Uganda is under the spotlight. With State Department travel restrictions on several senior officials and Amnesty International imploring the government to “reverse its decline,” it has been a full round of condemnation for the African nation.
Much of the negative attention stems from January’s election and its aftermath. Protests in the capital city, Kampala, where the opposition’s voter base is concentrated, descended into violence with the police. Some of it was perhaps excusable: COVID-19 restrictions on the size of public gatherings — when repeatedly broken — presented a challenging policing environment. However, some of the responses were heavy-handed.
Yet castigating a country based on a turbulent snapshot of riots in a capital city can be disproportionate. Kampala is not Uganda, in the same way D.C. is not America. No one would seriously base their view of the state of American human rights and democracy on the storming of Capitol Hill, also in January, by angry Trump supporters.
But in Kampala, they did. The short burst of global attention, with foreign correspondents deployed into the capital, provided an opportunity for a coverage-hungry opposition in their stronghold: Hold lockdown-breaking rallies of over 200 people, only to have them closed down in full glare of the international media.
This was presented as the “real Uganda” while the rest of the country, where most Ugandans live, went unseen. The majority of Ugandans abhorred the violence associated with their election. The global media who conducted narrow-vision election reporting from the Ugandan capital did not have the measure of the nation. Many of the turbulent events were staged for the benefit of these reporters.
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Nestled in the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa, insecurity surrounds Uganda. Neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo has been plagued by decades of conflict and absent governance. South Sudan has not known peace since independence. In Burundi, political persecution and violence has left many with no option but to flee. Most of them come to Uganda to seek refuge. They now number more than 1.2 million.
Not only does the country host the most refugees in Africa, it also practices one of the most progressive policies in the world. Though numbers are important, it is the policy that distinguishes Uganda. After conducting on-ground personal assessment in Uganda, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres documented that the refugees are “not in camps, but in so-called settlements that are in reality villages, like villages of the Ugandan people. This allows them to farm the land, allows them to go to the same schools, the same health centres, to have jobs, to allow them to have normal lives, to live in dignity.”
