NIP KASOKOSO CHAOS IN THE BUD

Last week the Kampala suburb of Kasokoso witnessed  running battles between residents and the police, punctuated by tear gas.

This was a carryover from an incident the previous week in which area mayor Mamerito Mugerwa was roughed up and his car torched.

Unsurprisingly this kind of violence and disregard for authority has at its root a land dispute.

National Housing & Construction Corporation (NHCC) claims ownership of the 250-odd acres of land in the area. Unfortunately over the last decade or so encroachers have settled on the land, built permanent structures and even buried their dead.

According to local authorities they had warned NHCC of the creeping encroachment as long ago as 2005. I guess bureaucratic sloth or sheer incompetence prevented management from enforcing their ownership rights at the time.

So now NHCC is ready to develop the area and have come up against stiff resistance from the residents, who may have no legal claim to the land, but that fact may count for nothing in the face of the real fear that they may lose their homes.

It is not by accident that land is becoming an increasingly emotive subject.

Uganda has one of the highest population growth rates in the world with our population projected to double every 20 years. A natural extension of this growth is that we have the youngest population in the world with more than half the population below the age of 15 years.

In addition there are increasing waves of internal migrations, putting huge pressures on urban areas.

It will be interesting to see how this incident plays out.

Looking at it from afar it should look like a cut and dried case. NHCC with the help of the law enforcement agencies exercising its ownership rights should throw off the squatters and commence construction.

However one can expect politicians to jump into the fray and justify the residents’ right to the land with some populist logic.

This is not the first such dispute and it will not be the last and it has far reaching implication for national stability and sustained economic growth.

To begin with NHCC may eventually get its way, but this will unleash on our streets a few hundred homeless and desperate citizens – a political headache at best or a trigger for widespread chaos at worst.

Economically the issue of land rights goes straight to the heart of development ambitions. If there are questions about land rights or their enforcement investment by anyone becomes very difficult.

To let the residents of Kisokoso have their way would send a negative signal to people – locally and abroad who may have plans of investing in the country. If squatters can dispossess legitimate land owners, what will stop them doing the same to buildings, vehicles, plant and machinery, investors will wonder.

But there is an even more nefarious underbelly to many of these land wrangles.

A diabolical industry has grown around these land disputes. 

Politicians and connected people sponsor some of these people to camp and quickly develop on land owned by other people. These “connected” people then either masquerade as arbiters by virtue of the positions they hold in the central government or in the local administrations and engage in an extortion racket under the guise of facilitating compensation for the squatters.

A variation of the same theme is that they facilitate the encroachment with a view to an eventual takeover of the land for themselves for much less than the market value.

Land issues are a political time bomb in themselves but government needs to come down hard on these shenanigans and nip these rackets in the bud. 

For political reasons government may choose to look the other way, but they then risk the racket snowballing into a situation where real estate development becomes a hazardous business dooming us to our slums and poorly planned neighbourhoods.

It maybe too much to ask of a seating government to resolve land issues once and for all but the costs of not getting a grip on these issues will reverberate through history with many unforeseen consequences.

Look at Zimbabwe. After more than 20 years of feet dragging on the issues of land redistribution, political expediency dictated that the Robert Mugabe’s governments take drastic action a few years ago, allowing illegal occupations of farm land to stand, decimating the country’s reputation as the food basket of southern Africa and bring a once promising economy down to its knees.

The wealth disparities in Zimbabwe underpinned by an unfair landownership, a hangover from the colonial era are indefensible but what is probably more unforgivable is Harare’s allowing the situation to fester long after they had assumed the reins of power.

Ironically the gap between the rich and the poor is even more dramatic now, more because the poorer have become poorer and more people have fallen out of the middle class to join their downtrodden cousins.

The point is we should not see Kasokoso as an isolated incident, another bit of drama or something that happens to “other people”, we need to seat up and take notice because Kasokoso may very well be a sign of things to come.

DRC NEEDS TO BE MAGNANIMOUS IN VICTORY

At the beginning of last week the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) refused to put pen to paper on a peace deal with the M23 rebels.

"While not communicating officially about their sudden change of heart on a deal that has taken 10 months to painstakingly put together, privately the Kinshasa delegation said the facts had changed on the ground and the deal cannot be the same.....

They argued that the M23 had been vanquished and renounced rebellion so the new deal should read to reflect this new reality.

In a way they have a point. 

The rebel M23, which was kicked off by mutinying soldiers of the national army, reached their peak last year when they overrun the strategic eastern Congolese town of Goma. This forced the DRC government to the negotiating table.

However, it also kick started an international diplomatic process that apart from the peace talks sponsored by the International Conference of the Great Lakes region (ICGLR) and mediated by Uganda, included bringing to intense diplomatic pressure on Rwanda, which some accused of backing the mutineers and strengthening of the UN peace keeping forces mandate in the Congo.

Whereas all accounts are pointedly saying the UN only offered support to a rejuvenated Congolese army, observers remained unconvinced that the previously indisciplined and unmotivated national army could turn around so fast and orchestrate their first victory over an organised fighting force since 1996.

The new intervention force has troops from Tanzania and South Africa and is commanded by a Brazilian.

With the rout it is safe to say the M23 lost all bargaining power though issues of their forces integration into the national army and how to handle human rights abuses in the region remain in abeyance.

That being said it would be in Kinshasa’s and the region’s best interest to show magnanimity especially since M23 is not the only anti-government force in the region and because the underlying  reasons of poverty and neglect of the region by Kinshasa remain.

"By not being too intransigent on the conditions for M23 to officially denounce their rebellion and lay themselves at the mercy of Kinshasa, could mean the difference between having to continue fighting these no-hope militias or reaching a quick and mutually beneficial settlement....

There are no formulas in resolving a conflict that has been going on for more than a decade in a part of the world where the conditions for rebellion are ripe and always there to be exploited.

History shows that bearing down too hard on the vanquished may only serve to  trigger another war. Part of the reason for World War II was the harsh reparations imposed on a defeated Germany. The compensations demanded by the victorious allies were even more painful to handle because the German economy was struggling.  Adolf Hitler took advantage of the situation to take over power, whip up German nationalism and send his panzer divisions rolling across Europe threatening the viability of the free world.

In the light of Kinshasa’s inability to exercise control over a region, rich in minerals and a population living in sub human conditions it is not inconceivable that vanquisihing M23 will not be the last we hear of rebellion in the region.

"The people of eastern Congo are war weary and have been exposed to suffering, stretched beyond what is humanly possible. It goes without saying that an end to all rebellion in the area would be a welcome Christmas gift, which a newly energised Kinshasa has within its means to deliver...

IS THERE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL FOR DRC?

Last week saw the winding down of the Congolese rebel M23’s challenge of the Kinshasa government.

The M23, which begun in 2011 as a mutiny, hit its peak last year when it overrun the strategic town of Goma near the Rwandan border, sending government troops and the UN peacekeeping force stationed there scampering for the hills.

The capture of Goma not only stung Kinshasa into action but also triggered a loud response from the international community, which authorised a more robust mandate for the UN peacekeeping force in the area and threatened Rwanda to stand down.

It accused Kigali of aiding the rag tag army which at the height of its powers never assembled more than a few thousand men under arms, definitely not more than 5000.

The coincidence of these actions set the stage for the Congolese national army to claim its first victory against an organised armed group since 1996.

Other lesser fighting groups foraging in the jungles of eastern Congo have been put on notice.

This turn of events is significant for many reasons but not least of all because it took the changing of the decade long UN peace mission’s mandate to effect and secondly, because it looks now like the DRC is now ready to bring the rebellious east under a control. This last one prompted by self-preservation instincts of the political elite in Kinshasa and the growing need for the natural resources in the giant central African republic that the world so sorely needs.

Since the overthrow of Mobutu Ssese Seko by a rebellion sponsored by the then Zaire’s eastern neighbours, it is no longer hypothetical that eastern Congo can pose a real and present danger to the powers that be in Kinshasa.

"The country, a dysfunctional hulk, with a land area the size of western Europe, would always be a nightmare to manage at the best of times, more so  now with its neglected transport and communications networks, which makes getting around it a hair raising odyssey...

Eastern Congo’s reputation as a place where rebel groups burst into existence like popcorn, is not because of the particularly hot blooded nature of its residents but more because of a DRC’s total lack of influence in the region.

About a 10 years ago the traffic police man who suited up every morning for work in eastern Congo’s, Bunia hadn’t seen a salary in years or the post master who opened the post office for business every day except Sunday’s for months on end in Kisangani despite the fact that a letter was last delivered to him years ago or the use of palm oil to stretch the diesel in lorries’ engine’s in Gbadiolite, were real life examples of how Kinshasa by then, had abandoned the rest of the country to its own devices.

It is much worse now.

With a second victory in the polls in 2011 and the earlier arrest of his major rival Jean Pierre Bemba in 2008, it is clear that Kabila is moving to resolve this major item on his to-do list, the eastern Congolese question, once and for all.

His eastern neighbours Uganda and Rwanda, always with an eye on the unruly jungles off their western borders, will be looking to see how this new military confidence plays out in coming days.

Both countries have claimed that their own rebel dissidents were holed up in eastern Cong far from their own armies’ reach but more importantly for the rebels, safe in the knowledge that the Congolese army was unwilling or incapable of flushing them out.

Last week the Congolese army in its pursuit of M23 fighters stumbled upon a suspected anti-Uganda rebel camp, arresting Bubulo West MP Tonny Kipoi, suggesting the honey moon maybe over.

At the end of the last century there was a grand design by western investment bankers to build up the transport, communications and energy infrastructure of Congo. The multi-billion dollar project would effectively open up the DRC for business helping to unlock its vast natural resource bounty – estimated in some places at as much as $12 to $24 trillion dollars or the equivalent of the size of the US and western Europe combined on the higher side.

These plans were scuttled when Uganda and Rwanda fell out with former ally Laurent Kabila and sought to unseat him, in a ploy that was stopped in its tracks by Angola and Zimbabwe falling behind the then DRC president.

The ensuing instability has continued to stall any credible attempts to invest in the country in the amounts required to lift it out of the underdevelopment rut it’s been stuck in for decades.

South Africa’s signing of an agreement with the DRC to develop the long-wished for Grand Inga Dam maybe a sign of how eager international capital is keen to get a bite at country’s vast resources.

The project which will eventually generate 39,000 megawatts and cost $80b, will be the biggest hydro-power dam project in the world and account for half the continent’s power needs. A first phase that is expected to generate 4,800 megawatts will take seven years to build, and will see at least 2,500 of these being evacuated to South Africa and the rest to power the DRC’s development of its mining industry.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Its vast deposits of gold, diamonds, cobalt, copper, other rare earth metals crucial in high tech industry and now oil make the country a prize whose time has come....

However this vast central African republic has shown a stubborn resilience in the face of countless attempts to order its chaotic nature, this just the latest attempt and we would best be advised not to hold our breath in anticipation of a favourable outcome.