Others within the government just about ignored them, assuring them how they must be joking, talking about the potential of Uganda having serious oil.

In the beginning a small band of geoscientists dug up rocks in quiet but determined obscurity – inadequate money, inadequate equipment, inadequate personnel.

Others within the government just about ignored them, assuring them how they must be joking, talking about the potential of Uganda having serious oil.

The local naysayers’ lack of belief in their fellow Ugandans’ competence hurt even more than the dismissive treatment they received from some of the world’s heavy-hitting geologists, who declared the Albertine too young a basin to have oil.

It turns out the Ugandan scientists were right. One of them, the redoubtable Reuben Kashambuzi, tells the tale nicely in his 2010 book, A Matter of Faith. It is a book every shouting MP should buy and read.

It is because our guys – Kaliisa (yes, Kabagambe), Kashambuzi, Rubondo, Malinga, Kasande, Kabanda – were right that we have some of the world’s leading oil companies such as Total in Uganda. Other super majors are reportedly rubbing their hands together, waiting to oil them here.

But the excitement oil has spawned amongst sections of Ugandans is a little unseemly. It would appear as if our “national life” begins and ends with it. Far from it.
In any event, we have pretensions to democracy.

So let all voices be heard. It is better we fight the ugly fight today before the first barrel of commercial oil leaves the ground for the refinery or directly for the international market. Imagine having these fights as oil is being exported and the dollars pouring in by the day.

It is not to say all the “issues” will be resolved by the time that first barrel comes out of the ground, whenever that is. It is my guess that at that point and on, there will be less acrimony. That assumes, largely, that the present standoff between the Executive and the Legislature leads to compromise – and consensus – that holds in the decades ahead.

Both sides should use the current suspension of Parliament profitably. The fight over the actual role that the minister in charge of petroleum should play, which she does on behalf of the President, is a principled one. It is also one that brings a whole host of issues into focus.

The first is the power the presidency/Executive has and how that power is discharged, and what checks and balances the Legislature can bring to bear.

The second is the regard the current crop of MPs has for the Executive. Some MPs just do not trust President Museveni’s government to do the correct thing and are ready to demonstrate it. Just as well. Oil is a resource that promises deep and wide changes for Uganda.

So cool heads should prevail in this period when Parliament is on katebe following last Tuesday’s cacophony in the plenary.

The Executive and Legislature must meet each other somewhere in the middle. Parliament speaks of checks and balances – but there will be no power to check or balance to provide if the Executive has no power to exercise. The reverse is true.

Before the Tuesday mayhem, a neat arrangement had been reached: on licensing, the envisaged Petroleum Authority of Uganda licenses and the minister endorses. If dissatisfied, consultations occur. On contracts, the minister negotiates but Parliament endorses. If otherwise, more work is done.

President Museveni does not like this framework. He wants full powers to license oil companies and enter agreements with them without input from MPs or anybody else. Parliament, vastly dominated by his own party, is saying: No, Mr President.

Mr Museveni’s “historic mission” was to use the gun to kick out hapless Amin, Obote and Lutwa and return Uganda to normalcy. But is he the man to fight corruption and return decency to government and country?

Stealing of public money is now so widespread that President Museveni is musing publicly about shooting the thieves China-style.

The President should stop musing and act in a big and thorough manner. No, nobody should be killed by firing squad. But there are things Mr Museveni, whose government is mired in grand theft and even grander incompetence at just about every level, can cause to be done. This show really starts with him.

First, he must order a deep forensic audit of all government ministries, departments and agencies. This will cost money, but it may be money well spent in the long run if the findings are robust and recommendations are acted on. Those findings would no doubt reveal what the Ugandan public – especially those of us who appear on radio and write in newspapers – talks about all the time: that this government is “corrupt through and through”, as Achebe’s Mr Green observed gravely.

Second, he should not rely only on the legal route when cases of grand theft come up, which is very often. Where the legal path is used, it should be selective. For the smaller thieves and accomplices such as cashiers, system administrators, junior accountants, a purely legal approach is fine. Once found guilty, they must save time and refund all the stolen money plus interest.

For their godfathers and mothers – the permanent secretaries, under-secretaries and principal accountants – the stakes must be a lot higher. Where a prima facie case exists, they should certainly be tried and face all the consequences that come with a guilt verdict. There are those, however, especially the permanent secretaries and under-secretaries, who may not have actually stolen but the thieving occurred on their watch. These ones must still be held accountable for negligence or incompetence or both.

I am not talking about stepping aside, itself a most rare thing in our land. They must resign. The President must demand their resignation, especially if they are permanent secretaries who are appointees of the President. With resignation, they cannot sue the government for wrongful dismissal.

For reasons best known to him, President Museveni does not do these bold things, having reduced himself to musing casually about the looting mafia in his government to the Chinese and before them the Rwandans.
Presidential musings would not be a problem. It is just that stolen money is not money you can use to build houses for doctors in post-conflict northern Uganda. Musings cannot replace action. That seems the case unfortunately. There is no reason whatsoever why Permanent Secretary Pius Bigirimana still sits behind his shiny desk in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM). This is no way to fight corruption, Mr President.

There are, in fact, many permanent secretaries and other top technocrats who should not be holding their jobs. Accountant General Gustavio Bwoch reportedly hinted at resigning while appearing before Parliament over the theft in the OPM. Go, boss, go. I say. You have failed to manage your accountants. They have run completely rogue; stealing from ministry to ministry and back again with smug confidence.

A lot of bureaucrats at permanent secretary level have also simply stayed too long, sometimes more than 10 years, in one ministry. They have consequently built fiefdoms from which they steal on top of inserting their sons, daughters, and mistresses. So focussed on theft and nepotism they have no time to supervise anything. That is why service delivery is almost non-existent despite all the money thrown at the various programmes. Why Mr Museveni lets his permanent secretaries overstay in these places is a mystery. Or maybe it is not.

I suspect Mr Museveni will seek re-election in 2016 on an anti-corruption platform. There is not much else left for him to run on. It cannot be professionalising the army, or completing certain projects, or fixing Kampala’s potholes. All his political capital is expended as well. So corruption it is. That is why you see the present well-publicised police investigations into the various swindles. Is this mere posturing for purely political ends?

Mr Museveni’s “historic mission” was to use the gun to kick out hapless Amin, Obote and Lutwa and return Uganda to normalcy. But is he the man to fight corruption and return decency to government and country?

Mr Tabaire is a media consultant with the African Centre for Media Excellence.
bentab@hotmail.com

What Africa needs, at country level and possibly collectively, is clarity about what it wants from these big powers. The problem is that no such broad debate is going on in places like Uganda. Only President Museveni knows what the heck he wants from China, if anything.

It is time once again for some well-meaning Africans to ask what an elected or re-elected US President has in store for Africa. I am yet to grasp fully the logic of the fuss. That these last two elections have sent and re-sent to the White House a part-Kenyan president makes the issue all the more urgent. People, Africa (read Uganda) is not Israel.

Shut up and get on with your business. “Africa’s future is up to Africans,” the said leader of the free world, Barack Obama, said three years ago on a quickie visit to Accra. Maybe we should be asking what Africa has in store for the United States and the rest of the world regardless of who is in the White House.

Seriously, though, the US, or Mr Obama for that matter, has something for Africa. But that something is not altruistic – coming from the good heart of the White House to benefit the teeming masses of Mother Africa. It is all about America. As it should be, I say.

Things get more interesting when China, which kicked off its leadership change this past week just as Mr Obama was basking in his victory, comes into the picture.

China is playing big in Africa –building roads, railways, stadia, hospitals, convention centres and palaces in return for deals in the natural (extractive) resources sector. In 2009, one report says, “Guinea [Conakry] announced a $7 billion infrastructure deal offering a Chinese firm, the China International Fund, a “strategic partnership” in all mining projects.” Many other multi-billion dollar deals around the continent have been, and are being, sealed along the same lines.

China is widely reported to be on course to overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economy in a few years. The US surely wants to retain its number one position.
Africa, finally growing economically, offers a chance to both countries. The Chinese are almost entirely into tangible things – minerals, timber, oil. The Americans, well, they want the same things but because of history, and some coyness, they mention them only amongst many other interests.

In June, the Obama administration issued its US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa with these objectives: “(1) strengthen democratic institutions; (2) spur economic growth, trade, and investment; (3) advance peace and security; and (4) promote opportunity and development. Across all objectives, we will: deepen our engagement with Africa’s young leaders; seek to empower marginalised populations and women; address the unique needs of fragile and post-conflict states; and work closely with the UN and other multilateral actors to achieve our objectives on the continent.”

Not bad, you say.
The strategy also lists America’s “core interests in sub-Saharan Africa: ensuring the security of the United States, our citizens, and our allies and partners; promoting democratic states that are economically vibrant and strong partners of the United States on the world stage; expanding opportunities for US trade and investment; preventing conflict and mass atrocities; and fostering broad-based, sustainable economic growth and poverty alleviation”.

Note the bit about “expanding opportunities for US trade and investment”. Just in case, President Obama makes clear his introduction to the strategy, saying that his country “will encourage American companies to seize trade and investment opportunities in Africa, so that their skills, capital, and technology will further support the region’s economic expansion, while helping to create jobs here in America”. The little phrase about American money and know-how supporting Africa’s “economic expansion” should not blind us to America’s real intent here: our resources.

Bush or Obama or Romney, it is all about the United States. Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao or Xi Jinping, it is all about China. Washington and Beijing only differ in approach toward Africa but the intent is the same.

What Africa needs, at country level and possibly collectively, is clarity about what it wants from these big powers. The problem is that no such broad debate is going on in places like Uganda. Only President Museveni knows what the heck he wants from China, if anything.

As a Ugandan, I think we should mind our own business. But, hey, I also recognise we cannot be insular, and that the world is not equal. The big fellows still bully the weaker ones and extract blood.

I therefore have only one desire: will anyone help us fight corruption because no one in Uganda will? China need not apply, not after President Jintao warned on Thursday at the opening of the Communist Party congress that corruption “could prove fatal to the party” and potentially lead to the “fall of the state”.
Hello MrObama.

Mr Tabaire is a media consultant with the African Centre for Media Excellence. bentab@hotmail.com

Banning uncomfortable issues from being discussed by citizens will not bury those issues. If the people won’t talk about theft of taxpayer and donor money through drama in the National Theatre, they will simply continue talking in – it is akin to the classic case of hiding one’s head in the sand – bars, taxis, churches, homes, and on social media

The Media Council is finally doing something. And it is the wrong thing. Instead of facilitating free expression, it is actively stifling it. That is a dumb thing to do even if dumb things go on in official Uganda all the time.

This past week the sensible people at the Media Council – part of whose mandate is unambiguously to “censor films, videotapes, plays and other related apparatuses” –stopped a play that was already showing at the National Theatre. The State of the Nation KkuGirikiti takes no prisoners in its treatment of our sorry politics and government. I have not watched the play yet, but those who have, plus news reports, say it attacks official theft of public money and property, cronyism, hypocrisy, and pretentions to dynastic political succession.

You would wonder why a play that spreads wide open these obvious issues is so toxic as to be banned. One clear conclusion comes to mind: the play is telling it as it is – the truth. As we have heard all our lives, the truth can be uncomfortable sometimes. It hurts. In this case it hurts the prospects of those in power who seek to continue holding on to it in unaccountable ways.

Banning uncomfortable issues from being discussed by citizens will not bury those issues. If the people won’t talk about theft of taxpayer and donor money through drama in the National Theatre, they will simply continue talking in – it is akin to the classic case of hiding one’s head in the sand – bars, taxis, churches, homes, and on social media. The Media Council is therefore engaged in an exercise in futility.

Ironically, this is the same play the Council had granted permission to be staged in public in the first place, say the producers. If the producers are speaking the truth, it must then be that the Council members saw nothing wrong with the play but changed their minds because someone from high up (always someone from high up) complained. This shows the Council, a body that also regulates the print media, is a spineless entity that is incapable of doing a professional job.

Intolerance is one of the things The State of the Nation KkuGirikiti rails against. The Council was at the centre of the action recently when the police locked up Mr David Cecil, a UK citizen, for staging The River and the Mountain, “a comedy drama about a gay businessman killed by his employees”. He is out on bail. His crime? Staging the play without the permission of the Media Council. So the Council does not want you to talk about serious political issues, but neither does it want you to talk about serious “social” issues such as homosexuality as well.

For writing a book titled 50 Years of Turmoil, a 23-year-old student has been arraigned in court. In the book, the young man says some uncharitable things about President Museveni. Since when did criticising one’s own country on its golden jubilee and calling the sitting President names amount to an offence? Part of the job of President of the Republic, fountain of honour or not, is to take unstinting criticism. To be derided comes with the territory. Else one goes home to herd cattle.

These three back-to-back cases point to a resurgence in the government’s desire to control what Ugandans can and cannot say, or even think for that matter. Our autocratic government seems to be slowly morphing into authoritarianism.

There is mindlessness to this stuff too. This government has ignored the creative industry. All those visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, comedians, and of course, dramatists, have to struggle mightily in dingy workspaces, often on less-than-full stomachs. Yet the only time they encounter their government is when that government is stopping them from sharing with fellow citizens the works they have created under those very rough circumstances.

If the government feels it must get involved with Ugandans’ creative business, it cannot do so arbitrarily. Let it start, for crying out loud, by fixing the torn, and therefore dangerous, floorboard of the National Theatre – yes the same floorboard that forms part of the stage on which the banned play was being staged.

Mr Tabaire is a media consultant with the African Centre for Media Excellence. bentab@hotmail.com

That is why we have crumbling everything for which the government is primarily responsible. The schools have not just physically crumbled; it is also the quality of teaching offered. The health care system is a joke. Some hospitals can no longer paint their walls because the administrators are busy stealing medicines meant for patients under their care.

The most striking thing about Uganda 2012 is not the Golden Jubilee shindig. It is the egregious cases of corruption that keep popping up, world without end. The mega thefts in the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Public Service are representative of the widespread madness.

It fascinates me in a weird sort of way that no corruption scandal is big enough to scare off potential thieves of public money. When Global Fund money meant to fight HIV, malaria and TB was stolen forcing the world body to suspend funding to Uganda in 2005, some of us naively thought we finally had a scandal so scandalous it would slow down public sector corruption. After all, this was a case where officials handling the money under the Project Implementation Unit were “eating” money in dollars. Not shillings. Yet Uganda is a shilling economy.

As the Global Fund was blowing up, some people were at that very moment scheming to steal money meant for Chogm, which took place in Kampala in 2007. Exposure of the corrupt does not seem to force others in the State bureaucracy to have second thoughts, fearing that they may get caught as well at some point. They seem to think that they will never be found out, or they are invincible, or maybe because they could not care less. Officials in the latter category are shameless. They know they can always blame their “woes” on “some people who want to bring me down”.

Failing that, they will brave the whole thing before family and friends, go serve a few years in prison then get out and enjoy the loot. The courts seem to be moving toward getting the corrupt to refund stolen monies on top of serving time. That is as it should be. All the convicted thieves must lose all those palatial houses standing atop Kampala hills and fancy businesses in Kikubo that they have built on the backs of Ugandans, especially the sick and the poor.

One could argue that the government is stealing from itself and from the people it is established to serve. A government that operates like that is not one that can be relied upon to deliver. That is why we have crumbling everything for which the government is primarily responsible. The schools have not just physically crumbled; it is also the quality of teaching offered. The health care system is a joke.

Some hospitals can no longer paint their walls because the administrators are busy stealing medicines meant for patients under their care. Those medicines, of course, end up in the administrators’ private clinics and pharmacies, to which they send the patients. Kampala’s legendary potholes – new city Executive Director Jennifer Musisi has so far disappointed on fixing them – tell their own powerful story of urban rot throughout the country.

Because of too much focus on coming up with schemes to steal, government officials have no time left to think through and implement policy. No wonder doing simple things like feeding Ugandans is a gargantuan task. Sapped of energy to do things that improve the Ugandan society, these officials have alienated the government from the people.

The one thing we must forever bear in mind is that societies improve themselves – fight corruption – if they so choose. Leadership is the most crucial element in moving forward, or backward. When leaders refuse to tolerate corruption, there will be little of it and even that little will be punished when unearthed. So corruption happens and flourishes as it presently does in Uganda because the country’s top leadership tolerates it.

If President Museveni is happy to take credit for improved security in the country, and there is no doubting that Uganda is possibly at its most peaceful in 50 years, he must also take the blame for the failings. The corruption buck stops right at his desk.

There has been no accounting whatsoever for the corruption in Uganda today. If corruption allows elites that support the government to thrive and thus let Mr Museveni continue hogging State power, he should say so. If that is not the case, then we need to know why and how we have arrived in a place where corruption is this pervasive. Over to His Excellency the President.

Mr Tabaire is a media consultant with the African Centre for Media Excellence. bentab@hotmail.com