All Ugandans caught up in corruption

Last week we looked at the several stages of corruption through which Uganda has passed since 1986 and it was obvious, from such scandals as the 2005 Global Fund theft, the 2007 Chogm swindle and the Office of the Prime Minister scandal, we are now at the final stage of corruption.

This is the systemic stage. The stage at which corruption is now an ecosystem, a fully-fledged, pervasive way of governance, way of life and structure of society itself. Everyone, the honest and the dishonest, is caught up in it and depends on it for their livelihood. Before we get into a discussion on how an honest person can survive in this corrupt environment, we need to have a look at exactly how widespread this corruption has become.

Today, unfortunately, everyone in Uganda has been dragged directly or indirectly into this corrupt ecosystem. Our very existence depends on it. The economic structure of Ugandan society --- seen in such things as the very high commercial bank interest rates and the higher interest rates charged by the “loan sharks”, the lack of financial security among the civil service that controls much of the day-to-day decision-making and administrative activity most Ugandans have to deal with, and the breakdown of the free or low-cost society services like healthcare and education we once enjoyed --- means that the only way one can survive for more than a year in Uganda is to become part of the corrupt system.

The Susan illustration
If, say, Susan starts a health club in Bugolobi or Ntinda, she will have got a bank loan or invested her savings to get it going. Susan is an upright, professional person. She pays her taxes and does everything within the law. But because of the difficult economic conditions in the country, the majority of her clients at the health club, the ones who can afford her membership fee (if she is to break even and repay her bank loan) will be the very civil servants, businessmen, politicians, military officers and corporate types who spend all week looting the National Treasury, evading taxes or using their offices to unfairly gain contracts and tenders.

Susan, in other words, has no choice but depend on the very people that she privately abhors for their corrupt ways, if her own business is to survive. Honest architectural firms, land dealers, high end private schools, forex bureaus and others like these, find themselves, like Susan, forced to accept as clients the very same corrupt people who are destroying Uganda.

This same sad state of affairs is to been seen everywhere, especially in the smaller towns and rural villages. Fundraising events at churches are attended by area politicians and civil servants who are always in the news for stealing public money, but the church now finds itself depending on their “generosity” to raise the money to complete the roof or altar simply because the church’s own humble village parishioners are too poor to afford it.

Many very honest Ugandans still find themselves working for private companies or in government ministries and agencies that are rotten with corruption. The media has done much to expose and report on the looting of Uganda’s public assets and money. But even then, it has to go about it in a certain way. Newspapers, television and radio stations need advertisement in order to cover their operating costs.

Many of these adverts are placed by companies involved in the same tax evasion and bribery of government, immigration and tax officials that the media spends its time reporting on and condemning. And since the government, in recent years, has become increasingly intolerant of criticism, the media speaks out boldly and in general vague terms against corruption but I notice it is always careful never to mention President Museveni by name.

That is, directly pointing an accusing finger at him as a possible grandmaster in this massive and unprecedented corruption in Uganda. Editors, reporters, columnists and radio talk show hosts know all that is going on but in public and in their pages, choose to condemn corruption in passionate but careful terms not to mention the President directly. Like the rest of Ugandan society, the media has been caught up in this ecosystem of corruption by which it is impossible to survive if one is too principled, too outspoken, and too honest.

Civil society groups and NGOs themselves have played a key role alongside the media in crying out against corruption, but like the media they too exist in this system. They cannot risk chopping the tree at its trunk and so, like most of us, beat about the bush or prune off only the dead branches and leaves of the tree.

When health, poverty dictate
When principled politicians opposed to the widespread corruption fall seriously sick and require specialised medical attention, usually outside the country (since Uganda’s public healthcare system has collapsed), they find themselves forced to accept an offer by the President to foot their hospital bills, the very President who has sat back and watched the government hospitals sink into rot.

And on and on the story goes: many genuinely honest Ugandans or foreigners working and living in Uganda are being forced into the humiliating and disturbing position of having to co-exist with the thieves or have the thieves as their main clients if their businesses are to survive.

Other Ugandans who are not corrupt, work hard at their jobs and businesses without directly coming into contact with the thieves or the corrupt State, maintain their high ethical standards. But they too make a major compromise: they essentially take a vow of silence. In order for their law firms, florist and bookshops, restaurants, dental clinics, FM radio stations, import business and accounting firms to survive in Uganda, they choose to avoid anything political, especially making sure they are not seen to be close to opposition parties and keep their political views to themselves.

They basically decide to keep quiet in exchange for the State not bothering them. To keep quiet, to never speak out at all when one’s own country is being destroyed by flat-out mass looting of the national treasury --- is in itself another form of taking part in the corruption or at least being guilty by association or guilty by some kind of inexcusable silence.

In the Biblical New Testament the founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ, brought a demanding new dimension to public and private morality, arguing often that the one who does nothing when a crime is being committed or who looks the other way in the face of major injustices is as guilty in the Eternal Divine’s eyes as the one who actually and actively commits the crime.
Or to paraphrase the titles of two 1990s Kevin Costner films, the “Silence of the Lambs” is as much a danger to society as the “Dances with Wolves”.

Going by all this, we can clearly see how pervasive corruption has become the “national disease” I described last Sunday. That is why anti-corruption demonstrations, workshops or appeals alone will not even start to deal with the problem. The structure and routine of our daily lives is now, as we have seen, around corruption, directly or indirectly.

Bishops who are given Four-wheel drive cars by the President upon their enthronement cannot be expected to condemn his hand in fanning the flames of corruption in their Sunday sermons. Either this system of massive corruption developed over the last 20 years must be broken up in its entirety or those who strive to be honest must create an alternative system within this corrupt system. That new system, that exists within the country but is separate from the larger corrupt one, is what we shall examine next week.

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