Should corrupt people be sent to the gallows and firing squad?

Jan 06, 2010

In the run-up to the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kampala, a group of notorious boys in Bugi village in Sironko district, ‘made a name’ by stealing coffee and maize from the villagers at night.

By Frederick womakuyu
In the run-up to the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kampala, a group of notorious boys in Bugi village in Sironko district, ‘made a name’ by stealing coffee and maize from the villagers at night.

From one garden to another, the boys terrorised the villagers and people cried out whenever I visited. Despite this knowledge, they didn’t know when, how and which of their sons was stealing from them. Their secret lay in three magic words— CHOGM and NAADS.

Whenever these boys went somewhere to steal, they usually confused the villagers by publicly nicknaming coffee CHOGM after the much publicised CHOGM on UBC radio that also reached the village, and then they called maize – NAADS after the famous Government farming project that is supposed to bring magical income to the farmers.

In Bugi, CHOGM and NAADS came at a time when they were about to have a bumper harvest of coffee and maize. Surprisingly, the villagers learnt nothing and forgot nothing from what the boys usually said. They continued sleeping and the notorious hooligans harvested all the crops leaving them at the mercy of poverty and disease. They only learnt that CHOGM actually meant stealing their coffee and NAADS meant stealing their maize after the boys confessed on their own after a long period of fooling the public.

To be specific, at the time these boys operated in the villagers, some officials who were in charge of the real NAADS and CHOGM in the country were robbing from farmers and the public with impunity. This is public knowledge from the CHOGM inquiry by the parliament’s public accounts committee, and the NAADS probe that has already caused the arrest of some thieves and is still traversing the country to arrest others.

The two demonstrate how the Ugandan society is corruptthrough and through. From a taxi driver giving a bribe of sh1,000 to a policeman when he breaks a traffic rule, to a permanent secretary diverting public funds for personal use, corruption is going on in the country openly without any or very little punitive action being taken against the culprits.

Instead, the thieves are popular with the public which has coined some interesting names for them such as “smart guys” or “sharp people”. The people who pay the taxes continue to pay and some official who holds a political office somewhere continues to steal the public funds and in turn the taxpayer sees lip service in form of potholes, load- shedding, and grows poorer. From undersize boots for the armed forces to dry rations and junk helicopters to the global money meant to alleviate the suffering of the poor, money is being stolen.

According to the World Bank, Uganda loses over half a billion shillings annually to corruption! Billions of shillings were spent on BlackBerry phones and laptops which some officials entrusted with guarding public money dump to their girlfriends at various universities. There were BMW cars that almost never existed while business forums organised by business gurus continue to be unaccounted for and nobody will take responsibility. So where are we headed with this impunity?

In the words of a great East African, the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere to the parliament of Uganda in 1965, “If your Excellency Milton Obote continues to reign over a government that is growing in the rich list of rich ministers and a growing list of the poor becoming poorer yet pay taxes, you are building social chaos.”

The Government of Uganda has tried various mechanisms to stem the vice but it continues unabated. The Police, corruption courts and the office of the IGG and prisons, have all tried to fight corruptionbut in vain. Some actually end up at Luzira and others prisons but find their way back. But what can we do? To borrow the words of President Yoweri Museveni, “Corrupt people should not be given bail”.

We should also copy the direction which Singapore and Ghana took in fighting the cancer of corruption. If you are working in the public service and you have wealth that is more than your income, you should be put under house arrest and investigated.

In the event that you are found guilty of dipping your dirty fingers in the public coffers you shoud be put on for firing squad. Such extreme measures might force some people to commit suicide like what happened in Singapore.
Apparently, Singapore had the death penalty by hanging or firing squad for the corrupt. A story is told of a minister of housing in the 1970s, who stole over $100,000 from the public coffers but when he discovered that the Prime Minister had learnt of his crime, he committed suicide by hanging.

Jerry Rawlings of Ghana applied the same ‘medicine’ to the corrupt.

Whenever someone was found to be corrupt, he sent them to the gallows or firing squad. These countries achieved one common thing: a corruption-free state that developed the poor masses.
But if we continue to talk, send some people to the court and somehow they find their way back to the society after appealing, we are fueling corruption ourselves.

The writer is a journalist

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