What the decent achiever would boast of at 31 years

If you were an honourable 31-year-old, you probably would be having an advanced degree. If not, you would be running a business worth hundreds of millions of shillings. Or both. If in the creative economy, the country would have heard of your cool stuff: music, art, comedic sketches, writing, or whatever.
You would also be married and raising a family, or maybe not. You would be involved in some community work, “giving back to the community” either through your local church or mosque or through a different channel. You would basically be “settled” on some clear path to a wonderful future.
Does NRM, marking 31 years in power, look like a promising young man or woman? Is the NRM the kind of citizen we would like to have? Like in any life, things are never that clear although we can still attempt to pass judgment.
I am writing this on the road (literally) in western Uganda. I am with a group of friends on a rapid-fire road trip of western Uganda. Other regions are lined up for the coming months.
The reason we can do these trips easily is because the roads are in fair shape, although nothing out of the ordinary compared with what I have seen in Tanzania or Ghana in recent years. Rwanda is possibly slightly better.
South Sudan is a different matter altogether largely because a senseless fratricidal war has impeded their work for the country.
War is bad. When we had it here in abundance, most recently in northern Uganda, things fell apart. So it is not something to sneer at that Uganda is peaceful border to border, and because of that a lot of other good things are happening.
The problem for the NRM government and President Museveni is Ugandans who can express themselves think good is not good enough. At the very worst good should be better.
The achieving 31-year-old could have done a lot more if only he or she had worked harder at discipline and creativity and refused to make excuses for stumbles and outright failures.
Uganda most definitely would be having thousands more kilometres of road finely tarred if it were not for corruption as various inquiries, judicial and parliamentary, have shown.
Uganda would be having many, many more classroom blocks built-to-last if it were not for collusion involving bureaucrats and private banks to play games with borrowed project money: putting the money on fixed deposit accounts for a short time at pre-agreed interest and share the proceeds.
Speaking of which, it is odd that when it comes to inflation the government works hard to keep it low and stable; for foreign exchange, the government is aggressive in ensuring that regime is stable. But when it comes to interest rates, all I hear from government officials are complaints about how Ugandans have not mobilised enough money to make it available for the banking sector to use.
We do not have fixed deposit accounts, no money in government bonds, and on and on. But where do we get the money to hand to the banks to enjoy in the first place? In any case, NSSF that is lending a lot to the banks is doing so using money from the small workers in the private sector.
We are already doing something in the circumstances. What is the government doing in return? There is never a clear answer save to say that NSSF should not have a monopoly in the retirement benefits sector. So the banks get off easy; not so the Ugandan. Those high interest rates are very annoying.
At 31 years in power, the NRM appears not to have seen the youth population ballooning and prepared accordingly. The officials seem so mired in short-term transactions as to fail to look over the horizon.
The National Development Plan is a move in the positive direction, but its implementation is tepid. In any case, generalised public sector corruption, wastage, and inefficiency ensures that there is no value for money in the things we do to see through the NDP.
The 31-year-old NRM still, inexplicably, is fumbling over land matters. On this one, the opportunity was missed in 1986 when there was an empty slate to write on. Mr Museveni could have rewritten the script on our convoluted land tenure system much better than the laws we have. We are now fidgeting with an amendment here and there. Nothing seems, especially coherent.
And, why, after passing the anti-sectarian law do we have so much sectarian talk, now fuelled by social media? A killing occurs in Kampala and the focus is not pursuit of justice through due process, but rather pursuit for justice through ethnic blackmail and counter-blackmail.
The 31-year-old NRM, through its large and small actions, has created a parochial environment that has unleashed these forces of resentment that may yet ensure the next three decades are not much different from the current plodding.

Mr Tabaire is the co-founder and director of programmes at African Centre for Media Excellence in Kampala. [email protected]
Twitter:@btabaire