Uganda’s ‘naked emperor and society’

Trouble ahead. This is the story of how the State uses Ugandans’ financial vulnerability to control the society.

This last week brought with it one of those many puzzles that define Uganda. The family of the late Woman MP for Butaleja, Cerinah Nebanda, announced that it was fronting one of Nebanda’s siblings, Florence, to contest the vacant seat left behind by her recently deceased sister in the forthcoming by election.

Florence, is to run on the NRM party ticket. Just for context, this is the family that had made it clear late last year that it holds the NRM government as the primary suspect in the death of her younger sister.

At Cerinah’s requiem mass, her mother point blank referred to the Inspector-General of Police, Lt. Gen. Kale Kayihura, as being pat of those who had killed Cerinah. At Cerinah’s burial when handed President Yoweri Museveni’s letter of condolence by Deputy Prime Minister Moses Ali, the deceased’s mother angrily tore the letter into pieces and threw it at Lt. Gen. Ali’s vehicle, as Butaleja residents triumphantly waved the FDC party sign.

But here is the same family --- less than a month after Cerinah’s death, with the circumstances of her death still as mysterious as they were on December 14, 2012 --- offering the inexperienced daughter to this NRM party they suspect killed Cerinah to run as a Member of Parliament.
What could be more puzzling than that?

MPs who had initially signed the petition to recall the legislative body for a discussion on Cerinah’s death at the last minute started to withdraw their signatures. In a discussion last week with a friend and political analyst, we reached the conclusion that many other observers of Uganda have reached: It is not so much that Ugandans lack principles as that they are in a very fragile financial situation indeed and, one might add, it raises questions of how well the Ugandan economy really is faring.

The economic slaves
Uganda’s middle class is in reality made up of economic slaves. The first step into our enslavement came in the early 1990s. The Ugandan economy started opening up to the private sector. Ugandans started trading and investing as never before. Radio station after radio station, take away restaurant after restaurant, night club, bank, health club, school, phone company, TV station, newspaper, snake park, hair salon, forex bureau, hospital, clearing and forwarding firm, law firm, accounting firm, NGO, all opened gradually.

“Welcome to the Hotel California”: The mafia state
The 1990s was the decade that a friend recently described as the “Fools’ Paradise”. Ugandans, who had for 20 years endured scarcity of commodities and services now set about putting those memories behind them and getting down to making money, acquiring property and, to quote the 1983 Lionel Richie song, “running with the night”.

By the middle of the 2000-2004 decade, the country had reached its peak capacity. There were only so many radio stations, newspapers, forex bureaus, law firms, video rental clubs, health clubs and clearing and forwarding companies that the economy could sustain. It had become an economy of too many services and companies chasing too few customers and too small a market.

The NRM government, led by a former intelligence officer and experienced in guerrilla warfare and political attrition, studied the patterns in this new Uganda and moved in to manipulate it.
The government started realising that the area in which Ugandans are at their most vulnerable and anxious (especially the Ugandans who earn a monthly income of more than Shs400,000 a month) is not the fear of crime, road accidents, being jailed or ending up in State security safe houses, but the fear of economic ruin and sudden destitution.

The middle class’ financial uncertainty and insecurity became the main weapon to be used by the State against them. Commentators in Uganda’s news media and in Internet forums often discuss how “the Emperor is naked” but few of us have realised how naked the Ugandan society is as well.

Whether it is an MP or a mobile phone company, bank or a long-haul transporter, the owner of shopping arcades and multi-storey commercial property in Kampala and other towns, a civil servant or a Cabinet minister, Ugandans are one phone call, one signature, one decision away from sudden and total ruin.

Those who earn Shs400,000 to Shs1.5m a month find themselves weighed down by too many immediate and extended family obligations to dare lose that job. As most Ugandans know, with the collapse of the government hospitals and schools, the society found itself exposed to the harsh economic weather in which there are no more safety nets.

When your elderly parents fall sick or your late brother’s children are sent away from school over unpaid fees, it is you the corporate executive or civil servant who has to foot the bills. There is no more free medical treatment in government hospitals or affordable but quality education in government schools as it was during the “dark days” of Idi Amin and Milton Obote.

Today, it is an economic jungle in which only the fittest, shrewdest and most corrupt survive.
This economic jungle has shaped a very insecure society, cautious in the extreme, too afraid to speak.

Even the richest people in Uganda are not beyond this state of psychological insecurity. The State has enough information on the prominent sections of Ugandan society to know that most of our income and revenues are made by bending or breaking the law.

In all this is the constant factor: the NRM state, Big Brother, is watching your every transaction and financial dealing. The State can ruin you in a number of ways. If you are a newspaper, it can starve you of government adverts (the government is still the largest advertiser even in this privatised economy).

If you are a hotel, your trading license can be withdrawn or when it expires, the license not renewed. Thus the country has actually been reduced to a society of economic slaves who dare not speak out just so they can have one more meal. This we see so clearly in the other puzzling feature of the 2000s: the NRM “rebel” MPs. Their every position and statement indicates they are all but former members of the NRM but somehow they cannot leave the party, whether it arrests, humiliates, tortures and intimidates them.

We got into this Fools’ Paradise and now it is nearly impossible to get out of it. It brings to mind the theme of the sinister 1977 song by the American Country-Rock band The Eagles, titled Hotel California.

It’s a song in which an unsuspecting traveller weary from the long journey checks into a hotel where, he discovers all sorts of debauchery and sin, gets disgusted and wants to leave, but is told that “You can check out any time you want/But you can never leave”.

So like the rest of upwardly mobile Ugandan society, Cerinah Nebanda’s family must put aside their innermost thoughts and take the pragmatic step of once again aligning themselves with the very political party and government they hold in suspicion.

“Welcome to the Hotel California/Such a nice surprise”, goes The Eagles’ song.

timothy_kalyegira@yahoo.com