Supporting the UPDF in handling NAADS

Jan 21, 2015

By mid-2014 President Museveni was openly voicing concerns that the NAADS programme had not delivered value for money.



By Dickson Kanakulya

By mid-2014 President Museveni was openly voicing concerns that the NAADS programme had not delivered value for money.

For example, by last year, over sh24b had been injected through NAADS in the central region of Uganda alone; but with little results to show.

Following that concern, the President called for re-channeling the money through grassroots SACCOS. But the SACCOS that attracted the most debate was that of the army known as Wazalendo. This followed the President’s comments while touring agricultural projects in Kikandwa, Mityana district; he complained that much money was ‘disappearing’ through bogus allowances for seminars, workshops, meetings and such activities.

He proposed that he will henceforth channel the funds through the army structures in order to realise food security and income generation. This issue has raised various critiques across the nation especially among the intellectual class with the main argument being that the army lacks specialized skills to handle such technical projects. Recently this debate was injected with some drama when the infamous ‘former presidential advisor-cum-political ally’ Hajji Ssebagala ‘resigned’ from his post citing the channeling of NAADS money through the army as one his points of disagreements with his boss President Museveni.

In this piece of analysis I would like to present a considered view on how we should view the army’s takeover of the NAADS program. I personally have come to conclude that the domain of agriculture in contemporary times is of military strategic importance. We need to change our perspective to fit into the realities of the changing world around us. There is a famous book, Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) by Prof Jared Diamond in which he discusses how the European countries came to dominate the rest of world using those three elements as the base from which they projected their power and became global masters.

In that book he makes an interesting note that as European powers conquered and pillaged other human societies they came across an unusual challenge in the African tropics with peculiar cultures that were based on the people’s peculiar interaction with the earth and the various creatures around. In short the people of sub-Saharan Africa were not wiped out because their bodies and genes had adapted to live with dangerous germs like malaria causing parasites which the European could not handle.

Likewise the animals such as cattle and goats and the plants that our ancestors kept had also adapted and develop genetic resilience against formidable diseases and climatic conditions over the years. This explains why central African countries got their independence quite faster than the southern African countries because the weather there closer to the one European were used to near the colder poles of the earth.

Without ever considering it, sub-Saharan Africa had a natural line of defense against European domination in terms of the animals and plants that they reared and cultivated. Agriculture therefore is a strategic aspect of any country’s existence and independence. This is all the more important given the growth of the genetic engineering industry in European business complexes. There is a growing trend of artificially tampering with natural genetic occurrences in animals and plants and then patenting it for business profit purposes. Imagine what happens if all the natural traditional genetic make-up of our ancestral animals and plants are artificially changed in labs and then owned by European multi-national corporations.

For that reason therefore, in an increasingly biotechnologically controlled global business system, agriculture has become an avenue of contestation and determinant to the independence and self-determination of any country or society in the world. Protection and safe guarding of the genetic wealth is of national strategic importance in such a generation when that ancestral genetic wealth is disappearing fast. God forbid but the time seems to be getting nearer when almost all naturally occurring genetic pools will be replaced with artificially bio-engineered ones that will be owned by profit-motivated multi-national European and American corporations. (Let they who have ears be warned!).

Military contests have long shifted from the traditional one-on-one or conventional battle-front fights. It is now high-tech and very organized on the basis of sophisticated and complex computers.

Today the people directing a war can do so thousands of miles away from the actual battle-front. In that respect, as sub-Saharan Africans we are disadvantaged given the low level of technological advancement. Imagine if a certain gene could be weaponized and artificially injected into our cows and matooke or millet such that it targets African men and kills them with five months of eating such food.

This may sound like Hollywood fiction but it is possible in modern biotechnology. For example there are research reports indicating that genetically modified soy milk could disorganize the hormonal system in men and turns on the production of female hormones such as estrogen and cause gynecomastia i.e. it induces the male body to function like a female one.

If our military if fed on such food, it could spell a disastrous army that lacks the hormonal mettle to go into battle and defend their nation in case of attack.

If we take care to research, we shall find that in super-power countries like USA, China, Russia, among others, those aspects of their societies that are considered of military or political strategic importance are either directly under control of the military or its subsidiaries. Since in our case the sector of agriculture is of existential strategic importance (as colonial history proved), it is prudent to ensure that such a sector is not left to only the peasants to struggle on their own.

They can easily fall prey to manipulative external forces that may not be wishing our country well. One issue that calls for alarm is the increasing dependency by our farmers on imported seeds every rainy season. Even though some people construe that as ‘agricultural modernization’ I personally refer to it as ‘agricultural colonization’. In case there emerges an issue of contention between the any country from which those seeds originate and our government and the seeds are blocked from coming in Uganda, what would be our fate?

Let the reader note that when I support the UPDF coordination of NAADS, I do not mean that they should take over everything; but we need to identify those aspects of agricultural industry that are of strategic importance and restrict them from being accessed by potential enemies of the country.

So before we out rightly dismiss the idea of UPDF coordinating NAADS we need to think deeper because the realities of the contemporary global system are changing rapidly and they refer corresponding changes in our national policies.

Nonetheless, the UPDF as it is currently will need more advanced training and military analytic skills in order to understand the nature of today’s military threats.

The writer is a lecturer, Makerere University and Uganda Christian University
 

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