Why thieving Ugandan politicians remain loyal to NRM party and its leader Museveni
With locusts compounding the Karamoja crisis and rising anger and militancy threatening mining, in 2021, the government voted hundreds of billions of shillings for feeding programmes, and to buy iron sheets and goats for the vulnerable in the region.
Uganda's Karamoja region is awash with minerals. It is also the poorest, plagued by decades of cattle rustling violence, punitive disarmament campaigns by every government since independence, and exploited by a shadowy network of foreign and Ugandan carpetbaggers, especially for its highly prized marble.
Its nomadic Kalashinkov and spear-wielding cattle herders are a hardy, headstrong lot. But decades of drought, starvation, pests (it bore the brunt of the 2021 locust swarm in East and Horn of Africa), and a violent putdown of its "warriors" by the government might be about to break their backs. In the past year, photographs of the starving and dying in Karamoja have been like something straight out of a horror movie.
