He further explained that AWDCA was not just a small organisation for Gulu district but rather for the entire Acholi sub-region; and that its reparations infrastructure system had been certified even by state officials who were fighting them.
However, despite the impressive picture of the Association painted by the chair, a section of the members agreed with government officials who accused the leadership of embezzlement and corruption. The production officer, the veterinary officer and the NAADS officer in separate interviews each pointed out how the committee had been accused of misappropriating funds so far paid by the government. The accusations centred on the Association officials distributing less money than what had been released to them by the government and sharing the rest among themselves instead. They were also accused of selective payment whereby they only paid their relatives and friends, leaving the rest of the members in the cold. Thus, whereas the records infrastructure could be praised, the payments system appeared as a point of concern.
When I put these accusations to the focus group discussion that I held with the Association officials under Eng. Opwonya, the executives exonerated themselves of the embezzlement charges pointing out that as an Association they did not benefit from any form of external funding. Yet they faced many challenges including expenses such as rent for office space for all the years the Association was in existence, allowances to the executives who sacrificed a lot of their time and other resources to serve the members’ interests, volunteers who collected data in the field, and transport costs both within the region and outside. I observed that although they tried to justify themselves, they did not want to put a figure on the amount they had paid themselves or what they spent in ‘office expenses.’ It was also clear that if the allegations were true, then they were committing the very same mistakes for which they had overthrown the pioneer leadership. But there could be no solid proof without audit reports. In fact, Eng. Opwonya’s team was being accused of bribing high ranking government officials so that they would not be audited so there would be no proof in case anyone sued the Association.
That aside, the Association officials were also accused of bribing government officials in a bid to influence them to release more funds faster. But on interrogating this claim, I found that the process involved the Ministry of Defence officials who could not be easily accessed by the Association. Hence, even if the bribes were paid, they couldn’t have solved the problem of delays given that the delays were largely blamed on the military. The chairman said he was certain that the defence department was only interested in finding fault rather than resolving the problem. He said that each time he went to the defence department at their Bombo military headquarters to check on the progress, they would tell him that his figures were too high and they always insisted on conducting field visits to verify the figures at the grassroots.
But the public also had its own version. There was a strong sentiment expressed by all the three elders I interviewed at different times that linked the delays to public criticism of the army’s discipline in the early days of the insurgency. They said that the story circulating in the Acholi communities was that government troops had participated in stealing Acholi cows directly or indirectly and that soldiers had collaborated with Karamojong cattle rustlers by buying the stolen cows from them. Mzee Okello, one of the elders in Awach who lost cattle to thefts in the early days of the insurgency, told me in an interview that it was possible the army was acrimonious to the Association and the Acholi in general because people had come out openly to point out their grievances against them. He said that some elders came out to state that they had seen army trucks moving with cows towards Karuma bridge. The bridge is the main gateway into Acholi from central region; hence, taking the cows towards the bridge means exporting them from Acholi sub-region. This account matches what appears in the research works of Gelsdorf et al. (2012) and of Weeks (2002) ten years earlier.