EAR TO THE GROUND | Charles Onyango Obbo

What fate of Uganda’s troops in Somalia reveals about our politics
A week ago a terrorist bomb exacted a heavy toll on the struggling Somalia government, when an explosion blasted a Mogadishu graduation ceremony, killing 19 civilians, including three ministers. A few weeks earlier, there had been another deadly attack, this time on the African Union peacekeepers, where several members of the Ugandan contingent of the AMISOM force in Somalia were killed.

That attack forced AMISOM to reveal, for the first time, that it had lost 80 of its soldiers in explosions and clashes with Somali militants since the force deployed there in March 2007.

The 5,000 AU troops are mostly from Uganda and Burundi. Of the 80 soldiers killed, 37 of them are Ugandan.

The anniversary of the Somalia mission usually passes without comment, and Ugandan casualties there get one or two days in the media, and are then quickly forgotten.

One reason for this is that the public has grown cynical of UPDF missions abroad, and the interests the army serves at home. The defining experience was the nearly 10 years that the UPDF spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during which time it came to be viewed as nothing less than a bandit force used by rogue officers and NRM big wigs and their cronies in Kampala to plunder minerals, timber, coffee, and even wild game.

In Somalia, many reasoned that the UPDF role in the mission was part of a scheme by President Museveni to buy favour from the West, and shield him the pressure over his push to amend the Constitution in 2005, which opened the door for him to be president for life.

Even if that were true, on close scrutiny, the UPDF peacekeeping in Somalia is different from the disastrous one to the DRC in major ways. Unlike the DRC, the group of militants who eventually take power in Somalia can have far-reaching implications for East African security. Right now, the radical Islamist group Al-Shabaab that controls most of Somalia has governments in the region and the West running scared. They believe that an Al-Shabaab take over will be the equivalent of having Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda ruling Somalia.

My own view is that Somalis are among Africa’s most pragmatic people (which is why they succeed where they have been scattered by the crisis back home) and that the risk of an Al-Shabaab takeover is overstated, but it is understandable why others might be alarmed.

So unlike DRC, the UPDF in Somalia have nothing to loot. In fact, don’t expect them to return with local women in tow and chicken dangling from their backs, as happened with the troops in Congo.

That said, even if Museveni has his own private agenda, for once the UPDF mission in Somalia – its most dangerous and thankless such task -- is part of something big.

If you look closely at the kind of officers in Somalia, you begin to see something else. Quite a few of them belong to the old National Resistance Army idealistic tradition, which believed that they would take over power and bring about a fair, law-abiding, corruption free political order in Uganda.

This school lost out years ago, and the power-hungry and blood-sucking wolves have taken over and are calling the shots. Indeed, they are growing stronger.

The UPDF in Somalia, therefore, is what the national army would have looked like if it hadn’t been turned into a fiefdom of a largely tribal officer corps, serving dishonourable interests of the NRM political elite – like stealing elections, tormenting the opposition, and serving as a palace guard. The contrast of the UPDF in Mogadishu with that at home, where it is has been deployed to guard land which influential people have bought out of the speculative calculation that they will make a killing from the oil in it, could not be more stark.

Compare again, the kind of officers who were deployed to hunt down the Lords Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony at their Sudan-DRC border bases earlier in the year. With the help of the US, the hopes were high that Kony would be killed, or at least captured. Therefore politically favoured, but inexperienced, officers who are part of the Museveni grand succession project were given the command, in the hope that their success against Kony would catapult them to national stardom. It didn’t happen.

By contrast, there will be national stardom for the Ugandan officers in Somalia, however successful they are, in part because they are part of a multinational effort. Secondly, success in Somalia will not come dramatically from a battlefield victory. In that sense, the UPDF mission is driven by old school but honourable values of service, not personal glory.

If you are a student of Ugandan, or more specifically NRM politics, pay attention to the mission in Mogadishu. Pay attention because it represents ideals that are dying in the army back home, and this might be the last time you will see them. The only thing the boys in Somalia have with those back home, is that they both have not been paid their salaries for some months now.

cobbo@nation.co.ke