Opinion Why Kony is yesterdays story in Uganda
The only person Ive ever met who was in the Lords Resistance Army is a Ugandan man named Francis
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Dayo Olopade
The only person Ive ever met who was in the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) is a Ugandan man named Francis. He was abducted by the group sometime in the late 1990s,when he was a teenager,and forced to march from central Uganda to what is now South Sudan. During a firefight with the Ugandan national army,Francis escaped with his best friend. They had never spoken aloud. The LRA enforced silence on marches.
The older Francis is a soldier again. But he isnt in Uganda. Hes in Iraq. Like many well-trained local fighters,hes gone to fill the vacuum left after the United States military fled its war of choice. I met Francis only once,last summer,in passing,but Kony 2012 made me remember his story. The viral video by the American nonprofit Invisible Children showcases Joseph Kony,the madman at the helm of the LRA who has been indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The video calls for his arrest this year and for public pressure on the US military to stay in the hunt. Thanks to it,some 50 million viewers,mostly non-Ugandans who understood nothing of Kony,now have the knowledge to despise him as much as a generation of Northern Ugandan families.
Except that hardly anyone in Uganda is talking about him. I spent most of February in Kampala and environs,and there Kony was a whisper on nobodys lips. Even since the US sent 100 Special Forces to Central Africa in the fall to assist in the chase,both he,and the LRA,remain far from a mainstream concern.
Ordinary Ugandans are worrying about other things. The government needs a strategy for assessing its capital needs by sector. Should Uganda build an oil refinery or forgo the profits and send crude to Kenya for processing? And if its Ugandan children in peril youre looking for,there are those suffering from nodding disease an unusual neurological disease thats killed hundreds of children in the very region Kony once terrorised.
The Kony video is a distraction. In Kampala last month,I met Hadijah Nankanja,the local director of Women of Kireka,a collective of women touched by Konys marauding violence. This was my second encounter with the group,happy to have income-generating activity to banish thoughts of past terror.
Hadijah and I tried to come up with a way forward. Food production? Distribution would be a problem. Tailoring? The investment in sewing machines was too great. Hair salons? The market appeared saturated. We didnt come up with a concrete plan,but opening a small restaurant seemed to be the front-running proposition. Our informal brainstorming session took about the same time as does watching Kony 2012. I dare suggest that time spent marshalling such reserves of imagination,communion and capital to support jobs for displaced victims is far more helpful than this sort of advocacy. The kinds of problems Hadijah is trying to understand and solve are less sexy than the horror stories trailing behind Kony. But they are the nut worth cracking.
Unfortunately,the mundane march of progress in poor countries is what awareness campaigns often miss. And when,as in this case,success is determined by action from outside the region,cries of a new imperialism should be taken seriously. Few international NGOs working in Africa define success properly as putting themselves out of business. Invisible Children seems no better.
Lets not amplify and reproduce another narrative of Africa in crisis when Ugandans themselves are moving on.
The writer is a journalist covering global politics and development policy
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