Introduction

By John Livingstone (Regional Policy & Research Officer, PENHA-Uganda)

Changes in Approach and the Establishment of the RBC Secretariat in Nairobi

Following the 6^th RBC Conference in Hargeisa, Somaliland, significant changes were made with a view to introducing a new dynamism into the RBC process.

Novib agreed to fund a new RBC Secretariat, in Nairobi, whose purpose would be to guide and coordinate activities across the region and to support the focal point organizations in the individual countries. Previous RBC conferences have incorporated analytical as well as training elements. This 7^th conference, while focusing on the specific issue of conflict over land, aimed, fundamentally, to look at what the different CSOs are doing in each country and to identify ways of strengthening the RBC network.

Arguments for a Shift Towards Bolder Activism

There was a feeling in some quarters that there had been too much talk and too little action. While the need to proceed on the basis of sound analysis, and the value of sharing ideas and experience across the region, were generally accepted, some felt that there was a need for a more activist approach, at both the policy and grassroots levels.

PENHA-Uganda wanted a conference that addressed current controversies and involved key players from government, the private sector, the security forces (police and army), the judiciary (local and national), the media and the communities. Many are convinced that the RBC network needs to move in this direction, with a bolder approach, working much more closely with community groups and building their capacity to advocate for and defend their interests.

Evidently, such an approach is only possible in those countries that have relatively open political systems, such as Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. In other countries, a more cautious approach is necessary. Although, even where civil liberties are restricted, there is scope for network members to work more closely with communities, to build local capacity in various areas, and to work with governments and communities in areas such as natural resource management. The Eritrean NFP’s natural resource management program with women headed households is a good example. The program enjoys government support and it has helped poor households to make better use of their land holdings. CSOs can also carry out analyses and share these with government. Many participants in this conference agreed with the view that CSOs need to develop mutually beneficial partnerships with government.

In the end, it was decided that this conference would look inwards, getting our house in order, so that we could look outwards as we go forward on a sound basis.

The Goal of Enhancing Personal and Working Relationships within the Network

The concept of a “family day” was advanced by the Secretariat. The idea being that members need to get to know each other better as individuals and to spend time interacting informally and developing an understanding.

Hitherto, there has been little, or infrequent, interaction been network members across the region. Dry exchanges of position papers program documents have not produced a genuinely cohesive network of individuals, collaborating intensively on the basis of a set of shared principles.

“Family Day” was to have involved a whole day of loosely structured, and more or less informal, interaction and discussions. But, this had to be abandoned when it became clear that there would not be enough time, with only three days, to get through the formal presentations and the plenary discussions of the latter, as well as the forward-looking sessions on practical/operational matters.

So, the Secretariat’s original conference program had to be substantially modified, with only the usual space for informal interaction.

Nevertheless, the goal of enhancing the quality of the interaction between network members remains, and there are hopes of doing this in innovative ways through the RBC Network’s website. It should be remembered here that relationships between organizations can become more effective when they become relationships between people.

More broadly, participants, NFPs and the Secretariat exchanged a number of ideas on ways to make the network more effective.

Planning and Managing the Conference

Overseeing the modifications to the conference program, and seeking to reconcile divergent visions, was a management team composed of the two facilitators, Dr. Zeremariam Fre of PENHA and Wilson Kaikai of the Participatory Development Centre (Nairobi), William Tsuma and John Aheere of the RBC Secretariat and John Livingstone and Amsale Shibeshi of PENHA-Uganda.

The management team held meetings in the run-up to the conference and on each evening of the conference, as well as at various points during each day of the conference. Amsale Shibeshi, PENHA-Uganda’s program coordinator, was principally responsible for the organization of the conference and made significant inputs on the management (content) side.

It was agreed that the usual mix of country presentations, group and plenary discussions, would be supplemented by “multi-country” group discussions, in which selected members from different countries would interact intensively.

On the final day Karin Van Dijk of Oxfam-Novib and William Tsuma held separate discussions with each country group on the way forward.

For the Uganda team, the discussion with Karin produced agreement on the need to focus on building the capacity of citizen’s groups to advocate for themselves and to defend their rights in local and national judicial and political processes (vis-à-vis District Land Tribunals and local government institutions with decision-making powers as well as their national-level counterparts).

This suggests an agenda of legal awareness training on land rights, information, education and communication around the Land Bill and government policies, efforts to expand access to information in the communities, empowering citizens to challenge and engage with their political representatives, and advocacy-related training for community groups.

All agreed that it is time to take a bolder approach and push harder, taking the side of the poor in the negotiated process that governs access to and ownership over land. PENHA-Uganda put forward the view that, given the uncertainties over land ownership, the outcomes are the result of an on-going negotiation between contending parties – the role of CSOs like PENHA is, then, to strengthen the hand of the poor in this negotiation.

A Note on Pastoralism and Conflict over Land in Uganda

Ugandan participants emphasized pastoralism throughout the deliberations.

This emphasis, in a conference on conflict over land, may not be obvious to those not familiar with the Ugandan context.

In fact, pastoral (communal) land tenure systems and pastoral mobility, as well as seasonal movements onto land that belongs to neighboring communities, have been at the heart of persistent conflict, latent in the West, violent in the East.

In the West, Banyankole and Banyarwanda pastoralists, who formerly enjoyed seasonal access to vast areas of grazing land across several districts, have, since the 1960s, seen their access to grazing land progressively restricted, following land grabs by politically connected ranchers and “absentee landlords”, as well as by a variety of competing land users. In the early 1990s, Western Ugandan pastoralists burned down ranchers’ residences, asserting traditional claims to land that was now privately owned. An uneasy compromise was reached, but latent tensions remain. Poor pastoralists in the West are now largely landless, a situation that imperils their livelihoods and obstructs progress in a number of areas. They cannot, for example, invest in water points, or roofed homes with water harvesting structures, on land that they do not own. The possibilities of mutually beneficial interaction with cultivators, through leasing and bartering arrangements, are limited by ethnic tensions and the fear that temporary users, “squatters”, might gain permanent rights to the land.

In the East, Karamoja’s three contiguous districts occupy a vast area of semi-arid land, bordering Kenya. With only a few agro-pastoral pockets, the area is overwhelmingly pastoralist. It is unquestionably Uganda’s most “backward” area, with little or no social or economic progress since the colonial era. Land is communally owned, with traditional rules and the decisions of clan elders governing land use. Karamojong pastoralists’ almost universal ownership of modern weapons has enabled them to prevent outsiders from alienating their land, and to resist cattle raiding by armed Kenyan pastoralists, but it has also enabled young warriors to terrorise neighboring communities in Teso and Acholiland. Within Karamoja, there has also been persistent violence and armed raiding between clans and ethnic groups, making development initiatives all but impossible. The Governments of Uganda and Kenya have both been sharply criticized for their failure to protect neighboring communities from pastoralist violence. Thousands have been killed in a constant stream of brutality over several decades, and agro-pastoralists in Teso and Acholiland have seen their herds decimated by raiders.

The presence of significant deposits of gold and minerals in Karamoja also poses important questions. Outside business interests are seeking to buy up chunks of land, and are not operating in a way that is transparent to local people. Government policy does not incorporate strong guarantees for local people, nor does it envisage measures, such as the hypothecation of tax revenues, that would ensure that local people benefit from any developments on their traditional land.

There are three key questions in the East:

□       How can neighboring communities be protected and law order maintained?

□       How can seasonal pastoral mobility onto the lands of neighboring communities be made peaceful, mutually beneficial and compatible with animal health regulations?

□       How should communal land tenure be adapted to accommodate social and economic change?

The land question – private versus communal tenure on traditionally pastoral lands, and the terms of access to seasonal grazing land in neighboring areas – is, then, central to violence and (latent) conflict in and around the pastoral areas of Uganda.

Land and Conflict

This conference was originally intended to focus on the concept of land as a strategic resource.

Clearly, land is special. It is owned and traded, and leased, like any other good or asset. But, it is bound up with the identities and ways of life of communities that have lived on a particular area of land for generations. Pastoralism and pastoralist culture have been shaped by, or have grown to fit, the arid lands that pastoralists inhabit. The same could be said of the agricultural communities of the highlands of many countries in the region – identity, culture and land, inseparably intertwined.

But, of course, change is a fact of life. It has been argued that conflict often accompanies positive change. Population growth has put pressure on the land and on traditional systems. In many parts of the region, rapid economic growth and social change are opening up new possibilities, raising the value of land, promoting sales and investment.

Ultimately, these changes may well bring about better standards of living for all, if the winners from change effectively compensate the losers, through new mechanisms for the distribution of benefits from growth and change. But in the short to medium term, change is likely to be associated with increased conflict – whether this conflict is violent or not, depends on the effectiveness of local and national institutions.

In 2004, in Kibaale District, hundreds of people were killed in a handful of days over the issue of the immigration of Bakiga people from neighboring Kabale, where population growth has diminished individual land holdings and left many landless. Large areas of land in Kibaale are now farmed by Bakiga immigrants. The trigger for the violence was the election of a Mukiga to the highest political post in the District, which dramatized for “indigenous” people the scale of the immigration. The keynote speaker at this conference, Hon. Hope Mwesigye, was called in to address the unfolding crisis, as the army moved in to quell the violence. She was instrumental in fashioning a compromise between local politicians that ended the violence. The latent tensions remain. This incident raises important questions for us. Why were so many people killed so quickly? Where were the police forces? Why were local institutions not capable of handling the tensions peacefully? Why didn’t local people advance their positions through civil society organizations and political representatives, before taking up arms?

In other areas, the predicted effects of climate change may be making themselves felt. Somaliland and Ethiopia have undergone a cycle of apparently more frequent droughts and floods. Climate change, alongside the salient macro-political factors, may be a factor in the violent conflict in Darfur. Whatever the facts of individual cases, it seems obvious that there is some scope to improve natural resource management and agricultural productivity in the region and that this could contribute to reducing conflict over land – a primary goal of CSOs, then, should be to help communities, working with government institutions, to make the most of the land that they have.

It is important to recognize that conflicts seldom have a single cause – they are usually the result of the interactions between a number of, related, causative factors.

Ethnic cleavages, poor governance, that often exacerbates ethnic divisions; weak institutions at local and national levels, the inability of the state to supply the basic public good of security; bad economic policies (national, regional and international) that lead to low growth and large pools of unemployed youth who have little to lose from engaging in violent activity – all of these and other factors may contribute to the eruption of violent conflict over a particular area of land.

Daudi Ekuam’s interesting presentation on the shocking post-election violence in Kenya emphasized the way in which latent conflict over land and other resources interacted with other factors to produce terrible violence in one of the region’s most stable countries.

Land tenure regimes across the region are characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. The difficult transition from traditional to modern systems has resulted in a confusing mish-mash, often with multiple overlapping claims to the same piece of land. In principle, security of tenure promotes investment, productivity and economic growth. In practice, land titling in the region has failed to produce these incentive effects, to some degree, because land titles and ownership remain contested. Country presentations at this conference attempted to take us through the complicated development of land tenure systems in each country. In most cases, the complexities are daunting and bewildering. But, rather than aiming to come up with a definitive analysis, or a “magic bullet” solution, we should think in terms of building community capacity to engage in the negotiated legal and political processes that determine outcomes. We should also seek to help strengthen and shape the local and national institutions within which these negotiations, over land ownership and use, take place, in hopes that these institutions will include all stakeholders in discussions that displace violent conflict.

As CSOs, and as a network, we need to think through these analytical issues and agree on some common principles.