So, it was not easy to see any evidence of the compensation payments made; but at least, people would know who had been paid. However, this became even more complex in the most recent payments launched in March 2022, because the money was paid directly into the claimants’ individual bank accounts by the government, which made it even more invisible. When I visited the LC I chair for Paromo village, Gweng-diya parish, Awach Sub County, after the 2022 payments, he told me he had endorsed claim forms (the yellow form) for ten people in his village but he could not tell who of them had been paid unless those who had been paid told him themselves. Even if he knew, he could not tell how much they had received or how they had used their compensation funds.
On further probing, the LC chairperson told me it would have been better if the claimants had been given cows directly to replace their lost animals because in such a case, it would have been easy to see how many people have been compensated and to replace the livestock in the land. The invisibility of the compensation also made it difficult to know how much had been paid out to bona fide claimants and how much of the funds had probably been misappropriated by officials or embezzled. This invisibility, therefore, greatly fertilised the internal suspicions and mistrust between members and executive officers of the Association on matters of fairness, accountability and transparency, which partly fuelled the coups and counter coups within the Association. Such was the case when Eng. Opwonya organised a come-back campaign after being overthrown by John Kiza Nyeko in 2016 (Labeja 2016). Each time the government released some instalment of the cattle compensation funds, the suspicions and mistrust within the Association heightened and sometimes ended in the leadership being replaced.
During the latest phase of my data collection which started in March 2022, my research assistant helped me to uncover some of the invisibility. Having identified some of the people in the area who had received funds from the latest release of 2022, she linked me to three recipients who were willing to participate in my study. Of the three, one who had claimed for 46 cows said he had only been given UGX 4.9 million; another one who had claimed for 30 cows had received only UGX 2.1 million; while the third one who had claimed for 60 cows had been given UGX 5.9 million. From the expected total of UGX 136 million for the 136 cows for the three, only UGX 12.9 million (about 9.5%) had been received. But none of them knew who else had received, what they had received, the criteria used to decide who receives or how much they should be paid. And for those who had not received, no one had any idea when or how much they should expect for the next phase. The invisibility coupled with uncertainty nurtured right from the very first payments, created more suspicion and mistrust, which made it very easy for members to be manipulated and mobilised against the Association leadership.
The economic significance of translating the cows into bank accounts, however, was that as invisible resources the money could now be invested in resources other than cows, particularly so, given the expanded scope of economic activities available in post war Acholi-land. Indeed, when he was officially launching the UGX 150 billion reparation funds in March 2022 (for Acholi, Lango, and Teso sub-regions), the president of Uganda echoed this. He advised thus, ‘Don’t use the money to get cows and marry more women…You must go for agriculture but also for the pocket …’ (Emwamu & Muron 2022). The advice provides the logic for the government decision to pay war debt claimants in the form of invisible resources given the expanded economic activities available in post war Acholi. The main challenge, however, was that concealing the compensation in invisible bank account deposits not only provided fertile ground for mistrust and suspicion which engendered new forms of conflict, but also the possibility of not utilising the funds resourcefully.