Sunday, November 10, 2013

"Social development in Uganda is more of a myth than reality." Can you justify this statement?

This is a very strong assertion---essentially saying that an entire country of almost 40 million people has shown no significant social development at all. It's not clear what period we're talking about, but the nation was not actually called "Uganda" until 1894 at the founding of the Uganda Protectorate, so that seems like a good place to start.

From 1894 to 1962, Uganda was a colony of the British Empire. The British expressed considerable favoritism for the minority of Ugandas who converted to Christianity, so even though local African religions remained the majority of the population, the government was largely based upon Christianity.

In 1962, after a period of violent instability, the British gave up on Uganda and left, granting them independence. There was a brief period of democratic government, but the government was disorganized and ineffective, and it was rapidly overthrown in a military coup in 1971 led by Idi Amin. Amin was then overthrown in 1979, which after a series of interim governments resulted in the current Republic of Uganda starting in 1986.

Since then, Uganda has been in a more or less continuous series of wars, primarily with Congo and with non-state factions, worst of all the Lord's Resistance Army, a fanatical religious terrorist group with beliefs that comprise a weird mix of Christian and local African religion, led by Joseph Kony, whom you may have heard of from the Kony 2012 movement a few years ago. International forces, including US troops, have been deployed to capture Kony, but so far he remains at large.

So, that brings us to the question of whether Uganda has undergone any meaningful social development during this time. It has certainly undergone considerable social change, oscillating between different regimes and in a constant state of tension between Christian and African religion.

But the word "development" implies some sense of progress, some notion that things are getting better. The history of First World countries like France or the United States is largely one of this sort of progress, with expansion of the right to vote to more people, reductions in discrimination against various minority groups, and greater personal freedoms, as well as ongoing political stability and economic growth. (Obviously it's not always a direct progression, as countries have their ups and downs. But in general most First World countries are better off in most respects than they were say 50 or 100 years ago.)

Uganda does not follow that pattern, however; it has lurched between a series of different regimes, often via military coups, and often one ruthless dictator is removed only to be replaced by another. Often progress toward greater freedom and equality has been quashed or even reversed; the clearest example is rights for LGBT people, or rather the lack thereof. Along with several other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Uganda criminalized homosexuality starting in the 1950s. The penalty has been severe, ranging from imprisonment to execution. In the 1950s many countries criminalized homosexuality (including the US and the UK); but most of these laws were repealed by the 1970s, and nearly all of them were repealed or struck down by the 2000s. Not in Uganda.

In fact, recently these already-draconian laws have been made even harsher; a law passed in 2014 compelled people to report others for homosexuality, essentially turning the entire population into a covert arm of the police charged with investigating and punishing people's private lives. This law was annulled a few months later for technical reasons, but at the end of 2015 a new law was passed which made it illegal to protest or advocate for LGBT rights in any way, effectively criminalizing a number of LGBT rights organizations in the region.

While LGBT rights are the extreme example, similar patterns can be found on the treatment of women and ethnic or religious minorities in Uganda; equality is far from achieved, and sometimes things get better, but mostly they stay the same or get worse.

That certainly does not look like social progress---if anything it looks like social regression, to an older system of government which was more unequal and more draconian. So it definitely seems fair to say that social development in Uganda has not been a reality. I think the harder part of the question might be finding anyone who believes in the myth!

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