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WHAT’S UP!

I am no bard, and have not come to praise anybody. But I can imagine what the greatest writer in English would say if he was privy to what has been happening in Uganda over the last couple of weeks (or has it been just one week, but seems so long because of the enormity of it all?).

Anyway, I bet Shakespeare would rub his receding hairline, shake his pointy beard and declare: ‘Something’s strange in yon Republic of Uganda, a strange air doth hover upon its realm’.

What the old bard would be saying is that what is happening in this land of matooke does not smell very nice, although it is not something new.

It recently came to light that the Parliament Commission sat one day and decided to give its members ‘Service Awards’, in terms of large sums of money.

First of all, this is not their money, it belongs to Uganda’s long-suffering taxpayer, who is sadly a minority in this land.

The Uganda Revenue Authority, which collects said taxes, has not been meeting its targets of late, which means that the Government has to borrow heavily to carry out its work.

We heard that it even borrowed from some Kenyan loan sharks. There is no money to fix roads, no money to stock hospitals with drugs or even pay the intern doctors who do most of the work in our creaking health sector.

Every single government department budget had been cut (or almost every one), but these ‘honourables’ sat one morning over a cup of tea and samosas and groundnuts and decided how they had been doing a stellar job and needed to reward themselves.

And so it came to pass and it verily happened that the former Leader of Opposition was awarded sh500m and he saw it was good. Now it has to veer into the realms of Science of Stupid for someone to sit with people he has been Opposing all this time and they decided to reward him with a sum of money more than one thousand times what the average Ugandan earns in a month.

But that is not the strange bit, though it might smell a bit that those commissioners were probably wearing masks as they signed off on the awards.

What is really strange and stinks to high heaven so much that those folks in 14th century Denmark would have passed out by now, is that the Ugandan public is not debating the obscenity of the money and the way it was handed out; but whether the party that sent that Leader of Opposition to parliament wanted a cut of it. Now, that’s really putrid.

The public debate has now pitted the said former Leader of the Opposition (LOP), who was replaced recently, against his party’s president. One side argues that the party’s president also gets a lot of money from donors, why doesn’t he let his colleague also ‘eat’? And they quote the corruption creed, that ‘man eateth where he worketh’.

Trolls have been let loose and all kinds of misinformation is making the rounds on social media. A former senior member of the ruling party even stepped in and insisted the whole saga was because the ‘correct forum’ was not used. Together with the aforementioned ‘man eateth’ creed, doing things in a so-called correct forum is another typical Ugandan obsession.

Others have claimed that the real issue is that the said former LOP is planning to make a play for the party’s leadership and that is why the current president is trying to paint him as a bad guy. Still others say it is the ruling party that is sowing seeds of discord in the opposition, ahead of the next general elections, which are in two years.

Lost amidst all this is the fact that what happened in that parliamentary boardroom is wrong on many fronts, including moral and legal. It is difficult and probably a waste of time to raise the moral card in Uganda, unless of course you are from Tororo and want to ban alcohol or put restrictions on the way women dress or Ugandans party.

The Uganda Law Society finally woke up from its ‘fight for judicial independence’ induced slumber and belatedly issued a statement condemning what happened in that boardroom. But it fell short of recommending any action against the perpetrators. And I understand the Inspector General of Government (IGG), Uganda’s ombudsman, is finally going to investigate those awards.

What would really get the old bard’s goat up is the fact that Ugandans have readily accepted that their leaders are going to chat and steal, and are neither surprised nor shocked when that happens. A whole generation has grown up admiring the thieves and entitled in our society and that stinks all the way to that Danish castle that housed Prince Hamlet. Something is really rotten in the state of Uganda and William Shakespeare is likely turning in his grave that people living almost a thousand years hence are more corrupt than the nefarious Claudius.

@KalungiKabuye