Can education exist outside the vampire state?

Last Sunday, I expressed the rather cynical view that Uganda’s Universal Primary Education (UPE) was probably doing the right thing, if its huge turnover of dropouts and failures provided tomorrow’s slaves; people who would do the work that more successful people usually do not want to touch.

But side by side with the government-financed UPE programme, we have the more respectable higher performance non-UPE government schools, as well as schools that are run as private enterprises.
Naturally, the administrators of the non-UPE (but) government-owned schools insist that they are not profit-making entities, and that they ask parents to pay only those amounts required to meet essential school needs.

Even more naturally, the owners of private schools claim that they had set up these outfits primarily to give a service to society, only making small surpluses that are called ‘profit’ for lack of a better description.

By contrast, if their investment had been made in any other business area, the proprietors would probably look for some elevated ground, plus a trumpet, and sing about their profits, unless they feared that bandits could get unduly interested in their movements.

When a Ugandan business operation makes a lot of money, our people tend to escape into their own fantasies of great wealth, and they will chat and speculate forever until the success story appears truly heroic, even if it is a tale of thieves.

Therefore, to our people, huge profits in most business lines improve the brand, because greed is good; but huge profits in the education industry are frowned upon, because greed is bad.
For that reason, the successful school operator does not promote his enterprise by publishing annual balance-sheets; he publishes annual public examination results.

When a senior desk office bearer steals a few billion Shillings of government funds, he only needs to throw a few million at the local church, then at his neighbourhood funerals, plus of course buying some beer, and he will be a cleansed man; another hero to be celebrated.
When a government school headmaster steals a few million Shillings, people want him removed. Some wish he was lynched.

Why are there two different moral scales?
We are often told that the thieves who occupy virtually every government office are picked (and sometimes elected) by and from the general society; that the police officers who double as criminal gangsters are children of ordinary Ugandans.

So, we are invited to accept – indeed to embrace – the vampire state, because its actors come from a rotten society. But where do school operators come from?
Not only are they from the general society, but they are as exposed to their fellow vampires as any other citizen. They pay their taxes and the appropriate bribes to get things done, just like any other citizen with comparable responsibilities. Neither does inflation spare them or their institutions.

It is therefore glaringly undemocratic to deny a section of society the right to the channels that bring great wealth, when at the same time the doctrine of the vampire is virtually the only recognisable ideology under NRM rule. Indeed, this doctrine is so firmly established that even foreign donations for some of the most wretched refugees on earth must flow through the dark siphon network – via the Office of the Prime Minister – before trickling to the camps.

In an environment like that, when I hear government ministers and other politicians howling that school managers must not increase fees, I know it is just another chorus confirming that hypocrisy is not dead.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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