The lives of small Ugandans also matter

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the huge gulf between the earnings of Uganda’s privileged government officials and the slave wages given to those at the bottom of the pile every end of the month.
That gulf makes a statement at the level where the questions of social justice and ideological commitment are raised.
In their real lives, the opulence and life-style options available to the princes of the NRM regime can be shocking. Just the per diem (more than $1,000 a day) given to an (often ill-informed and unconstructive) MP when they travel abroad is a curiosity in an economy where political leaders generally do not want to hear of a minimum wage in the private sector, even if the proposal is to set it as low as $2 (Shs7,500) per day.
By infection, the injustice in the government sector is communicated to the private sector, which exploits it as the correct operating principle.
That is why, for instance, the perception that bankers and industrial workers earn a lot of money is a myth, except at the higher management levels. A bank cashier (often holding a university degree) can earn as little as $200 (Shs750,000) in Uganda, while a very senior executive at the same bank may haul away a cool $10,000 (Shs37.5m) per month.
Quietly, using the agency of money (which is not an end in itself), the principle is being established, that the wellbeing and sheer leisure of those in high office is exceedingly important, and those at the bottom of the pile are lucky that they are not told officially that they are expected to live on dog food. The doctrine: Their wages are what they are because their livelihoods do not really matter.
In an environment of very high unemployment and generalised political repression, a helpless economic underclass cannot ordinarily stand up to the government or private corporate enterprise to attack that injustice and sustain the challenge.
Glancing at the state of affairs in the healthcare system, or in the education sector, small people are consistently pushed to the huge margin where they and their children remain unattended to, or are poorly attended to and are poorly educated.
And precisely because they are poorly educated, they are unlikely to fully grasp that they may be condemned to remain in that condition for generations to come, as long as the political establishment of yesterday, and today refuses to embrace leadership change as the facility through which a society sometimes shuffles the beneficiaries of privilege and redistributes the power and wealth of the nation.
During these changes, even in an unjust society, new sets of the privileged come to the fore, and every time at least a few different people leave the huge margin where people’s lives do not matter.
Furthermore, as the NRM’s hold onto power becomes less and less tenable, the voices in the ongoing struggle are becoming more strident and more desperate, and the actions of the regime more cynical. The NRM has always been marked by a soft Stalinism. There are signs that this could rapidly harden and be rolled out as open fascism.
Thousands of victims have been directly connected to various electoral exercises since 1996, the period of the first general election since the enactment of the 1995 Constitution. It cannot be too early then to remind those who wield power that the drivers, bodyguards, political functionaries and other small people who die, suffer or get tortured in the chaos, also have loved ones to whom their lives matter.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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