Ex-Soldiers and Their Foes Work Together to Learn Farming in Uganda

Sam Ebukalin Okwii is a man with a mission, an African Johnny Appleseed zipping down back roads on a battered dirt bike, one eye out for rain and the other on hesitant fields of new cassava.

The farm extension agent’s mission: to persuade ex-soldiers of Uganda’s governing National Resistance Movement and the rebels who once fought them that the life of a yeoman farmer is more rewarding than that of a warrior.

After years of war that pitted brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor, Uganda is grappling for ways to direct idled fighters toward peaceful pursuits and away from the violence that is all many of them know.

The problem faces many African nations trying to recover from wars. But it is not easy for impoverished countries to provide jobs for thousands of out-of-work soldiers, and people worry about frustrated veterans taking up arms again.

The rebels of the Uganda People’s Army agreed three years ago to end their war against President Yoweri Museveni, who had himself seized power in 1986 as a guerrilla chief only to see a new rebel movement form to oppose him.

With the peace accord, Museveni decided it was time for nearly half his government’s 100,000-man army to begin returning to their homes along with the former rebel fighters.

Home for many of these demobilized warriors is the region comprising the districts of Soroti, Kumi and Pallisa in east-central Uganda, where the Teso people have raised Zebu cattle and cultivated cassava for generations. The region was one of the first in sub-Saharan Africa to use ox-pulled plows.

But travelers in the area today find mainly overgrown fields and few cattle. For the better part of a decade, it was a no-man’s land, overrun by government soldiers, rebels and Karamojong rustlers from the northeast.

Farmers were herded into compounds, and government troops and rustlers carried off the cattle. Famine hovered over the beautiful but dangerous land.

Francis Okaje joined the National Resistance Movement in 1979 when it was a rebel army “to stay alive.” Today, he is chairman of the 10-family Chaniboot Veterans Farmers Assn., whose aim is “to fight famine and poverty.”

Through a U.S.-financed program, the group received two oxen and a plow, and also gets biweekly visits from Okwii, the extension agent for the Soroti Veterans Reintegration Project.

In addition to planting cassava, peanuts and millet--three crops to provide the group with food security--Okaje and his colleagues have learned basic veterinary practices and now care for the neighborhood’s newly acquired cattle.

“The challenge here is trying to come up with a cash crop that the veterans can sell after they have provided for their food security,” said John Kajoba, manager of the Soroti project, whose office opened just a year ago. Peanuts suitable for candy and sesame seeds are possibilities.

Agriculture accounts for 80% of the project activities. Other participants are involved in operating low-capital enterprises such as making bricks, smoking fish and operating bicycle taxis.

Kajoba said the area has the highest concentration of demobilized veterans in Uganda, but not all can participate in the project. The project, which got $900,000 for two years’ operation, is seeking additional aid for a third year to bring in more veterans.

One of those vets is Alfred Okiring, now a member of the Popular Kumi Workers Initiative. As a rebel in the Uganda People’s Army, his job was to try to kill the men who have just helped him hitch his oxen to a plow.

“You just fight for nothing, and you die for nothing,” he says. “It is better that you progress.”

Okwii marches ahead of the oxen and plow, extolling the virtues of straight-row planting.

His father studied at the agricultural extension at the University of Connecticut just after Ugandan independence from Britain in the mid-1960s.

“My father brought back many books that explained better ways of doing things on the farm,” Okwii says. “Most of those books were lost when the army and the rustlers burned down his house. But I remember what they said.”