The Anti-Corruption Walk 2019: What next?

OPINION

By Allan  Rugabo

On Wednesday last week, President Yoweri Museveni was the chief walker during the Anti-corruption Walk. As a proponent of Africa's potential to occupy its rightful place in global economics and realising social equity, I applaud the renewed thrust of determination against corruption.

I hope the wider meaning of the walk is not lost in the generalisation of trivial discussions that dominated social media in the aftermath of the event. We have had several initiatives aimed at fighting corruption, but the current impetus gives hope that finally, as a country, we realise that we cannot tolerate corruption, a vice that has seriously impeded national development and caused serious service delivery shortages. This has greatly affected the country's transformation agenda.

Whereas I would agree to any anti-corruption initiative, we must clarify more depth on how this vice can be uprooted. Our hopes as ordinary citizens shall be raised further by an elaborate plan to undo the stretch of years of not just the deep rootedness of corruption, but also the apathy and acceptability corruption has been decorated with in public service delivery and it's more recent extensions into the private sector.

For a bit of perspective, the Corruption Perception Index, CPI by Transparency International, TI, has since 1995 measured corruption based on public and institutional surveys. The index is published in a rating based on a 0 - 100 scale. The least being the most corrupt and the highest being the least corrupt. Uganda is ranked 149 out of 180 nations with CPI index score of 26. Its notably saddening that Uganda is worse than countries such as; Liberia, (120), Malawi (120), Gabon (124), Sierra Leone (129), Mexico (138), Kenya and Nigeria (jointly at 144).

Corruption exists in complicated forms and patterns that are incapable of a single measure or tangible quantification; TI categorizes corruption to include; public and private forms and the former to include; nepotism, election fraud, cronyism, practices such as slush funds, abuse of power etc. These concepts, in my view, are not strains of corruption, if it were a disease, but are layers of the "sandwich". The "kitu kidogo" concept often enjoys wide interface with the public while hoodwinking the same public from the larger ills by sanitizing the resulting transactional environment in general as "clever survival strategy" promoting positive co-existence.

A "tip" extended to access warden to access a loved one in a hospital past visiting hours may be as permanently mind corrupting as can a 15% kickback for a billion dollar government infrastructure contract. I call it the "mpisee'wo ntya" bargain. A tendency to act acceptably immoral due to either desperation or mere indiscipline in this case individual or corporate indiscipline. These are minds at play not isolated actions of people.