If Western aid money returns, steal it

Today, when Western ambassadors and visiting cabinet ministers and US Assistant Secretaries of State for African Affairs meet Museveni, they sit humbly in his presence as he lectures them about their double standards, with the diplomats taking notes like schoolchildren.

Kampala

In the last one month Ugandans have read a familiar story. A discovery is made that government officials have all along been stealing money from the Western donor countries intended for development projects in Uganda.

A new round of cuts in aid has been announced in protest. Apparently, the Western governments, even after glaring case after case in the recent past of their money being stolen by government officials, have continued to give aid to Uganda. But now, they seem to be saying, it has gone too far. So we are told.

The relatively junior officials who swindled donor money at the Office of the Prime Minister and the Public Service pension scheme built expensive homes and bought square miles that the State security system cannot say it would not have known about.

Some of these officials had been attending meetings with ambassadors from the donor countries, often in private cars three times more expensive than the official cars of the given Western ambassador, but the envoys were unable to make the connection between their aid and this luxury life of Ugandan bureaucrats.

That this massive corruption is taking place in broad daylight and stolen government money invested in buildings visible one kilometre away, suggests not only the rotten state of public morals today. It obviously points to a breakdown of the NRM government. But it also says a lot about the degeneration of Western Europe and North America.

The Western donor nations now claim they are suspending all aid to Uganda until 2013. That is not saying much. 2013 is less than a month away, so one might interpret this aid cut in any way, including that the Western aid is to be cut for only two months.

The Western world, sadly, is not what it once was. The West has always had its calculations and vested interests in Africa since the 19th Century. We resented their goals, detested their decision to continue “constructive engagement” with apartheid South Africa and their backing military coups and dictators across the continent who served their interests.

The days gone
But at least they seemed like serious people even in their pursuit of a foreign policy agenda that left us at a disadvantage. When you went to a Western embassy in Kampala, you felt a sense of order, purpose, civilisation and control all around. There is a time in the mid 1980s to mid 1990s that the US embassy information service premises along MacKinnon Road in Kampala, the British Council offices along Parliament Avenue and the Alliance Française at the National Theatre along Nile Avenue were a hub for middle class Ugandans desperate to read the latest international news magazines, periodicals and watch Western TV news channels.

Today, the West is a shadow of its former self, absorbed with eccentric social and cultural agendas, especially gay rights. It almost seems more important for the American or French governments that the handful of Ugandan gays are granted full rights and protection from discrimination than for US and French companies to win road construction or car dealer contracts in Uganda.

The West appears to have given up any hope of advancing its commercial interests in Uganda, has left all the heavy construction and commercial advantage to China and Japan and has settled for championing gay rights as their number one foreign policy goal in Uganda.

When Yoweri Museveni seized State power in January 1986, his very first order of business, even before his swearing-in ceremony, was to call a press conference attended by Western diplomats and journalists in Kampala, in a tacit acknowledgment of Western global power at the time.

Today, when Western ambassadors and visiting cabinet ministers and US Assistant Secretaries of State for African Affairs meet Museveni, they sit humbly in his presence as he lectures them about their double standards, with the diplomats taking notes like school children in his presence.

Even the Barack Obama we thought would radically shake up US foreign policy in Africa acts like a man who does not know what is taking place.

Hillary Clinton, the woman, whom in the early 1990s, we once viewed as the real power, the American Evita behind the newly-elected US President Bill Clinton, today surprisingly seems tame. The most Hillary was able to do recently was “call upon” the M23 rebels in Congo to leave the town of Goma they had captured. She sounded more like she was requesting than that she was ordering the M23 rebels to leave Goma.