Advertisement

Wonders never cease! Look who’s talking gorillas now

Saturday September 13 2014

Wonders never cease.” I grew up hearing an elderly relative utter these words regularly. It was his way of reacting to news he found particularly amusing or which gave him pause for thought.

I used to find this amusing, as it was one of the few phrases he could string together in English, a language he loved but could neither speak nor write properly.

The phrase came back to mind on Tuesday August 9, as I read a story describing an event that was underway in Kampala. It involved officials from the three neighbouring countries, Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to the New Vision, Uganda’s leading daily, the three countries’ representatives had come together under the auspices of the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration, a mechanism established to strengthen security around parts of their territories straddled by Virunga Forest Park, one of the few remaining sanctuaries for the world-famous mountain gorilla.

The meeting sought to come up with “joint measures” through which the three countries could pursue their common objective of safeguarding wildlife and protecting the natural environment in the areas in question.

They would like to do this via strengthening legislation while at the same time working in partnership with local people.

Advertisement

Wildlife and nature conservation groups must be thrilled. The meeting went as far as discussing the possibility of sharing revenue, especially from gorilla tourism, a significant money-spinning niche in the regional tourism industry.

Under normal circumstances, there should be nothing remarkable about neighbouring countries coming together in this way to pursue common interests for the collective good of their citizens.

In this instance, however, there is every reason to wonder how they pulled it off. That is because since the early 1990s the three countries have been caught up in arguments and accusations pertaining to the activities of insurgents that, from time to time, have pursued regime change in all three.

Interestingly, efforts to sort out the mess have never been left to the three governments. On the contrary, as if to suggest that they are inherently incapable of sorting out their own affairs by themselves, such efforts have involved a multitude of actors chasing different goals.

Many are from places so far removed from the local context that one is compelled to wonder to what extent the approaches and solutions they bring to the table and whose adoption they usually influence, are “fit for purpose.”

That they generally don’t fit can in many ways be seen in their failure, after billions of dollars have been spent and dozens of meetings held, to address the root causes and real drivers of conflict.

Which is why, one can argue, they have never ensured that insurgent groups that are de-activated or “neutralised” do not sprout again and start new wars.

President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, arch-advocate of African solutions for African problems and critic of Eurocentric approaches, has long argued that the search for durable solutions be left to local actors with intimate knowledge of what has gone wrong and what needs to be done to correct past mistakes.

It is hardly rare to hear significant voices within and outside government in all three countries wonder why the three governments do not engage with each other, without foreign chaperons, and agree what needs to be done to guarantee long-term peace and stability in the region.

There are many theories about this. One is that trust, an indispensable ingredient of healthy inter-state relations, is largely absent.

Indeed, reliable sources suggest that three-way meetings have been held more than once and agreement reached about collective courses of action that never saw the light of day.

This, apparently, is because after every meeting the DRC has done nothing to fulfil its end of the bargain. Sources there attribute this partly to internal political rivalries among the political elite in Kinshasa with conflicting views about who and what drives conflict in their country. The consequence of all this, reports suggest, is that in Kampala and Kigali, the DRC is seen as anything but a reliable partner.

Unable to arrive at durable solutions with its counterparts because of these challenges, the DRC government has turned to external support to keep at bay neighbours whose security interests remain under threat from insurgents it has neither the capacity nor the drive to uproot from its territory.

International and regional powers, whose interests in the country are not unconnected to its vast wealth, even as they accuse Uganda and Rwanda of exploiting it, have been happy to jump in and claim roles for themselves as nannies of sorts and as overseers of efforts seeking to normalise relations among the three neighbours.

Remarkably, as the three countries discussed security for wild animals, there was no mention of the usual mistrust, let alone the mediators that bedevil discussions about enhancing the security of their citizens. Indeed, wonders never cease.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]

Advertisement