Africa-Press – Uganda. The Acholi paramount chief, Mr David Onen Acana II, has rejected the latest poverty ranking by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), which places the sub-region as the poorest in the north.
He says it is a ploy by the government to get more donor aid for projects that have failed to impact the area.
“The level of poverty in Karamoja is terrible but when I look at the life and wellbeing of my people, I don’t think we are worse than Karamoja. The findings aren’t representing us well and this could be intended to win sympathy for donor funding,” Rwot Acana told journalists in Gulu City last week.
“I was told they are writing a proposal in our name using this poverty report and that is what makes me think that it is only meant to influence the donors to give the country more,” he added.
Rwot Acana said the report needs more interrogation.
Recently, UBOS issued the national poverty ranking indicating that Acholi had the poorest levels in the northern region at 67.5 percent, 2.5 percent higher than the Karamoja.
Whereas UBOS 2016/2017 poverty ranking indicated that poverty levels in Acholi and Karamoja sub-regions had grown by 5.6 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively, the 2019/2020 ranking indicated that poverty in Acholi rose by 10.3 percent while Karamoja scored 5.2 percent.
Rwot Acana, however, admitted that poverty levels in the region had remained significantly high due to the slow recovery following the two-decade insurgency by the Lords Resistance Army Rebels .
“We still have poverty because we had war and people were pushed to live in camps, and for 20 years, they were constrained to engage in meaningful ventures that would propel them out of poverty while the little they had was lost to war.”
“We lost food, animals, lives during the war, but if this government was transparent, there would be direct support for people who suffered harm,” Rwot Acana said. He said it was easy for those in the government to influence partners to give more money to the country using the situation in Acholi.
“We saw it at the time of the war. Many projects came here and yet they have never benefited us. As the war ended, there were so many interventions by the government to rehabilitate the area but the support mainly ended up in the hands of the implementers of such programmes,” Rwot Acana said.
While speaking at St Philip Cathedral in Gulu City last year, Chief Justice Alphonse Owiny-Dollo attributed poverty in Acholi to primitivism.
“I am ashamed to be called Chief Justice of Uganda if one of the greatest societies in education in this country is ridiculed as a society that has gone back to primitivism. I believe my brother, the Speaker (Jacob Oulanyah) has no pride.”
Chief Justice Owiny-Dollo said the people of Acholi should have stayed in IDP camps to save their morals and culture.
“How I wished our people continued to live in IDP camps because they were somehow constrained from doing or practising such evils and backwardness. The level of moral decay we now experience in Acholi is worse than that we experienced while rounded up in IDP camps,” he said.
Other regions
According to the 2019/2020 UBOS data, Lango and West Nile sub-regions scored 5.4 percent and 5.2 percent respectively. In the 2016/2017 ranking, the two regions scored 3.9 percent and 7.8 percent, respectively. Only Busoga Sub-region scored higher than Acholi in the 2019/2020 ranking with a 14.5 percent poverty increase compared to a slightly higher figure of 16 percent it scored in the 2016/2017 ranking.
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