By Chowoo Willy
Gulu City
The number of street children turning into criminal gangs increases each day in most of the Regional Cities in Northern Uganda.
For those in the Northern region, urban criminal gangs are not new things. Many have fallen victims. They attack you, rob, injure, or kill you.
They are known by different names, in Acholi, they are known as Aguu referring to a group of misguided street youth/children labeled as a criminal gang operating in the streets of Gulu City while in Lang sub-region they are known as Owukwuk– meaning they can loot and turn their victims upside down and flee with all valuables.
In the West Nile Sub-region, the regional city of Arua has experienced the emergence of various notorious criminal gangs since it attained its city status in 2020; they have all sorts of names such as the ‘35 Dogs’, ‘Chicken Cannot Pass’, and ‘The Jobless Millionaires.”
These groups have wreaked havoc on multiple streets within the central division of Arua City. In 2023, a new criminal gang, known as ‘AK City’ emerged specifically targeting individuals with money, smartphones, motorcycles, and other valuable possessions during the evening rush hours and late at night.
These networks are considered illegal and often pose significant challenges to law enforcement due to their clandestine nature. They adapt quickly to avoid detection and frequently change their routes and methods to continue their illegal activities.
“When we came in, the situation was tense, our biggest worry was manifested in terms of the progress of the city”, Gulu Deputy Resident City Commissioner, Peter Ochan Banya noted.
The latest rise of the criminal gangs in the Acholi’s Agro-industrial regional city of Gulu has hit harder than it did in the past. In the past three years, in the wake of the crime rampage, these lawbreakers have taken the lives of innocent people and left many more injured.
In 2014, Gulu University lecturer Andrew Rackara died in a similar incident, and in 2017 Gulu Municipality Deputy Town Clerk; Oola John was hit by iron bar hitmen and died. Though there was no substantive evidence of the death of any of the individuals, it was linked to conflict at the workplace.
The Aguu criminal gang is currently perceived as the main source of high rates of crimes in Gulu City. Uganda Police estimate that by mid-2018, there were 300 of them on the streets, and by 2000 their numbers had doubled to 600, and in 2022 it is estimated that there were more than 1000 who are involved in criminal activities such as robbery, rape, housebreaking, killing, thefts, waylaying people and pick-pocketing.
Uganda Police annual crime reports from 2017 to 2022 show an increase in the trend of crimes committed in the country over the last five years with a total of 1,329,942 cases of crimes recorded, thefts, assaults, Domestic Violence, sexual-related offenses, and housebreaking as the most top crimes in Uganda.
The report also shows that from 2020 to 2022 Uganda recorded an increase in cases of thefts, sexual-related violence, housebreaking, and robberies. This presented a crime rate of 457 per 100,000 people in Uganda in the year 2022.
The crimes are committed mainly within urban areas, there were 113,511 crimes committed in urban areas out of the total 231, 653 crimes committed in the country in 2022.
The regional crime distribution report shows that North Kyoga was ahead in all the 28 policing Regions in Uganda with 17,605 cases and was followed by KMP North with 16,691.
The three policing Regions of North Kyoga, Aswa, and, West Nile had a total of 34,526 crimes committed in 2022. The statistic also shows that the trend of crimes committed in these regions has exponentially been increasing over the last three years. There were a total of 96,259 crimes committed.
In
In 2022, a total of 239,988 persons were victims of crimes and the most affected were male adults (140,861 Male Adults, 61,850 Female Adults, 11,234 Male Juveniles, and 26,043 Female Juveniles.
Out of 90,182 people arrested and convicted by the court of laws in 2022, there were 2,494 juveniles. A j juvenile is a person below the age at which ordinary criminal prosecution is possible, and in Uganda, it is below 18 years.
Most of the children who are on the streets and have become criminal gangs in most of the cities in the country fall into this age bracket.
Where did Aguu come from?
The origin of the Aguu criminal gang can be traced to the conflict in Northern Uganda –which made these children orphaned due to the war or sickness of the caregivers, and others were abandoned by their parents. Some of the youth gangs are the children of the war returnees.
According to a report on Criminal Gangs in modern-day Gulu City published in the Journal of Human Security (2021) described the Aguu as groups of street youth/children who lost access to their land, uprooted from their communities, and separated from their livelihood due to the conflict.
Mr. Owor Arthur the Director of the Centre for African Research (CAR) and one of the authors of the report, says their report found out that there were urban Aguu and those coming from peri-urban areas.
He attributes the increase in the number of the Aguu to adaptation of the lifestyle brought by humanitarian agencies during the conflict in the region.
“These are people who are deriving their livelihoods on the streets whose existence was linked to the war we had in this region and the lifestyle of different humanitarian actors who came and the youth would go along with and remove them from normal traditional social ways of living into a new modernized lifestyle”. He notes.
Owor adds that when these children returned from captivity, many families started rejecting them because they never wanted to share the family land with some of them,
Audio one: Owor Arthur talking about why Aguu is on the street-Eng
The two decades of armed conflict between the government of Uganda and the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led to the displacement of over 1.8 million people in the Acholi sub-region into the Internally Displaced Persons camps (IDP camps). According to estimates, the rebels abducted between 54000 to 75000 people, out of which 25000 to 38000 were children.
The report of Criminal Gangs in the modern-day Gulu City indicates that the war made children exposed to a variety of traumatic circumstances, including separation from their homes, safety, abuse, and physical and sexual violence.
The rise in the number of street gangs is partly blamed on the failure of the government to do a comprehensive resettlement of people from IDP camps (2006) which did not cater to children born during the encampment. They are now landless since their family lands have been sold off or grabbed and they have nowhere to reside.
“What we should have done, was to come up with a very organized way of taking people back home, we would have registered everybody where they came from before 1986, if we had done it that way, it could have reduced the problem of Aguu in Gulu City”. Deputy City Commissioner, Peter Banya added.
He believes that if everybody had registered where they came from before leaving IDP camps, it would have been easy to trace these misguided youths /children on the streets.
Banya says some of the parents of these children when they try to go back to their villages, find that their lands are sold and they return to squat with their children in the city.
“These are some people who have failed to go back to their homes after displacement in Gulu City, they are living at National Forest Authority Land at Holy Rosary ward and Pabbo Kolo Quarters cells, life is very difficult because resources are limited and that has led their children moving into streets to look for a living”, he adds, and, “they find there is no job to employ them and they end up resorting to stealing”.
The encampment has made the children / youth exposed to various degrees of trauma, loss, and stigmatization. This circumstance carried a significant number of people in the streets of Gulu and exposed them to the changing urban environment while detaching them from their habitual rural livelihood such as hard work to the begging community. This justifies why the sub-region still swings in poverty even when the gun has fallen silent for almost 20 years.
West Nile and Lango sub-regions have their share of the impacts of the northern Conflict which has also made them register an upsurge in the numbers of urban criminal gangs over the past years. The two sub-regions are ranked after the Acholi sub-regions in number three and four respectively in terms of being poor.
The five poorest sub-regions in Uganda, the Karamoja, Acholi, West Nile, Lango, and Teso were equally affected by the civil unrest in Northern Uganda which devastated the economic status of the sub-regions which were predominantly agriculturalists.
But why are these children on the streets?
In Uganda, more than 6 million children aged between five and seventeen (17) are engaged in hazardous and exploitative work that puts their lives in jeopardy. This is according to a 2022 report by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS).
Experts estimate that there are about 15,000 children, who are homeless and living on the streets of Kampala, Jinja, Iganga, and Mbale,
There are a number of factors driving these children from their homes to the streets ranging from the high cost of living and the reluctance of parents to embrace family planning especially in slum areas.
On the streets, there are street families, street children born from street parents, and those that are not born from the street but due to child neglect, they run into the street and live for the streets
Some are using the street as a place to ‘work’, These particular types of children come from poor families and so they go to the streets during the day, beg then go back to their homes in the evening. These are the street children’s decoys.
Gulu City is now like a transit center, many people come over as a gateway to other places like West Nile, Lango, and Karamoja sub-regions, and some have settled out at one point in time. They leave their children behind and end up on the street.
The stories from Gulu HashTag Gulu, an organization working to rehabilitate, reform, and reintegrate these children reveal that these children do not want to submit to authority.
“They think when they come to town, they are able to live with their colleagues, not able to submit to authority, to do whatever thing they want at whatever time they want ”. Commented Ojok Michael, the Executive Director of HashTag Gulu.
The influx of these street children is highly linked to poverty.
Northern Uganda which is the poorest region in Uganda and it has the highest number of misguided youth or children living within the suburbs of the urban areas in Lango, Acholi, and West Nile Subregions.
Acholi is the second poorest sub-region in Uganda according to the annual report 2022 released by Uganda Bureaus of Statistics (UBOS), the national poverty index was at 42.1% with the Northern region the poorest at 63% followed by the Eastern which is at 45.7%.
The statistic below shows the poverty index by sub-region in all the 16 sub-regions in Uganda and this justifies the linkage between poverty and street-connected children and youth.
The linkage between poverty and upsurge of the street children on the streets can further be confirmed by the UBOS report, for example from the chart, Karamoja Sub region has the highest levels of multidimensional poverty index of 84.9 percent and the other sub-regions with high incidences of poverty are Acholi (63.6 percent), West Nile (59.1 percent), Lango (57.0 percent), and Teso (56.6 percent) as indicated in the chart above.
“Some of them are children of single mothers and fathers and they don’t have what to eat, and they decide to resort to stealing”, Ochan Peter Banya, Gulu City Deputy Resident City Commissioner told the Elephant.
There are cases of parental gaps due to the breakdown of families which are pulling out children to come out to live on the streets.
“When family breaks and the mother decides to go back to their home, most of them end up running away from homes, neglected, lack of love from people from home due to domestic violence”, .Ojok Michael Executive Director HashTag Gulu.
According to UBOS report 2022, the majority people who are poor in Uganda are the widows and widowers who are at 51.1 percent and it is lowest among those who are never married at 20.0 percent. The poverty is more in families with more than 7 children.
The Acholi, Lango and West Nile are sub regions that have regional cities of Gulu, Lira and Arua with the highest number of criminal gangs on the streets in the sub region respectively.
While for Karamoja which is the poorest subregion in the country, the story is different, children from this subregion are the ones flooding the streets of the Country’s Capital City-Kampala. They are beggars in the city; some are hired to beg for others to make them rich.
Karamoja sub-region is projected to have a population of 1.4 million in 2022 by UBOS and their main economic activity is pastoralism due to a semi-arid region characterized by variable, unpredictable, and often sparse rainfall which does not heavily support agriculture.
Some of these children end up on the streets of Kampala after being sold off by their poor parents to those involved in child trafficking who buy them from the poor parents due to economic hardship.
In 2022, Save the Street Children Uganda rounded up 1,000 children from the streets of Kampala and other cities in Uganda who had been sold by poor parents. Most of them were from Karamoja.
In 2023, Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA) rescued over 850 children from the city and returned them to Karamoja subregion at Kobulin Youth Rehabilitation and Skilling Center in Napak district for comprehensive rehabilitation. It is estimated that over 800 Karamojong children live and work on the streets of Kampala.
The City Council Authority in 2022 initiated a similar effort and secured convictions for 36 child traffickers. These are people who buy these children from the poor parents and send them on the streets to beg for money.
The operation was in line with the Kampala Child Protection Ordinance 2022 which forbids anyone from sending a child to beg or solicit for alms in public places, streets, offices, or commercial establishments. Additionally, it also prohibits profiting from a child engaged in begging or soliciting for alms.
The biting poverty in Karamoja, Lango, Acholi, and West Nile is a result of the impacts of the 20 years of armed conflict that ravaged the region. The infrastructures were torn to pieces, social settings altered, livestock looted and this greatly affected a region that used to be the ‘food basket’ of the country to begin from scratch.
Despite the silence of the guns, 18 years down the road, there is no change, the region still stuck in the mud of poverty. The majority are still living below the $1 poverty limit.
Many children never went to school and they are the ones turning to be sources of urban insecurity, families are breaking as the result of poverty and their children do not want to die with empty stomachs as the widows and widowers left by the war are unable to keep their children home.
Who are behind the gangs?
Some people are believed to be profiteering from the children who live and work on the street. In Kampala, some people were child trafficking these children from the Karamoja sub-region.
They buy these children at Ugx 20, 000 and bring them to the streets to beg money for them to become Risk. The City Council Authority in 2022 initiated an effort and secured convictions for 36 child traffickers.
In the Country, it is believed that criminal gangs are being used by some people to meet their interests.
Mr. Banya confirms that some people are profiting from the criminal gang’s activities by misusing the kids to do wrong things to settle their scores. He cites an example of a lawyer and a medical doctor who each had hired Aguu to kill one another, but they had to intervene.
The Deputy RCC explains that. “I can tell you that there are a number of examples where people had been killed and names of those hiring these kids are there, it is true people have used these kinds for a wrong reason, these are people who should have guided them”.
In Gulu City, some young people are living on the streets, and boys and girls; are giving birth on the streets.
Mr. Ojok Michael, the Executive Director of HashTag Gulu says if the current trend is not addressed, it presents another dimension to the security challenges in the city.
Mr. Ojok adds that “we would have a lot of children who are living on streets but also adults who have decided to remain on in the street and have not done anything with their lives, people can easily take advantage of the situation as it is now to do what they want”.
In Lango sub region, there are reported cases where some members of the community are conniving with these street gangs to rob, waylay, and attack residents in places like Lira city and Kamdini town.
North Kyoga Police spokesperson Patrick Jimmy Okema says all urban areas have similar problems in line with the street goons, “our region had several complaints from the public, some of them have graduated to adults who are now directly involved in the thefts of motorcycles”.
The criminal goons in the Lango sub-region have graduated from street goons and have been baptized as, Owukwuk— they arrest people, carry them on their shoulders, turn them upside down, and shake them until everything falls off from their pockets, if they find nothing on you, they beat you up for not moving with anything in your pockets.
In December 2023 in the Lango sub-region, two saving groups -Village and Saving Loan Associations VSLA lost Ugx 80million when they were robbed by the Owukwuk Criminal gangs on their way from the banks according to Police.
Okema reveals that in 2023 alone more than 400 have been taken to prison when they were netted during a joint security operation in the sub-region.
On the 20th December 2023 in Gulu City, a 22-year-old girl identified as Anena Grace (not her real name) was attacked by the criminal gangs at around 6:30 am near Gulu University while on her way to the market day (Auction day ) and she was robbed her mobile phone, money, and a jacket.
Anena was cut on her head with panga multiple times by the gangs who were four in number as they tried to rape her, but she was rescued by the security guard attached to the faculty of Agriculture and Environment at the University on hearing her yelling for help.
“I thank God that I am still alive, I tried to block them from cutting my head with my hand, they cut my hand as well”, Anena recalls as both her head and hand are seen with healing deep cut wounds.
More than 100 people get injured every year in the Acholi sub-region from attacks by the Aguu according to an estimate from police.
These criminal gangs are also infecting people with HIV/AIDS- according to the office of the City Commissioner; most of these children are living positively. “My biggest worry is that in this region in the next ten years to come, our level of HIV/AIDS is going to go up, if the region will be the highest affected because these children who rape people are infected”, Deputy RCC Banya adds.
The prevalence rate of HIV/AIDS infection in the subregion was at 7.4 percent and National HIV prevalence stood at 5.3 percent as of 2021.
What is being done?
In July 2019, the army and Uganda Police fired live bullets to contain a fight that erupted between the Criminal gangs and a group of Vigilante in the Industrial Area of Gulu City. The criminal gangs who were about 50 in number armed with wielding machetes and clubs attacked the vigilantes accusing them of mobilizing people against them. Four people sustained serious injuries during the fracas.
That was one of many attacks on town residents, between 2019 and 2022; very many people were attacked, robbed, beaten, and injured almost daily. The notorious criminal gang B13 spearheaded some of those attacks on the town residents.
The security team later came out with many approaches to handle the security situation, which included among others-village meetings with the local leaders, talking to some of the parents, and sensitization through radio programs in the area.
Deputy City Commissioner Peter Banya says the joint operation with the Police and the army has helped them to restore sanity in the city as of today. The operation targeted the hot spots where they found some of the gangs were school-going children.
“I introduced the issue of Kiboko-some of them were students, you ruin your future, I ruin your buttocks, and a number of them were taken back to school”, Banya adds.
The office of the City Commissioner which is in charge of security recruited several youths to help identify the gangs and drive them back to school.
Operation Kiboko did not end with beating people only, but those who never listened were told to buy their coffins before they were shot dead.
“Just buy your coffin or tell your family to have a small portion of land somewhere-whereby one day they will see an Ambulance coming home and bring your dead body”, Banya recalls how this message helped the insecurity in Gulu City drastically.
In the Lango sub-region, Police are doing intelligence-led operations to net Owukwuk. They involved different leadership as well as members of the public conducting community policing which made it easy to get the names of the street gangs.
“We have been conducting what we call intelligent-led operations that have led to the arrest of a number of them including the ring leaders. There was a time in one week alone, we arrested more than 130 of them”, North Kyoga Police spokesperson Okema adds.
Police in the West Nile Sub-region (Arua City) say at the moment they have been able to suppress the criminal gangs that had been terrorizing the city residents.
West Nile Police regional spokesperson Josephine Angucia says, “We conducted operations to crack them down, some have been taken to prison”, and she added, “We have been able to suppress them”
In Gulu City, HashTag Gulu is a community-based organization (CBO) working to rehabilitate, reform, and reintegrate street connected children who live and work on the streets.
Over the three past years, they have provided support to these street children to change their lives including counseling, Art Therapy, life skill training, health service, advocacy for changed mindsets, and conducting family meetings with their parents.
Mr. Ojok Michael, the Executive Director of HashTag Gulu, says 674 street children visited their outreach clinic for different treatments over the last three years, reunited 106 children with their parents, and conducted 350 mediation meetings with the parents of the children who are on the streets.
“We facilitate mediation meetings between the two, where there is acceptance, then we facilitate this young person to go home, and at that point, we sit down with the parents and other family members”, Ojok adds.
The integration or family reunification has seen many street children returned to their homes in West Nile, Lango, Acholi, and some parts of Karamoja sub-regions respectively. Some of these children return to the streets when they find the situation at home has not changed. Out of 106 children reunited with their families, 29 of them have returned to the streets.
For those who are reunited with their families and choose to get involved in farming, HashTag has set up a small farm to build their capacities to improve the quality of their farming.
Audio File Two: Ojok on supporting the youth in a farm-Eng
The Ministry of Gender, Labour, and social development which is responsible for children’s affairs has been removing these children from the streets, especially in Kampala. Some of them have been rehabilitated and skilled in different centers across the country.
Joshua Kyalimpa, the head of communications at the Ministry says the biggest challenge in managing these children is underfunding to the ministry.
“There is limited resources, our appeal to government has always been to increase budgetary allocation to the ministry to be able to undertake this aware of the magnitude of the problem as it required enormous resources”, Kyalimpa adds.
This money is to support the children with feeding needs and also provide them with the materials can use for purposes of getting the skills at different centers of rehabilitation in the country.
What should be done?
In Uganda, the local leadership in places affected by the activities called for the establishment of a National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC) to help rehabilitate the street gangs that are becoming a national threat. They see the NRC as the only option to change the lives of misguided children by addressing the challenge of mindsets, skilling, and employing them.
Gulu City Deputy Resident City Commissioner Peter Banya says arresting and sending the children to prison alone will ruin their future because these children keep on recycling the same crime after they are released from prison. Since 2022, Banya adds that “ there was a week we had 1000 arrested, I can tell you that ever since we started, those who went to prison are more than 500, some are still there”.
Mr. Banya notes that the center would help to transform the lives of these children in the region looking at the trend where they come to the streets every day.
Audio File Three: Gulu Deputy RCC Banya talking about the Rehabilitation Centre.
As the HashTag Gulu is focusing their attention prevention in 2024 by reaching out to many parents and other stakeholders, Ojok however, adds that the issue of the street connected children needs to be handled with urgency because they are going to have generation where grandparents, fathers and children are not parented. They are living and producing on the streets.
“It is like we are have time bombs or our hand because the population keeps on increasing and more and more people keep on coming on the street, and he adds that, the risk is that many of these people could be used for anything wrong, people can easily take the advantage of the situation as it is of now to do whatever they want for small gain
The Gender, Labour and Social Development Ministry which is responsible for children affairs has decried low budget allocation to child protection as the main hindrance saying the Ugx20million that was allocated in the FY2023/24 for street children can only buy sweets.
Nyirabashitsi Sarah Mateke, the Minister of State for Youth and Children Affairs in the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, said they receive only Ugx5m to handle issues of street children per quarter.
“This financial year, I have been given Ugx 20million. What can I do with it? It means that every quarter I get Ugx5million, and last year it was the same case,” she adds.
These children keep on recycling on the streets after serving their sentences in prison or when they are taken back to their families. The government says they are wasting a lot of money trying to remove these children from the streets.
The Minister for Kampala Capital City Authority, Minsa Kabanda, while appearing before Parliament’s Presidential Affairs Committee requested Parliament to enact a law banning the public from giving out to street children saying, the government is wasting a lot of money relocating the vulnerable children, who end up returning to the same streets.
Ends
