WHAT OTHERS SAY : When you see Museveni walking at night…

The photographs of President Yoweri Museveni walking across Mpologoma swamp bridge on the Mbale-Tirinyi road at dusk, to headline his new “war” on environmental degradation, were a little strange and even comical, but the cause is noble.

A broad daylight event, including a symbolic dredging of the swamp would perhaps have spoken better, but it’s good that the President has shifted the spotlight on the environment.

I was last in that region not too long ago, to visit my good old friend and fellow Ugandan-Nairobian Erich Ogoso. The event itself involved some serious pre-visit discussions over a small but touchy issue.

Because I am a vegetarian, a plan had to be hatched to explain to his mother, who was going to host a couple of us friends to lunch, why I wasn’t eating her chicken and beef. And to make matters worse, because I am also a teetotaler, I was not going to drink her ajon.

How do you tell a proud grandmother from eastern (and northern) Uganda that a grown man with a long beard couldn’t eat meat or drink ajon, and that it was not an insult?

In the end, advance warnings and a good long warm hug settled the issue.

But the issue of meat (which at a broader level is one about our cattle economy), and agriculture are playing out into a big environmental issue in ways not many appreciate.

I was shocked by what the combination of population growth and the popularity of rice growing had done in the Pallisa area. The invasion of the wetlands, and the withdrawal of water from the swamps like Mpologoma were alarming.

The problem was not the rice growing per se, but that it was being done unscientifically killing off the wetlands.

The sight of the rice extensive rice paddies themselves is impressive, but the environmental cost is high. Within a few years, that area will run out of water.

But Pallisa is a microcosm of what is happening all over Uganda. As this column has noted before, the lower eastern Uganda (as have areas like Masaka and Isingiro) went through their first phase environmental crisis some years ago.

With lands unable to support growing populations and both small scale farming and cattle keeping, families moved to the wetlands of Busoga and Buganda, especially Mukono. They were our first “environmental refugees”, and have exported the crisis to these regions. A similar environmental crisis pushed many people out of Kigezi to, among areas, Bunyoro.

But conflict, and the fact that 30 years of President Yoweri Museveni’s rule, its authoritarian aspects notwithstanding, have also provided the longest period of stability for areas in Uganda outside the north, also have played a role.

The 1978/79 Tanzanian-led war against field marshal Idi Amin, fought mostly in the west and south west Uganda, disrupted the peasant economies there.

Then the NRA/NRM war two years later led to the destruction of the peasant economy in Luweero and surrounding area, and some dislocation in a few areas in the west. Post-1986 many peasants, and small holders, who were farmers and cattle keepers in these areas were vulnerable.

To survive, they sold their land to a rising middle and money class that arose partly from the corruption of the NRM period, but also from the stability of it that allowed an extended period of capital accumulation unprecedented since independence.

The land sales by small holders, and the rise of a deep-pocketed class has resulted in fencing, closing off once communal water sources, cattle grazing corridors, or new farming methods that have killed off the natural vegetation that allowed peasant-level cattle keeping (e.g. varieties of grasses that removed ticks off cattle) in western Uganda and the southwest.

A lot of these small cattle keepers, Balalo, unable to sustain their way of life were forced to head further into Buganda, but mostly east-northwards.

So, while some couched the “Balalo invasion” in parts of Buganda, Teso, and the north in political and sectarian terms, the structural reasons for it were environmental and socio-economic.

It was also possible, ironically, because war in Teso and the north had, by accident, created environmental havens, because people weren’t living in and farming many of these areas, allowing them to regenerate and water resources to build up.

So, again, those stories you keep hearing about conspiracies to steal northern land, without understanding it is as partly a response by marginalised groups in the south-west to environmental and economic stress, is simplistic.

However, in recent years the return of peace in these areas, land fencing, and rice farming in some of them, is closing off these escape routes, forcing some of these people further into wetlands!

A scientific understanding of what is going on is important to crafting a solution. We shall return to these in future.

The author is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3