UGANDA is one country that will make any critical mind spin in frustration. Parliament is proposing the purchase of Japanese monster cars at a cost of sh20b ‘because our roads are bad’ as Prof. Apolo Nsibambi justified sometime back.
The energy crisis has received just the usual knee-jerk response, with expensive thermal generation and almost endless utopian promises of dam construction at Bujagali and Karuma.
The question is; what is the problem?
Forget the drop in the level of Lake Victoria; forget that talk of climatic change, please! Sensible and responsible people know this is a global problem but where are the strategic response protocols in government departments?
Why has Bujagali or Karuma dam construction stalled or snail-paced?
It is clear the Government was caught off-guard on this energy disaster. It was in slumber, letting market forces take the show as the righteous advisors from IMF/World Bank had informed.
Remember when there was famine in eastern Uganda and the then prime minister told the people to eat lizards and mangoes as a crisis response?
How about when another honourable minister told Kalangala people to eat monkeys if the vermin were eating their crops?
Now the vice-president believes that because of the bad roads, the Government must buy Japanese four-wheel drive cars for government officials.
Another honourable minister told the people of Bundibugyo that the Government cannot extend the national power grid to them because it is protecting them from electrocution! Indeed!
Fuel tanks overturn in the middle of the city due to potholes in the roads and block all traffic and everything looks normal to our dear mayor. Help me here! Meanwhile, very stinky financial scandals come out in media reports daily and no one is reprimanded.
Who is in charge of our national strategic planning? Why the constant knee-jerk reactions to national challenges? Why the lack of crisis anticipation, simulation and planned response?
National governance must be run on workable and tested models built overtime. Where are the brains in our town, people?
The writer is a Ugandan living in Pretoria, South Africa
