Living honestly in highly corrupted pearl of Africa

Behind the curtains. If Ugandans knew what many in the news media know about these greedy people who on the outside appear much happier than us because of their greed, they would quickly abandon the illusion that the more one steals, the more one owns or embezzles, the happier one becomes.

It is no different from an addition to cocaine or gambling. Anyone who simply can’t control the urge to loot his office funds or whole government ministry resources most probably is too mentally and emotionally unwell to enjoy that wealth even when they finally get it.
So it is an error on our part to envy or wish to join the corrupt.

Inside stories
Many of us know insider stories on the well-known corrupt people of Uganda: how they live, the state of their marriages, the conduct of their children, their personal outlook, their plans and dreams and all that sort of thing.

If Ugandans knew what many in the news media know about these greedy Ugandans who on the outside appear much happier than us because of their greed, they would quickly abandon the illusion that the more one steals, the more one owns or embezzles, the more political power one wields, the happier one becomes.

In 1995, I sat in President Museveni’s personal office at the International Conference Centre with his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba for a series of interviews for a book I was working on.

Fine, Museveni’s office looks nice with its large mahogany desk and black leather chair, with the Uganda flag behind it. But I did not feel any different from being in any other office I have been to.

I have not felt a significant surge of happiness from the two occasions I stayed in five-star hotels in Kigali, Rwanda and Johannesburg, South Africa and I doubt if my life would be five times more content now than it is if my simple bedroom at home resembled those five-star hotel rooms in which I stayed.

But, most of us are burdened with many family and personal responsibilities that could be solved if we had just a little more cash on us.

Several companies and government ministries have organised office cooperatives from which their members can borrow modest loans. We need more of these and churches should introduce them.

The one solution open to those who strive to live by their consciences in a society as rotten as Uganda, where corruption as we discussed last week, has now become a well-organised, well-structured system, is not to make the futile effort to try and “do as the Romans do”, but to create an alternative system.

Many groups, such as the Jews living in hostile Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, were forced, for their very survival, to organise themselves into “ghettoes”, small, secluded communities-within-communities and in the long run ended up becoming more wealthy than the wider society that persecuted them.

The few honest people left in Uganda should emulate these examples and create societies and associations. Within these associations they can borrow money, shop at each others’ supermarkets and support each others’ private clinics, audit and legal firms and so on.

Just a little more organisation and association and just a little less waste of our resources vainly buying $30,000 cars and we can create an eco system that shields us from the extremes of despair without having to resort to corruption and taking bribes.

timothy_kalyegira@yahoo.com