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Uganda MPs should take on boda riders as they did with Nyege Nyege by Joachim Buwenbo

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Uganda is a nation of the highest moral standards, no wonder we gave the (Catholic) Church its largest harvest of saints in one episode — 22 of them, now known as the Uganda Martyrs! Since 1969, every Pope reigning at The Vatican feels duty bound to make a pilgrimage to Kampala, at a place called Namugongo where they were burnt to death for refusing to compromise on their morality.

It is therefore not surprising that our parliamentarians have been up in arms against the Executive over a festival deemed immoral and called Nyege Nyege — what an immoral sounding name that provokes feelings of gyration — that used to be held annually in Jinja, 80 kilometres east of Kampala, before the Covid-19 interruption.

How do people dare think of coming from different countries to perform immoral dances in this highly moral land of ours!

Much as we don’t tolerate immoral dances, we are a very forgiving society. That is why although the lodges of Kampala fill up at lunchtime, their short-term clients who return home from work promptly at five wearing pious faces and sounding like gospel preachers as they greet their husbands and wives occupy front pews in our churches, playing key roles in the worship sessions because its also part of morality to forgive.

That is why blatant robbers of public funds are also major donors to church projects because generosity is a virtue in highly moralistic societies like ours.

How then can anyone think we can tolerate fellows who want to contaminate our pure land by bringing musicians and dancers, splashing money while hiding in a thickly vegetated arena at the source of the Nile, and spend four days doing immoral things?

In that first week of September, however, there was a major development in the capital city of Kampala, which is directly run by the central government, which ought to have preoccupied our national legislators more than what paying adults were doing in Jinja, which a city with its own city council, inside a district which also has a district council.

In Kampala, for the first time in living memory, mass public transport was being revived, with two bus companies being licensed to operate on two key city routes.

The revival of mass transport was, however, running into obstacles that should have concerned national legislators more than events of paying adults hidden far away. The sleek, modern but innocent buses were being beaten by angry matatu touts and conductors, their crime being that they are so clean and lovely, offering Ugandans an opportunity to travel decently in their city.

As the week wore on, the smart new bus operators enlisted the hostile touts to also call passengers for them, for a fee.

Realizing that the buses were offering them an opportunity and not removing them from work, the touts became cooperative.

But then the local authorities have not moved fast enough to enable mass transport to operate smoothly, by way of designating lanes for the buses.

So boarding the sleek, zero-emission electric, soundless buses does not necessarily save you from the traffic jam, though you can enjoy free wi-fi and air-con while on board. Such are the matters that should have engaged the nation more than Nyege Nyege.

Menace

Caning poor young buses by touts aside, the MPs should address the boda boda menace with the same vigour as they did Nyege Nyege.

Today, 14 Ugandans are being killed on the roads daily, half of them being passengers or riders on boda boda. Most hospital beds are now occupied by boda boda crash victims, at the expense of other ailments.

Previous attempts to register boda boda and institute some form of regulated operating environment for them have failed.

Recently a for-pay training programme was started for them but the boda boda riders have scoffed at it, claiming it is just a money making plot for some connected people, and that the certificate one gets after attending it does not mean anything to the traffic and statutory registration authorities.

Such matters, though directly linked to several deaths a day, are not deemed as important and worth of more urgent parliamentary attention as a four-day picnic for paying adults in some forest by the riverside.

Joachim Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail:buwembo@gmail.com

Strictly Personal

Off we go again with public shows, humbug and clowning, By Jenerali Uliwengu

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The potential contestants in the approaching elections are already sizing themselves up and assessing their chances of fooling their people enough for them to believe that they are truly going to “bring development” to them.

 

I mean, you have to be a true believer to believe that someone who says they have come to offer their services to you as your representative in the local council or in the national parliament and they tell you that they are going to build your roads to European standards, and your schools are going to be little Eatons; your hospitals are going to be better and more lavishly equipped than the Indian hospitals, where many of our high-placed people go for treatment, and your water supply will be so regular that you have to worry only about drowning!

 

I mean no exaggeration here, for the last time we had the occasion to listen to such clowns — five years ago — we heard one joker promise he would take all his voters to the United States for a visit.

 

He was actually voted to parliament, or at least the cabal acting as the electoral commission says he was. He has never revisited that promise as far as I can remember, but that must surely be because he is still negotiating with the American embassy for a few million visas for his voters!

 

Yes, really, these are always interesting times, when normally sober people turn out to be raving mad and university dons become illiterate.

 

Otherwise tell me how this can happen: Some smart young man or woman shows up in your neighbourhood and puts up posters and erects stands and platforms for the campaign and goes around the constituency declaring his or her ardent desire to “develop” your area by bringing in clean and safe water, excellent schools, competent teachers, the best agricultural experts as extension officers, etc, etc.

These goodies

At the time this clown is promising all these goodies, you realise he has been distributing money and items such as tee-shirts, kitenge prints, khangas, caps as well as organising feeding programmes, where everyone who cares can feed to satiation and drink whatever they want with practically no limitation.

Seriously, I have been asking myself this question: Would you employ a young man who shows up at your front porch and tells you he is seeking a job to develop your garden and tells you that, while you are thinking whether to employ him, “Here is money for you and your family to eat and drink for now!”

Now, if we think such a man should be reported to the police or taken to a mental institution, why are we behaving in exactly the same way?

Many a time we witness arguments among countrymen trying to solve the conundrum of our continued failure to move forward economically, despite our abundant resources, and it seems like we haven’t got a clue.

But is this not one of the cues, if not probably the most important clue, that we have not found a way to designate our leaders?

It ought to be clear to any person above childhood that this type of electoral system and practice can never deliver anything akin to development or progress.

Now, consider that we have being doing this same thing over and over — in many of our countries elections follow a certain periodicity like clockwork — but we have not discovered the truth.

Put simply, our politics is badly rigged against our people, and elections have become just devices to validate the political hooliganism of the various cabals running our countries like so many Mafia families.

Knee-jerk supporters

We have so demeaned our people, whom we have turned into knee-jerk supporters of whoever gives them food and drink around election time, that now they say that at least at election time it is their turn to eat, which means, naturally, that at all other times it is the turn of the ones who “bring development” to the people.

Clearly, this is not working, and it is no wonder that dissatisfaction and frustration are rife, as our people cannot put a finger to the thing that holds them back.

Apart from these sham elections, from time to time, the rulers organise shows designed to make the people believe that somebody is concerned about their problems.

We have one such masquerade happening in Tanzania right now, where public meetings are organised so people can vent their frustration. But these will never solve any problems; they are just shows.

If the elections we have been holding had any substance, there would not be any need for such public shows, except those organised by those people we elected.

Where are they? What is the use of spending so much money and other resources to erect and maintain a political system that has to be propped by public shows, where people come to vent their grievances over the hopelessness of the system in place?

I am just asking.

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Strictly Personal

Road deaths are symbolic of our national failure, By Tee Ngugi

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“Killer roads claim 25 lives,” screamed the headline of the Daily Nation on March 18. Among this number were 11 Kenyatta University students, who died in a grisly road accident on the Nairobi- Mombasa highway.

The report gave chilling statistics on the ever-worsening road carnage. The 25 died in a span of three days. Between January and February 20, a staggering 649 people lost their lives on our roads.

What these statistics show is that we are well on our way to breaking the annual record of deaths on our roads.

Roads are deadlier

In a column in 2022, Kenyan roads are deadlier than some of the battlefields, I gave some comparative statistics to illustrate just how deadly our roads are.

I stated: “In 2021, more than 4,000 people lost their lives (in Kenya). By contrast, the UK, with a population of 65 million people and 32 million cars, recorded 1,400 deaths on the roads in 2021.

“In Germany, within a comparable period, about 2,500 people died on the roads in a population of 85 million people and 48 million cars.
“Thus, Kenya, with a population of 50 million people and only two million cars, registered more deaths on the roads.”

I went on to show that the deaths on our roads in 2021 were twice the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan in a 20-year period.

If these statistics are not enough to wake up our somnolent officials, then nothing ever will.

Not the avoidable deaths during droughts. Not the deaths caused by collapsing buildings. Not the sky-high cases of femicide.

Not the cry of millions who sleep hungry every day as officials fly around in helicopters. Not the alarming numbers of street families.
Not the despair of millions of unemployed youth. Not the squalor in our unplanned towns and cities.

Nothing will wake these officials. In any case, as the Daily Nation of March 19 on globe-trotting officials showed, when awake, our officials are travelling to the next European destination or, as the countless cases of theft being reported almost daily in all media show, they are busy lining their already saturated pockets.

Now, Kenya wants to send its police to Haiti to rein in marauding gangs that control most of the capital. Do our officials, or citizens, ever ask themselves how Haiti became what it is?

Cursed by God

Haiti is not cursed by God. It got that way because of systematic plunder by officials over the years.

It became what it is because of officials not performing their duties to required standards, and not being sanctioned for it.

It became that way because its officials love nothing more than to cavort in Paris or Miami, rather than think about how to transform the lives of their people.

Every day in our papers, we read about the conduct of our officials that mirrors the behaviour that led to Haiti becoming the broken country it is today.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator

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