{UAH} If I were president? Here’s the new Uganda I would cook up - Charles Onyango Obbo

Clearly, it is easier for Uganda to be generous to refugees, than to be even-handed in Burundi. Both reasons draw from our history.

Barely three decades ago, we were one of the largest sources of refugees and asylum seekers in the region and less than 10 years ago, one of the world's largest populations of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the north occasioned by the war against Joseph Kony's Lords' Resistance Army. Attitudes towards refugees, therefore, tend to be partly shaped by empathy born out of a shared experience of displacement from the homeland.

These inconveniences, however, should not blind us to the opportunities of using refugees to reinvent the nation.

Secondly, pass laws that give second-generation refugees with a high school education and above a fast track to citizenship. This could not only buy long-term friendship when those countries become peaceful, but also a future emotional market for our goods. But a favourite idea I have always toyed with, is to give all refugees a residency green card and take them to freshly minted district of foreigners carved out of Karamoja, Koboko, and Fort Portal or Kasese areas and give them land and freedom.

The goal would be to try and create a society that is not based on our old sectarian divides, and that in the long term it would force us to organise around more cosmopolitan politics.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter@cobbo3

http://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/OpEdColumnists/CharlesOnyangoObbo/If-I-were-president--Here-s-the-new-Uganda-I-would-cook-up/-/878504/3006824/-/hmdq45/-/index.html

Sincerely,

Brian M. Kwesiga