General Salim Saleh, the soldier who keeps looking for peace

COMMENT | CRISPIN KAHERU | Whereas some people are defined by the battles they fight or what they do when the guns fall silent, General Caleb Akandwanaho, better known as Salim Saleh, is uniquely understood by both.

His place in Uganda’s military history is well established. Yet Saleh has always described his own entry into that history as modestly as he continues to live his life today. He once said that he did not join the army. He joined the struggle. He had read books about fighting for freedom and was eventually recruited into the liberation effort.

That distinction matters because it helps explain the man. For him, the gun was an instrument. The cause was bigger.

And as Uganda approaches its 64th Independence anniversary, perhaps there is value in looking beyond the soldier we know or hear about and examining the philosophy that has increasingly defined his life after the battlefield.

His philosophy is built around a deceptively simple idea. You may defeat an enemy without destroying him. You can prevail without humiliating the other side. And sometimes the greater victory lies in leaving your opponent a bridge back.

Even while commanding forces in the final stages of the liberation war in the early 80s, Saleh was already encountering the difficult intersection between fighting and negotiation. That instinct would become much clearer after 1986, when he personally led talks with former adversaries in northern Uganda, sometimes at great personal risk.

That is vintage Saleh.

He speaks frequently about social cohesion, harmony and keeping society together. In his world, a ceasefire is not necessarily peace. It is an opportunity to begin the harder work of repairing relationships.

Perhaps that explains the language of Operation Harmony. The idea is not to silence disagreement. It is to prevent disagreement from becoming permanent estrangement. It is to keep talking, especially when talking is difficult.

But there is another Saleh that receives even less attention. The general who reads.

Spend time with him, and the conversation can move unexpectedly from history to food security, from clan structures to agricultural value chains, from the politics of a particular region to the economics of a household.

His intellectual journey is just as revealing. While studying at the Senior Command and Staff College at Kimaka in the mid 2000s, Saleh began putting on paper an idea that would increasingly shape his thinking. Poverty, food insecurity and conflict were deeply connected. There is something profound about a general arriving at such a conclusion. After years of fighting wars, he was beginning to ask whether livelihoods could prevent them.

A young person with nothing to do, no earning and little hope is easier to recruit into conflict than one with an income and a future. A community producing for itself possesses more than food. It possesses confidence and has a sense of belonging.

This thinking, coupled with his deep appreciation of Musevenomics, helps explain Saleh’s journey from battlefield commander to champion of socioeconomic transformation. It also explains his enduring interest in agriculture, cooperatives, household production and, ultimately, Operation Wealth Creation.

For him, poverty is not just economic. It can quickly turn into a security problem. Economic exclusion can become political anger. Desperation can become conflict.

So, peace must eventually enter the household.

That connection between security and livelihood is perhaps one of Saleh’s most important ideas. You cannot preach harmony indefinitely to people who have no stake in society. Social cohesion becomes stronger when people can work, produce, trade and see tomorrow as better than today.

This is also why his personal style matters.

For a man who has occupied the highest levels of military and political power, Saleh is very comfortable outside its theatre. He sits with generals, ministers, ambassadors, farmers, cultural leaders, young people, the locals, current and former adversaries with much the same ease. He listens. He probes. He questions assumptions. And when another argument makes better sense, he concedes the point.

That is confidence without insecurity. But that also explains his appreciation of soft power. Saleh has long understood that people cannot always be commanded into unity or even development. Sometimes they must be persuaded.

His song We Are One, his play Ceasefire and the “Uganda, This Is Home” campaign all carry the same message of, yes, we can disagree, even fiercely, and still belong to one another.

And that brings us to Uganda at 64.

Every generation must answer its own independence question. Ours is whether we can continuously build a country where our differences in ethnicity, faith, region, generation and politics do not turn us into enemies. We do not have to agree on everything. We simply have to keep belonging to one another.

That takes a different kind of strength. To listen when you could command. To reconcile when you could retaliate. To leave the door open when you could shut it. And to understand that sometimes victory is not defeating the person on the other side, but defeating the conflict between you.

Perhaps that is the more lasting story of Salim Saleh. From the battlefield to dialogue, from food security to household wealth, and now to social cohesion and Operation Harmony.

As Uganda approaches 64 years of independence, history will surely remember Saleh the soldier. But it should remember the peacemaker too.

For Saleh, the journey seems to have come full circle, from fighting for Uganda to working to keep Ugandans together.