By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
In Uganda, environmental conservation is done as a technical rather than an ecological and cultural undertaking. The unity of human communities and nature is continuously abused. The reason for this conservation attitude and practice is traceable to our colonially designed education system, which has for held decades taught generations of Ugandan learners that we are apart from, not part of the environment.
In other words, we have been tuned to take the environment as something physical, which is there just for us to exploit to satisfy our needs and greed. Time has proved that this attitude towards the environment is the reason why we have done so poorly in the enterprise of environmental management and conservation, either as individuals or communities or government through time and space.
There is a need to rethink and change our individual and collective attitude towards the environment if we are to manage and conserve it effectively this century and beyond. The rethinking must start with accepting that we are not apart from the environment but part of it; that we are integral to it, not outside it. Then we must discard the thinking and attitude that the environment is just a physical thing. If we are integral to the environment then our historical, biological, psychological, ecological, social, cultural, moral, ethical and spiritual dimensions of our being, existence, survival, diverse belonging, identities and ecologies must be taken as essential dimensions in the enterprise of management and conservation of the environment.
Therefore, meaningful and effective environmental management and conservation is sensitive to the historical, biological, ecological, psychological, social, moral, ethical and spiritual unity between the physicality of the environment and the human populations and/or communities. Their diverse environmental histories, biologies, psychologies, ecologies, socialities, moralities, ethics and spiritualities must be factored into the environmental management and conservation environment for any success to be recorded.
Although in the universities there may be programmes focusing on environmental history, environmental biology, environmental psychology, environmental sociology, environmental morality, environmental ethics and environmental spirituality, they frequently contribute little to environmental management and conservation because they are taught in the disciplines with little effort to seek integration across disciplinary walls. Besides, academics an academicization are unreal human activities, that can have no meaning to the real enterprise of environmental management and conservation.
This means that our rethinking of the environment for effective environmental management and conservation must include revising the way we have been taking the environment to be: a physical being. We must also rethink the disciplinary science, which has dominated education at university campuses and discouraged the integration of knowledge and its application to environmental management and conservation.
We must allow interdisciplinary science, crossdisciplinary science, transdisciplinary science and extra-disciplinary science, which are knowledge-integration loving, to coexist on university campuses. When this happens, universities will produce graduates and /or professionals who will think critically, reason broadly, and be future-ready enough to address environmental challenges in the various dimensions of the environment.
Since, from the reasoning above, humanity is an essential aspect of the total environment, we must accept that a meaningful and accommodative definition and structure of the environment needs to include Man, Homo sapiens, in his diverse dimensions. We must abandon the thinking that the environment is just physical not just physical and that Man is the villain that must be contained to manage and conserve the environment for posterity. Until we separated humanity from the environment through formal education, the environment and humanity needed each other to preserve each other and in fact co-evolved. In this relationship, the non-physical aspects of humanity were critical to effective environmental management and conservation.
For decades I have taught that the environment is multidimensional with its dimensions also being multidimensional. I have taught that the environment is four dimensions in one, each dimension constituting one-quarter or 25% of the environment. I have taught that the dimensions are not mutually exclusive, are mutually inclusive and dynamically interact with each other to make the environment not just a physical being but a dynamic living being with non-physical dimensions. Meaningful and effective environmental conservation must take this in account.
Otherwise, a lot of time, energy and money will be cowed into environmental management and conservation without ever achieving meaningful effective environmental management and conservation. The people in their diverse communities will be taken as the enemies of effective management and conservation enterprise and separated further from the physical environment. Yet, like in the past, we need the people and their communities to be at the centre of effective environmental management and conservation. Environmental management and conservation may be reduced to political management of people and the environment, which never succeeds.
The real enemies of effective environmental management and conservation are (i) the universities that continue to teach the environment as if it is just the physical environment and have persisted in separating the sciences – the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences from each other, yet together they constitute one science; (ii) the political elite who make laws and policies for environmental management and conservation that target only the physical environment; (iii) the bureaucratic elites that conceive strategies for environmental management and conservation that target only the physical environment; (iv) foreign international financial institutions (IFIs) that finance projects and programmes that end up destroying the environment further; and environmental refugees that are incessantly flocking into Uganda and disrupting environments and ecologies ecological-biologically, socio-economically and socio-culturally in time and space.
Byarugaba and Oweyegha-Afunaduula (1995) perceived the environment as consisting of and/or organized in three dimensions: ecological-biological, socio-cultural, and socio-economic. However, without the temporal dimension, the environment is incomplete. We wrote that all environmental and development problems, issues, and challenges can be assigned to these dimensions separately and interconnected.
All physical aspects of the environment are assigned to the ecological-biological dimension, and all the non-physical aspects belong to the other three dimensions. Unfortunately, the nonphysical aspects of the environment are ignored, yet they are more dynamic and impact society far more badly and in diverse ways (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022).
The rethinking of the environment, which started long ago before the new millennium must, therefore, recognize four dynamically interacting dimensions of the environment, none of which is independent of the others, and are, therefore, intricately interlinked. The four dimensions are:
- The Ecological-Biological Dimension
- The Socio-economic Dimension
- The Socio-cultural Dimension
- The Time (or Temporal) Dimension
When we talk of sustainable environment and development, we should see this as the balance between these four dimensions of the environment in such a way than none of them constitutes more than one -quarter or 25% of the environment at the expense of the others and, therefore, that there is harmonious interaction between them. Unfortunately, as we emphasize sustainable environment and development, (SED), the physical environment is losing out to the socio-economic and socio-cultural dimensions, in which most environmental changes take place as the time dimension is incessantly abused. In fact, few environmental managers are aware that time is an integral component of the environment. They are also unaware that the environment is more than the physical environment (the ecological-biological), and include the socio-economic dimension, the socio-cultural dimension and the socio-cultural dimension (which includes the sociopolitical perspective).
Let me address the dangerous changes taking place in the various dimensions of the environment in Uganda.
Changes in the Ecological-Biological Dimension
In the ecological-biological dimension, refugees, former or current, own factories, separately or in joint ventures with Asians (Indians and Chinese); large, extensive farms and ranches; plantations of sugarcane and oil palm; aquaculture farms; mining enterprises; shops and supermarkets; hostels and hotels; petrol stations; private schools, hospitals, and dispensaries; trailers; buses, et cetera. A lot of land grabbing, even in designated national park and game reserve areas and in whole communities, is being carried out by them or people connected to and protected by them. This is how and why public forests are endangered. Some of the grabbed land contains water resources and sacred resources, which the deprived public can no longer access. Natural waterfalls have been destroyed, ostensibly to produce and supply hydroelectricity to Ugandans.
However, increasingly, electricity has become too expensive for the majority of Ugandans to afford (Oweyegha-Afunaduula (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022). It is in this dimension that we are witnessing climate change become a serious issue locally, regionally and globally. Our distinct seasons (two rainy seasons and two dry seasons have disappeared. Rain now comes any time it wants. This year, 2024, we have received rain throughout the year; a phenomenon that used to be the case only for Mabira Rain Forest before it was badly destroyed power (military and political
The rulers have illegally mined in national parks and game reserves for limestone and other natural resources; felled trees in game reserves and forest reserves to establish plantations of oil palm and sugarcane; removed natural vegetation and replaced it with foreign species of Eucalyptus and Cypress; and erected huge dams in national parks or elsewhere along the Nile, thereby erasing endemic species of plants.
In all cases, the academics in charge of government institutions responsible for the management and conservation of wildlife and/or natural areas have publicly approved the above-mentioned human activities by saying/writing that the actions will not seriously harm the environment, or by looking on with naked eyes as the government destroys our wildlife and the total environment in the name of development. They have approved so-called industrial parks in swamps and other wetlands.
Meanwhile, polluting activities have been okayed, thereby leading to enhanced levels of pollutants in our atmosphere and the threat of climate change. We no longer have two rainy seasons and two dry seasons. Rainfall is tending to come throughout the year, like was the case in Mabira Rain Forest. All this suggests that, on the whole, the academics in charge of managing and conserving and our wildlife and the total environment are suffering from imposed environmental ignorance (Oweyegha-Afunaduula 2023).
Changes in the Socioeconomic Dimension
Refugees and former refugees, who have no historical, ecological, biological, psychological, moral, ethical and spiritual attachment to Uganda’s diverse ecologies and environments, now predominate and dominate in the socio-economic dimension of the environment, where they have resisted reinstating the minimum and fare wages for Ugandans.
This is causing many Ugandans to lose interest in their country and to flee to foreign countries. Instead of encouraging investment in whole communities, refugees and former refugees in power have chosen the path of money bonanzas for a few select individuals, many of whom emerge as connected to them either politically or ethnically. This may explain why the absolute majority of Ugandans are not experiencing development, transformation, and progress in the 21st century.
Rather than ensuring that communities experience improvement in their income bases and livelihoods, refugees and former refugees are presiding over a country in which communities of indigenous Ugandans are getting poorer and poorer with the passage of time (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022). They are instead grabbing land from the local communities to enhance their economic dominance and their monetary benefits. The have erected huge mansions, petrol stations, supermarkets, hotels and other islands of economic enhancement, mainly in swampy areas, for themselves at the expense of Ugandans.
Corruption has provided most of the funds they are using, denying the citizens quality social development. They have even captured the crop of prosperity – coffee, which they want to directly manage. Besides, they have captured the mineral resources of the country, which they exploit for themselves at the exclusion of the indigenes.
I have elsewhere stated that the agroecological farming systems of Uganda, which used to sustain our food security, economic security, health security and social security of the traditional societies through the extended family system are being destroyed by the refugees and former refugees. Our future environmental security is in jeopardy.
It is in the socioeconomic dimension that ideas such as Bonna Bagaggawale, Myooga, Operation Wealth Creation and Parish Development Model have been introduced, ostensibly to empower the people economically. However, they manifest like environmental pollutants since they do not target whole communities but select individuals. Their individual development, transformation and progress are supposed to trickle down into the communities, but this never happens.
The communities continue to sink into debilitating income poverty. Besides, the beneficiaries of those schemes manifest as environmental destroyers, since they have to assault the environment to make ends meet. Or many the ends never meet and they sink farther into income poverty. Meanwhile, whole communities miss socioeconomic development, transformation and progress because public funds are being used as money bonanzas for select individual, sometimes with political aims of votes.
Changes in the Socio-Cultural Dimension
In the social-cultural dimension of the environment, the cultural and social structures and functions sustained for centuries by the diverse cultures and sociality of the indigenes have been systematically eroded. Land grabbing and the settlement of an alien group of people in all parts of the country where the traditional ethnic groups of Uganda have thrived for centuries have brought into focus a well-coordinated plot to own every resource in a cultural void. They have used some misguided indigenes and some highly educated and highly placed indigenes to facilitate their population displacements, dispossessions, desocialization and de-culturalization of whole communities.
Because the culture and sociality of traditionally settled communities have been shaped by the total environment, the destruction of the total environment has been emphasized as the main avenue for destroying the cultures and socialities of indigenous communities and converting them into disorganized congregations of beggars and slaves. Beggars and slaves have no culture and are no longer meaningfully attached to the land. Neither can they meaningfully be involved in production or even pay taxes. This could, in part, explain the rising dependency of the Ugandan government on the dwindling donations and/or debilitating loans, which are unfortunately, being abused or stolen by politicians and government functionaries.
Besides, the pervading and permeating foreign culture of money is destroying the social and cultural fabrics of society as the government sticks to the falsehood and outmoded idea that, if money bonanzas are given to a select few individuals, community development will be achieved through a trickle-down effect. However, the majority of the money never reaches the bottom of society. Due to rising income poverty, families, extended families, clans, and whole communities are breaking up.
Simultaneously, society is decaying ethically, morally, spiritually, socially, and culturally. It will be extremely difficult to rebuild it. Even leadership in the rural area, which used to be based on the culture of the people, has been systematically destroyed and replaced by NRM party leadership. This is dangerous. It decentralizes and dissociates leadership, transferring it to the NRM Party’s political leadership. Alternative leadership is muzzled and disabled. It is worse than was the case under British colonialism.
I should not forget to emphasise that it is in the sociocultural dimensions that the environment is most supersonically decaying and collapsing under the aegis of corruption-driven sociopolitics. This is eroding all kinds of justice, security and peace, specifically environmental justice, environmental security and environmental peace. It is in this dimension that society is losing through cultural, social, moral, ethical, psychological and spiritual erosions, mainly due to foreign influences..
Changes in the Temporal Dimension
Last but not least, the temporal (or time) dimension of the environment is deteriorating due to the increasing abuse of time, the most critical resource available (24 hours) for the country’s development, transformation, and progress. Time is central to every process of development, transformation, and progress. If it is grossly abused, as it is in Uganda, then it becomes extremely difficult to experience meaningful and effective development, transformation, and progress.
When planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating projects and programs are done without respect for time, the results are unlikely to be the ones envisaged or else production will be consistently and persistently below capacity. The most consistent thing will be to spend money to sustain the workforce, which is increasingly unprofessional and unskilled since the selection of the workers seems to be based more on technical know-how than on resourcefulness, experience, and qualifications. The overall result is that, on a given timescale, failure superseded success (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022).
Way Forward
Uganda’s environment must be liberated from its capture and occupation by refugees and former refugees. If not, the invasive nomadic pastoralists’ capture and occupation of Uganda’s environments will be the ultimate fundamental change that President Tibuhaburwa Museveni did not explicitly mention when he said on January 25, 1986, “This is not a mere change of guards, but a fundamental change. “This will express itself in the total decay and collapse of Uganda’s time-tested bioecological systems, which were the basis of a thriving agricultural production system before the invasion, acquisition, and occupation by nomadic pastoralists (Oweyegha-Afunaduula,2022).
Hilary Heuler (2013), in her article “Missing the Forest for the Trees” published in the Earth Island Journal, cites me saying: “There are many places where swamps have dried up, such as in Western Uganda, where eucalyptus have sucked up all the water, I have also tried to introduce local species of plants in my own village. I have an agro-forestry farm there, which contains only local species. We have some tree species that grow fast, like musizi. Even mvule can grow fast if planted among other trees. It is very good for wood, for protection of the environment, for binding the soil. But it is not being emphasized. Institutionally and politically, our indigenous tree species are being worked against in favor of pine and eucalyptus.” Those plantations are not forests. They are biological deserts – formations which do not allow other beings to exist among them,” he says. “You won’t even find things like butterflies, snakes, and birds”
The blame should go to the practice of academicization of management and conservation of the environment, thereby producing managers and conservators who are basically academics, and hence unreal. They need to be retrained especially in view of the fact that we are in a century of new and different knowledge production, that emphasizes knowledge integration and reintegration and produces more holistic knowledge workers and users. In one sentence, “It is wrong to academicize the environment and clog its Leadership and Management with academic elite, or even military elites. It is important universities embrace integrative and integrating sciences which take all science as one and perceive the environment as a multidimensional concept, with the dimensions dynamically interlinked and interactive. This will lead to generation of necessary environmentally rich wisdom.
. As I wrote in my article “The sociology of Uganda’s elite and the necessary crusade for mind liberation” of 10th July 2023,” one distinguishing feature of our elites is that they are greedy and selfish and believe only today and now matters. They are not so futuristic in their thinking; meaning that they do not factor future generations in their equation, and are more oriented towards exploiting (environmental) goods and services, conquering nature, and the anti- conservation attitude is almost universally developed amongst them is the attitude that they are modern. They tend to be Westernized and both despise and have rural roots.
They are almost completely urbanized, with extremely few of them having homes in the rural areas where their ancestral homes persisted for centuries. As such they are outward-looking, with wandering minds that are more comfortable externally than internally. They need mind liberation”. I may add that so disoriented, they are unlikely to be curious enough about nature to conserve and manage it wisely for posterity as our ancestors did. They are likely to work in the interests of environmentally destructive forces.
Environmental governance and political governance are interlinked. In my article titled “Environmental Governance for Diverse Ecologies in Uganda: Is It Possible?” published by MUWADO of 1st December 2023, I link environmental governance to political governance, emphasizing that it is difficult to separate the two; that this is because political decision-making is central to environmental governance at all levels of decision-making; and that effective environmental governance is seen in its capacity to maintain diverse ecologies simultaneously with maintaining diverse economies. I add that because Uganda has a diversity of ecologies, including agroecological farming systems ecologies, environmental governance should encourage the perpetuation of ecologies that support the various agroecological farming systems on which we depend for food and socioeconomic security (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2023).
I evoke education and training policies to explain why we are doing badly in environmental governance for conservation. I state “Education and Training in Uganda is still rooted in the past; driven as it is by the disintegration of knowledge. Therefore, the products of the education system are still disciplinary and who, therefore, see, pursue and produce knowledge disjointly. They are completely unaware of the existence of new knowledge cultures and/or systems, namely: interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity, which are more sensitive to meaningful and effective environmental governance.
Effective environmental governance requires interculturality, crossculturality, transculturality and extraculturality. Since we need critical thinkers, sustainability science, effective teamwork and future-ready professionals, we must rethink education and training policies to begin to produce people we need to govern the environment for diverse ecologies” (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2023). However, I also mention that effective environmental governance will require rethinking our social, land, civil rights, governance, mining, rural development, and refugee policies, which collectively are an antithesis of effective environmental governance for conservation of our diversity of ecologies in the 21st Century and beyond.
In my article “Integrating Conservation, Biodiversity and Sustainability: The Case of Uganda” published by Nile Post” of 19 October 2023 I write: “In Uganda, environmentally unconscious policies for industrialization, agriculture, energy, forestry, food production and land grabbing by greedy and selfish people are delinking conservation from biodiversity and sustainability Ecosystem services everywhere in the country are being violated for selfish ends at the expense of humanity. Whole ecosystems are being destroyed simultaneously with the destruction of agroecological systems.
This is in total ignorance of the fact that there can be no meaningful and effective development if conservation, biodiversity and sustainability are not interconnected and integrated to maintain their interdependence”. I add that “A lack of interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary and nondisciplinary or extra-disciplinary scholars working on solutions-based research has been a barrier to achieving sustainability objectives in the country. Yet without achieving sustainability objectives, we are just sojourners of the century”.
In my article “Uniting Climate Justice, Cooperation, Peace and Diplomacy in Environmental Security Building” published in Daily Express Uganda of November 4 2024 I advise that “It is time for state and nonstate actors to collaborate effectively on building environmental security for prosperity and posterity. There is no doubt that environmental security concepts are shaping the contours of global [and regional] environmental governance (e.g., Liebenguth, 2022). They must begin to be seen shaping the contours of national environmental governance as well. Later will be too late”.
Sadly, all our socio-culturally constructed life conserving bio-ecological systems are being destroyed through grandiose land grabbing of whole ecosystems, mostly by people whose human energy system is the nomadic pastoralists energy system. They have power and they have the gun. They are disintegrating, dispossessing and displacing indigenous people from land and destroying their cultures and well-being for their own greed and selfishness.
They are largely responsible for the current climate change in the country, not only through land grabbing but also the land, water, agricultural and forestry policies they make, driven by the sterile culture of money, and their own possessive and acquisitive culture of nomadic pastoralism. This culture dictates that we move from one thing to another with no indication that planning is important.
So the well-being of citizens has been greatly sacrificed for the narrow interests of power, domination, glory and wealth. Integral Ecology does not matter. Culturally based development does not matter Values-based ecological worldview does not matter. People do matter. What matter are things, power, power retention, politics, domination and the alien culture of money. We have made survival of the fittest as the cornerstone of governance and leadership in the 21st Century.
Such governance and leadership is genocidal. All policies and laws will tend to be designed to ensure that survival of the fittest dictates who lives and who does not. The vulnerable victims are the poor and needy. No protection in the real sense of the word (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2024). There is great need to specifically consider the interaction between the refugees and former refugees in the environment of Uganda. I have been environmentally and ecologically interested in the issue of refugees in the Great Lakes region since 1995 (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022).
The growing refugee economy undermines Uganda’s long-term independence, citizenship, sovereignty, environmental security, , environment peace and environmental justice and unity. It is the surest tool the State is using to disempower Ugandans and put them under the continued rule and domination by former and current refugees. Most of what is happening in the social areas and in the political arena are, no doubt, explained by the loss of power and authority of bona fide Ugandans to former and current refugees with our citizenship, dual citizenship and nationality. It is not far-fetched to suggest that Uganda’s refugee economy is also a political strategy of the increasingly narrow State. (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022).
There is great need for the indigenous Ugandans to be in charge of their country and its resources, as well as the enterprise of environmental management and conservation. People from foreign cultures cannot be expected to manage and conserve the environments of Uganda effectively because they have no historical, biological, ecological, psychological, moral, ethical and spiritual links with them They manifest as environmental pollutants.
Last but not least, instead of political cadres, we shall need a new cadre of environmentally-literate, environmentally conscious and environmentally sensitive elites generated from the alternative sciences of interdisciplinary science, crossdisciplinary science transdisciplinarity science and extradisciplinary science. These will be the one we shall rely on for meaningful and effective environmental leadership and governance in the 21sy Century and beyond.
Without them we can forget meaningful and effective environmental management and conservation this century and beyond. The universities must quickly transform themselves into integrating and integrative universities of the 21st century and beyond. They prepare themselves to be the 21st Century academic and environmental dinosaurs if they continue to ignore the wind of change in science that is favouring the integrating and integrative sciences of interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity.
For God and Country
Do you have a story or an opinion to share? Email us on: [email protected] Or join the Daily Express WhatsApp channel for all the latest news and trends or join the Telegram Channel for the latest updates.
