When your government steals from itself and its own people

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