Forget Karamoja, we can't even find the illegal guns in Kampala
By Joachim Buwembo
The East African, Aug 1 -7 ,2005
It took the murder of Mrs Robinah Kiyingi on the evening of Monday July 11 to awaken the authorities to the similarity between Kampala city and the remote region of Karamoja in the northeast of Uganda.
Mrs Kiyingi, a lawyer, a mother of four and chairperson of the Uganda chapter of Transparency International, was killed by a gunman who shattered her skull with seven bullets from an AK47 rifle as she drove up to her gate in the upmarket Buziga suburb of Kampala.
Everybody talks of the illegal guns in Karamoja, a region bordering northwestern Kenya where cross-border cattle raids are frequent, and there have been several operations to disarm the Karimojong pastoralists and cattle rustlers.
But few people ever consider the likelihood that there are more illegal guns per square kilometre in Kampala district than in Karamoja. And unlike Karamoja, where there are cultural rules governing the use of the gun that will allow you to live to a ripe old age if you observe them, in Kampala we only have official laws, which are not fully enforced anyway.
Kampala is hardly 200 square kilometres in area, but has thousand illegal guns, compared with Karamoja, which covers several thousand square kilometres and has several thousand illegal guns. Kampala thus beats Karamoja in density of illegal weaponry, yet you rarely hear of an operation to rid Kampala of illegal guns.
One day, at the close of 1999, the government conducted a swoop that netted one thousand illegal guns in Kampala. The press were briefed and given figures breaking down the collection of the firearms in the city's five divisions. The biggest haul was made in Makindye division. While the news was surprisingly positive, it did not provide any relief because the 1,000 culprits were never charged in the courts of law for illegal possession of firearms.
At least, there were no open trials. Then, a couple of years later, there was the successful Operation Wembley, which led to a sharp reduction in armed crime in the city. But it was followed by rumours of a thousand guns having "gone missing" in the process. While the city is really peaceful and one can walk out in most neighbourhood at any time of night, the knowledge that some figure lurking in the dark could open fire on you as you open your gate can be quite uncomfortable.
What is even scarier is that most murders are committed using guns that belong to the government. You do not hear of someone being murdered with a civilian firearm. Unlike cars, which people are allowed to drive at the age of 18, civilians are only licensed to bear firearms if they have attained the age of 26 and above.
That way, you don't have young fellows who have quarrelled over a girl yanking out pistols to settle the issue. Moreover, any careless mishap involving a civilian-licensed firearm ends in a serious charge of failing to secure one's firearm. If the same yardstick were to be applied across the board, the government would be constantly facing charges of failing to secure its firearms.
The government has, for instance, repeatedly told us it has never licensed anyone to carry an AK47. (This provides the state with the justification of trying anyone who uses it to commit a crime in the military court martial as a "volunteer" army personnel.) So any AK47 you see in Uganda belongs to the government.
And most murders in Kampala are committed using AK47s. Need we belabour the point? As for other calibres, the commission of inquiry into corruption in the police force disclosed how cops hire out weapons to criminals. A few days after Mrs Kiyingi was murdered, the government swung into action and arrested four suspects.
But they need to do more than respond swiftly when the victim is a high-profile person. If the government wants, it has the capacity to comb every square inch of Kampala for guns. A decade and a half ago, the army searched virtually every house in the city ahead of the pope's visit.
Today they have better equipment and numbers. Combing every square foot of Kampala for guns may take a few days but the harvest would justify the effort. Then, to show their seriousness, they can burn the guns the way Kenya does.
Joachim Buwembo is managing editor of The Monitor of Kampala.
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