How Janet can shape Karamoja’s development

Jun 20, 2011

ONE night, I was driving through Abim district in Karamoja when I saw an unusual light in a sub-county office.

By Oscar Okech

ONE night, I was driving through Abim district in Karamoja when I saw an unusual light in a sub-county office.

I wondered how patriotic the civil servants in Karamoja had now become. Only to learn that the First Lady and Minister of State for Karamoja Affairs, Janet Museveni was visiting the district soon.

In a related incident, an issue came up at a meeting the First Lady was chairing in Moroto and she reportedly called the minister concerned as the meeting was still going on. Within days, the goods which had taken the district officials months to track had arrived.

So, although the Karimojong expected more from the recent cabinet appointments, the elevation of the Ministry of Karamoja Affairs to cabinet level and the retention of Mrs Museveni is a good bargain.

How can this new ministry be made to work better to shape the course of Karamoja’s development?

Among the issues, the ministry requires a new policy framework.

One that defines its new status in terms of policy, institutional linkages, programmes and structures including reviving the defunct Karamoja Development Agency (KDA).

The ongoing Karamoja Integrated Disarmament and Development Programme (KIDDP) is part of the broader Peace, Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP) for Northern Uganda which is supervised by a Minister of State.

Now that the KIDDP region has a cabinet minister, should it still be under the PRDP or a separate programme just as MPs from Karamoja at the design stage of KIDDP had wanted it to be?

Even the KIDDP at the design stage, was skewed more in favour of disarmament activities than developmental projects because the UPDF put their foot down.

So, with most guns taken or gone silent, the KIDDP needs to be revised and updated since the context of disarmament has changed to focus more on development.

Although the current KIDDP has targets and benchmarks, these are lumped in one document and are in broad terms.

With the ministry, strategies should be set with more specific approaches tailored to the specific needs of the region.

Sectors such as infrastructure, water, health, education, minerals development, food security and a funding strategy, for purposes of accelerated progress, should be pegged to the international Millennium Development Goals targets, so as to reduce poverty and hunger by 2015.

‘Even in poverty policy, the Government in 2010 changed from nine years of the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) to the new National Development Plan (NDP), with the focus now moved from poverty reduction to wealth creation. But with poverty levels of 80%, Karamoja still requires a poverty focused development approach in order to develop the minimum capabilities to participate in wealth creation with the rest of the country at the level of the NDP where poverty levels nationally have now reduced to 31%.

Otherwise it will lead to gross income inequalities and distorted development in Karamoja, whereby there will be pockets of development while some groups of people will be permanently locked in chronic poverty.

But without personnel, these may not also be achieved. For example, Karamoja has 20% of Uganda’s cattle but only 10 veterinary doctors in the Government service and six in non-governmental organisations.

There is need to develop a policy to attract key personnel to Karamoja and to deliberately train local expertise.

The ministry, together with that of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, should come up with a policy on pastoralism that will cover pastoralists in other parts of Uganda as well.

The African Union in January 2011 already passed a Pastoralism Policy Framework for Africa. We now need to develop one tailored to the needs in Karamoja and elsewhere in Uganda.

The above issues aside, other localised issues that the ministry needs to address are conflicts and factionalism among local leaders in the region that have also undermined progress for some years. These have reduced of late but not healed completely.

The other is corruption where funds are diverted because of the excuses of insecurity, poor administrative and governance structures.

The minister now needs to engage in continuous dialogue with the people of Karamoja beyond the bureaucratic processes of the Government or the technocratic UN processes in more informal forums in order to have the feel of what the people want.

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