.
The first generation born in the ghettos in the early 90s has now given birth or way to a second generation born in the first decade of the millennium. Then there is a generation that was born in what were then villages but which, due to rapid urbanisation, have since become urban or peri-urban areas. These are the young men and women who now deliver their boda boda passengers to newly built mansions on land that previously belonged to their parents or grandparents, or babysit their young residents. The Gen Z revolution currently underway in Kenya has invited inevitable comparisons with our own. The conventional wisdom is that the conditions are materially different in the two countries to allow a similar revolution to happen in Uganda. I agree, but for different reasons.
The first is that Ugandan society, broadly, has never fully recovered from the hollowing out of the middle class that occurred under the mass exodus of the Amin years and in the political instability that followed. Many Ugandan households today that are middle-class in income and even aspects of lifestyle are, to put it lightly, unburdened by critical analysis and the weight of ideas. This will come, but after access to the basic necessities of life has come to be taken for granted, and with a few triggers in the public discourse.
The second point of departure, almost counter-intuitively, is that a growing number of Uganda’s Gen Zs, as CCTV footage shows, are already engaged in revolutionary violence, but of the criminal and self-serving variety. With few legal economic opportunities available to them, grabbing what they can from those they can overpower, seems like a legitimate course of action. In a way, they are only mirroring what they are seeing in the country’s political class.
The material circumstances and underlying grievances of young people in countries like Kenya and Uganda are not too dissimilar. What should worry us more? The organised protests by Gen Zs in Nairobi, or the organised crime by their counterparts in Kampala?
Daniel Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @Kalinaki
