Prime
Uganda’s security problem isn’t a guns problem alone
Raymond Mujuni
What you need to know:
- Uganda is increasingly urbanising. By 2021, Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) chalked down 11.45 million Ugandans as those who live in urban areas
The president spent a good amount of time speaking to the hardware of Uganda’s security. He demonstrated the capacity of the UPDF, showing how unmanned aerial vehicles had surveilled camps said to be of the Allied Democratic Forces and also showed how missiles were lobbed at them.
He, of course, characteristically attacked Daily Monitor for its coverage of the attack on Mpondwe. What would be a speech without an occasional jab at the little guy?
The speech was reassuring of the UPDF’s ability to deal with the most pressing security problem at their feet – terrorism and yet, he spoke less about the software; the drivers of insecurity, the reasons for which the ADF is still able to recruit from Uganda and the steep rise in petty crime in the urban areas.
It might be the general design of how the security agencies see the problem. As a violent conflict that can only be dealt with by tightening the monopoly on violent weapons and stamping authority but it’s also that Uganda’s security will have newer and more sophisticated challenges for which violence may not be a perfect solution.
This, dear reader, is not my opinion. It is the opinion of Uganda’s security experts who in 2014 chaired the Defense Sector Review Committee.
Uganda is increasingly urbanising. By 2021, Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) chalked down 11.45 million Ugandans as those who live in urban areas. The UBOS number is interesting but perhaps not reflective of the general picture. Under agglomeration, which measures the number of people for whom there exists clear road network to urban areas, that number could be higher.
Urbanisation is a good indicator of development. It is a great indicator too of the creation of opportunities. Under neath that however, urbanisation moves people from dependence on subsistence farming for their regular meals to the cash economy. When this happens, two major problems arise; the first is that the labor market must be able to reward a lot more people daily for them to fend and put food on the table, the second problem is that it places pressure on rural communities to increase their yield per acre to meet growing demand for food in urban areas.
On both these indicators, Uganda is still on the blinking red lights. In some of Uganda’s densely populated areas like Kasese and Wakiso districts, cereal yield per acre has been declining with a corresponding decline in incomes of labor in those areas.
It makes crime inevitable and terrorism, the kind the ADF is practicing plausible.
To tackle our security problem, Uganda’s government bureaucracy is going to need an interdisciplinary team working with actual figures and numbers on food production, labor growth and income growth to make strides. Plotted on a curve, all countries with high incomes, high yield per acre and persistent job growth are also the countries with the least crime rates.
Is there a chance to develop something akin to this? If there is, then we might be getting close to reducing reliance on violence as a response to insecurity.
