Let not emotions cloud our mind on Apaa crisis

Sep 16, 2015

Leadership is the faculty of managing personal and public emotions. The horror, the pain and agony being experienced by Ugandans in Apaa seems to be brewing emotions that can be exploited by wrong elements in our society.

By Emmanuel Mwaka Lutukumoi

Leadership is the faculty of managing personal and public emotions. The horror, the pain and agony being experienced by Ugandans in Apaa seems to be brewing emotions that can be exploited by wrong elements in our society.

The social media is awash with painful pictures of victims of the Apaa debacles. One person commented “Kony once told us that when he leaves, Acholi land will be taken” and many other sectarian messages were circulated in the social media.

Being a political time, chances are high that some people will also try to take advantage of this unfortunate misfortune after pain of the war. Some people who claim to be leaders are lambasting the Government while others are attacking opposing views and pointing fingers instead getting solutions.

It took the Israelites 40 years to reach the Promised Land. They had conflicts and worshiped several gods not knowing their true enemies and friends, a journey that could have taken merely six hours. It took Uganda 20 years to end a senseless war that claimed over 500,000 lives, displaced over 1.8 million people and over 30,000 abducted.

I learnt from the two decades war that two wrongs will not make a right. To imagine an enemy and fail to attack the real enemy is a clear way to self and community destruction. The enemy in this case is not the Government. The Government wants peace and security.

The enemy here is neither the Adjumani people nor the Apaa people, they need leadership and fairness and the biggest enemy isn’t Gilbert Olanya and other leaders who stand with the rowdy, anguished lot who feel desperate and are made to believe they are tormented and alienated. But our biggest enemy is ourselves as leaders for failing to come with decisive solutions.

The President was very clear, he said Apaa land belongs to the people who stay and live there. It is not for animals, let us degazette the so called reserve for human settlement and let us accept that the Government clears the boundary issue. This will see the people who lived for generation live in harmony and again.

Let the current miss-up cloud our minds and the critical issues on development. Many unscrupulous leaders used the emotions during the painful war to achieve selfish ends. Acholi say “Dyang pa la Kun pee”- meaning even if you are enraged, you must not lose track to development.

The moral questions now are: How can we end this crisis not to let us retract back to the war trauma. The northern war left us devastated economically, socially, culturally and in all; can we afford to continue with disunity to fail to get a solution together as leaders?

Northern Uganda shares 40% of Uganda’s poverty and war in all sectors of development; in a country destined to achieving Vision 2040 from peasantry to modern and industrialised economy.

If we don’t wake up from the slumber nightmare, if you fail to separate leadership from politicking and show the way to our people; in the next two decades we will continue lamenting as Uganda moves on. Education, Agriculture, small scale industries and big alike must be encouraged. We must strengthen our cultural institutions, improve household income and push for more reparation in terms of wealth creation.

Let the Government learn something from the past conflicts and decisively act and if it is to be, it is up to us leaders. Martin Luther king once said, “At the end, they will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” and included the “the hottest part in hell is reserved for those who keep neutral in moral crisis”.

Leadership is not about lamentation, it is not about exploiting emotions, but taking swift actions, managing personal and public emotions.

The writer is the RDC of Kitgum District
 

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