Arua City: Where you must sleep with your eyes open

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OPINION

By Walter Akena

If you are visiting Arua City for the first time, there are some safety precautions you must take seriously. Never speak on the phone while walking along the road, avoid carrying valuables like laptops or large sums of money late in the evening, and above all, sleep with your eyes open. The danger spots to be wary of include Sansiro, Transport Road, Golf Course, Oli, Drivers Corner, Weatherhead Park Lane, and Barifa, among many others.

I learned this the hard way on Wednesday, August 27, along Weatherhead Park Lane in Golf Course Cell, Mvara Ward, in the Central Division of the city. At around 6:30 p.m., while walking home from work and speaking on the phone with my family, two young men on a numberless Bajaj motorcycle rode up from behind and snatched my phone before speeding off toward Oluko Road.

What shocked me most was not the theft itself, but the audacity. They struck in full view of the public, including police and security personnel manning offices along that road. With the help of two boda boda riders, we gave chase as far as Mvara Trading Centre, but the thieves disappeared into the crowd.

Barely a month earlier, two of my acquaintances had fallen victim to similar attacks in the same area. A primary school teacher had his bag snatched around 7:00 p.m., losing sh2.5 million meant for their school SACCO. On another evening, an NGO staffer was attacked at about 7:30 p.m. and lost her laptop and other valuables.

When I went to the Central Police Station the following day to report my case, I discovered that mine was far from an isolated incident. At least ten people stood at the counter with similar complaints of stolen phones, money, or laptops, most of which cases traced to the same few hotspots.

What is even more disturbing is the age of some of the offenders. Many are young boys, some barely in their teens. In one sad case, a seven-year-old allegedly colluded with thieves to rob his own family in Bunyu Ward, Ayivu Division. Pretending to have a running stomach at night, he convinced his father to take him outside, allowing thieves to gain entry. The robbers drugged the rest of the family with chloroform and made away with everything in the house.

These incidents may appear like mere security lapses, but in truth, they expose a deeper crisis in West Nile. Nearly 50.5 percent of the youth in the region are neither in school nor employed. With such high levels of idleness, crime has become both a livelihood and an outlet for frustration. The connection is direct, illiteracy limits opportunities, poverty follows, and criminality becomes the default path for survival.

According to the 2024 National Housing and Population Census, only 7.8 percent of persons aged 10 and above in West Nile had completed primary school, 5.5 percent had completed secondary, and a mere 3 percent had gone beyond that. With 41.9 percent of the population unable to read or write, the region has the second-highest illiteracy rate in Uganda, only behind Karamoja. These grim statistics explain why so many young people are trapped in dependency and vulnerability, unable to compete in a modern economy.

The fallout goes beyond individual hardship. It is tearing at the fabric of families and communities. During Civic Engagement Meetings (CEMs) convened across the region by ACODE and WENDA, women repeatedly voiced a disturbing reality: men are increasingly withdrawing from their household responsibilities, leaving women to carry the burden alone.

In a patriarchal society where land and other productive resources are controlled by men, women’s ability to provide for their children is extremely limited; many unable to pay their children beyond the primary level. The strain is not only economic. As boys grow older, mothers struggle to discipline them in the absence of fathers, and many of these young men slide easily into delinquency and crime.

Poverty itself is another powerful driver of this crisis. In 2022, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics reported that West Nile had one of the highest concentrations of poor people in the country, only after Acholi and Karamoja, with 59.1 percent of the population living below the poverty line. The situation is made worse by limited access to poverty alleviation initiatives such as the Parish Development Model (PDM).

In Arua City, for instance, only 4.5 percent of the 78,619 households had accessed the PDM fund by the time of the 2024 census. Twenty-nine percent of households in the city are still stuck in the subsistence economy, yet only 16 percent of these have benefited from PDM.

Unless these fundamental challenges of low levels of literacy, high poverty rates, and the breakdown of family structures are urgently addressed, the crime rate in Arua City and the West Nile region will only escalate. For now, residents and visitors alike must remain on guard. In Arua City, the safest way to live, quite literally, is to sleep with your eyes open.

The writer is a Research Officer at the Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE)