From Expulsion to Exclusion; Revisiting the Citizenship Conundrum for Migrant Communities in Uganda.

Abstract

Post-independence Ugandan history is pock-marked with the expulsion of both citizen and non-citizen minority and migrant communities. While the best known of such was the Asian expulsion of the early-1970s, large numbers of Kenyan Jaluo and Rwandese indigenous and migrant communities suffered a similar fate. Although the phenomenon of expulsion has ceased to be deployed as a tool of government policy and action since the emergence to power of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government in 1986, this paper argues that various forms of exclusionary practice have been subtly deployed as a means to achieve similar objectives, i.e. the marginalization and discriminatory treatment of communities who allegedly have no claim to indigenuity. Such exclusion is manifest in the very manner in which a citizen of Uganda was defined in the 1995 Constitution and its relevant schedules as well as in recent developments around the recognition of dual citizenship, the treatment of long-term refugees and the law and practice on national identity cards.