Last week, a very rare event happened to a couple of Ugandans who were travelling to Tororo. Their car hit and killed an antelope that dashed into the road around a corner near Busitema Forest.

They were lucky they were in a big vehicle; otherwise the antelope wouldn’t have been the only fatality. I have been travelling that route since I was just out of my nappies for 40 years now, and I had never even, heard stories, or rumours about antelopes in the area.
The wild animals that rule Busitema forest are baboons. Apparently, a car striking some rare game had ever gifted the villagers who live nearby. Still, the likelihood of encountering an antelope in that part of this fair land is as rare as seeing a wild ostrich crossing the road there.
Word spread quickly, and soon villagers arrived with their pangas, sharpening them in the darkness on the edge of the tarmac, and hastening to cut off a piece of antelope meat for themselves. The people of Busitema had a 50th anniversary of independence celebration like no other in the country.

For the good folks who had a run-in with the antelope, the more immediate question was; “what was it running away from?” Accentuate by the unease that comes with darkness, they feared that the antelope was being chased by a leopard! Now that the villagers had carted away its dinner, it was likely to turn to the passengers stranded on the roadside.

I thought there was even a bigger question; “where was the antelope coming from?” I could only arrive at two educated guesses. Either it was being transported by wildlife authorities and it escaped from the back of the truck or, and more likely, it came from Murchison National Park!
Murchison Falls National Park is nearly 460 kilometres away from the spot where the antelope met its fate, yes. However, it is the only place that touches a corridor that would bring it to Busitema. It probably left the park, possibly in a group, and travelled along the bushy banks of Lake Kyoga – where it would also have water to drink – then drifted through Busoga to Busitema.

Therefore, the story of the Busitema antelope is an indicator of how severe the pressure on their natural habitat is. The figures for Uganda don’t look good in this regard. Up to 50 per cent of Uganda’s forest cover has been lost since 1970. It is estimated that the country will run out of fuel wood by 2025 – just 13 years away. This in a country where 93 per cent of the population depend wholly, partially, or occasionally (during power outage when the charcoal stove is brought out) on fuel wood.

Increasingly, there is no place to hide if you are a wild animal in Uganda. Now the Institute of Zoology has been tracking the fate of vertebrate species in natural ecosystems in Uganda since 1970.

It says that; “For some species, the rates of loss have been close to catastrophic…60 per cent of Crowned Cranes since 1970, a third of the species of fish in Lake Victoria and more than 90 per cent of the once-famous Kampala bats have disappeared”.
You need a sense of humour to remain levelheaded when faced with such carnage, and the Institute of Zoology notes that, “Some things are of course increasing, most noticeably the Marabou Storks in Kampala”.

The Museveni government, fortunately, reversed the extreme poaching in Murchison National Park that happened during Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s and some period of the Obote II government. There is still poaching, of course, but it has been drastically reduced and is no longer semi-state policy.

The main interest these days is no longer the animals, but the land. Some folks would like to build golf courses in the parks. Say what you will about John Nagenda, the colourfully querulous and lyrical senior presidential adviser on media and public relations, but his heart and words on protecting Ugandan wildlife and their homes against such invasions is extremely admirable.
Now, though, there is an adversary even he can’t push back against – oil. Environmentalists have charged that oil-drilling activities in the neighbourhood of Murchison Falls National Park will endanger the environment and park in the long run.

The death of the antelope in Busitema was probably not in vain. It was a message that all is not well back at the farm. Maybe, since it seems there is no oil in Busitema, we could grow millions of trees and tall grasses there, and create a new park in such places as a haven for the Murchison park refugee animals.We shall deal later with the “natives”, who seem to have a very lively appetite for wild game meat.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com & twitter@cobbo3

Corrupt government is hard work. It is far cheaper and easier to have an honest government.

I have just finished reading a wonderful book titled Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, And The Poverty Of Nations by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, two American economists.
To Ugandans, some episodes described there would be very familiar, given our recent fight over the Oil Bill, and the dust over corruption.

Ugandans would particularly be intrigued by the story of the Indonesian strongman Suharto. We are told that despite the big time corruption by the Suharto regime, Indonesia still managed to turn in very impressive economic growth rates of 6 per cent over the 30 years of Suharto’s rule, “making it one of the great economic success stories of modern history”.

Sound familiar? Then you haven’t read this yet: “While the Suharto clan may have taken more than its fair share, poverty levels fell dramatically in the Suharto years, and public education, health…were also greatly expanded.

“Plenty was left over to trickle down to everyday Indonesians,” Fisman and Miguel write. The authors suggest that Suharto made sure stealing never really got out of hand, and he played by the rules in the crooked book. “For better or worse, the Suharto regime had a reputation for holding up its end of bribe transactions, at least removing the uncertainty that is a part of most illicit transactions.”

The post-Suharto years have sometimes been messy, and a foreign business executive in Jakarta laments the state of affairs today: “There was a price for everything [during the Suharto reign] and everyone knew the price and what he was getting for what he paid.” However, today “you see chaos instead.”

Read that and reflect on the runaway corruption in Uganda. The corruption itself is bad, but what seems worse is that no one is managing it as Suharto did. There is chaos.

Secondly, Uganda’s crooks seem to have also broken another golden rule of corruption. Don’t eat everything, let some trickle down to the people.

The chaps at the Office of the Prime Minister who stole the reconstruction billions meant for northern Uganda, and those who robbed pensioners broke every rule in Suharto’s book.

This brings us to a strange place. While everyone is cursing the rot in government, perhaps they should worry more that its corrupt officials and leaders cannot steal well. It seems their inability to be smart crooks, is a wider reflection of how incompetent they are.
Indeed few leaders and bureaucrats can be very corrupt, but still build roads, have hospitals stocked with medicine, increase teachers and nurses’ pay, and so on.

The path the Kampala government has chosen is a very difficult one. Corrupt government is hard work. It is far cheaper and easier to have an honest government. Look at Tanzania’s founding father Julius Nyerere. He was an honest simple much-respected man, and whenever he called on Tanzanians to sacrifice, they did so willingly.

After the collapse of the first East African Community in 1977, Tanzania had no international phone system. To raise money to build one, 25 per cent of public servant’s salaries was cut for many months. It caused hardship, but Tanzanians became more nationalist, because they had given up their salary to build a national institution. They felt ownership. Nyerere could do it because he had integrity.

The late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi docked civil servants’ salaries to finance a giant hydro-electricity dam. Though Zenawi had his critics, his development credentials were well established.

DR Congo’s thieving dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, on the other hand, couldn’t call on his people to sacrifice precisely because he was corrupt. The Congolese didn’t believe in him, and I suspect like many Ugandans view their government today, believed that he was stealing their money for himself, and would have kicked him out much sooner.

In addition if you are lazy, incompetent, you are better off having an honest government. You don’t have to find a lot of money to build a coalition of the corrupt that keeps you in power.

Finally, since not many people will give a corrupt leader their affection willingly, he needs to buy their love. So a corrupt big man needs economic growth. Uganda’s Big Men, on the other hand, are undermining growth.

He has a responsibility to do nothing that discredits the UPDF and undermines its ability to remain in Somalia.

Although it is sold in Uganda you probably didn’t read Sunday Nation. Last Sunday, there was an opinion piece titled “Uganda Must Not Reverse Gains Of The Last Generation” (http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Uganda-must-not-reverse-gains-of-the-past-generation/-/440808/1676122/-/c13hy1/-/index.html) by Mukhisa Kituyi.

Kituyi is a former Trade minister, and currently director at the Kenya Institute of Governance. Kituyi follows Uganda’s politics closely, and in my conversations with him have found his knowledge of the players and our issues, even small rural ones in remote Busoga, quite impressive. A while back, I spent an evening with him during which he argued that Uganda’s historical sectarian divide along religion, was “better” than Kenya’s which tends to split along ethnic lines.

The reason, he argued, is that a religious divide avoids emotional and visceral fights over things like ancestral land, which Africans tend to kill each over and to harbour enmities for generations. Also, the logic of religion is cross-tribal. A good Catholic from Masaka can come together with another one from Gulu and possibly die in defence of the Pope. A good Muganda from Masaka and a good Acholi from Gulu, however, will rarely find a common political cause over which they will die easily – unless, as happened in 1979 – it is an Idi Amin.

Anyhow, in the article Kituyi commented on the current political battles in Uganda; the growing intolerance of the government; the hardline with critics; attacks on the media; and threats by political and UPDF leaders to stage a coup (against themselves).

His plea to Ugandan leaders, and President Museveni in particular, is to pause and reflect because not only is the journey they choose likely to end in disaster for the country, but for the region too. Museveni’s shortcomings aside, he argues, Uganda has still been a force for good. And to preserve that greater good, the President needs to change course:

“Events are reaching a point when this cannot remain a little domestic intrigue. Uganda is a major force for good in the East Africa region,” Kituyi wrote. “The key provider for, and leader of the Amisom forces in Somalia, principal arbitrator in the never-ending conflict in DR Congo, and the ultimate guarantor of the state of South Sudan; her leadership role cannot be transferred to any other country overnight.”

He added: “As a regional organisation, the East African Common Market has agreed protocols on governance stating minimum standards for member countries. Each country in the region undertakes to be its brother’s keeper.

“Under this understanding Uganda...continues to be a major driver on the road to greater East African integration.
“Yet the country now finds itself in a growing labyrinth of conflicts that are not only threatening its standing as a beacon of peace and stability in the region, but poses challenges as to the extent to which turmoil at home can upset the emerging bullishness in the regional economy and politics.

“It is everybody’s business that President Museveni is assisted to see that tactics of yesteryears are rapidly losing relevance. Globalised appetites and demonstrated transitions from rogue leaderships create…self-belief in a new generation who may now claim back their country without any sense of debt to politicians of Museveni’s generation who were responsible for the chaos that created heroes of the eighties.”

I have nothing much of my own to add after those worthy insights. So let me borrow from a far greater man - my father.

The old man has many intriguing outside-the-box ideas. One of them is about charity. He believes charity cannot be a one-off thing. That if you give a relative money today, you should do so tomorrow, and the next if he is in need. If you don’t, you do something worse than leaving him in his suffering: You raise his expectations that you will help, and crush his hopes. So if you don’t intend to try and finish the race, don’t start it.

If you bring his and Kituyi’s ideas together, the conclusions are obvious. First, Museveni worked hard for East African integration. If he didn’t intend to see it to the end, he shouldn’t have invested in it. He sent UPDF to Somalia and it helped stabilise Somalia. He has a responsibility to do nothing that discredits the UPDF and undermines its ability to remain in Somalia.

And he invested a lot of diplomatic capital in the DR Congo peace process. If he didn’t intend to conduct himself in a way that enables him to be a credible mediator, then he shouldn’t have got involved.

I am trying to find a delicate way to say this. President Museveni shouldn’t take the region for a ride. He had a choice. He should have been content to be a parochial Ugandan Chief and a Nyabushozi cattle keeper.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com & twitter@cobbo3

The outcome a military coup could be terrible, yes, but its happening would not be out of character in Uganda

In the space of a few days last week, Uganda’s minister of Defence, Dr Crispus Kiyonga, and then President Yoweri Museveni, said words to the effect that if Parliament continues to give the Executive headache, the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) might be tempted to step in and stage a coup.

The outcome a military coup could be terrible, yes, but its happening would not be out of character in Uganda.

The surprising thing is that Museveni and Kiyonga acknowledged the possibility in the way they did. That is because it represents a sharp move away from the story on which the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) and Museveni have justified their monopoly of power, and having the army represented in Parliament.

The story is that the UPDF is the “People’s” army, and when as the National Resistance Army took up arms to fight the Milton Obote regime, and thousands of peasants died in that war, it was to hand power back to the people. That is what made the NRA war a “revolution”.

That power was exercised through the Resistance Councils, later Local Councils at the lower levels; by the National Resistance Council, which later became Parliament at the national level; and the NRM leaders at the executive level. The UPDF’s place in Parliament was, as Museveni used to say, the “eyes and ears” of the peasants and progressive intellectuals who lost their life in the cause.

For the UPDF to have to stage a coup, would mean the gulf between it and the “people’s organs” it brought into people to exercise power had grown so wide, it needed to break that social contract. In short, what Museveni and Kiyonga are saying is that the “revolution” is over. That is truly amazing.

Next question then, is why would a coup not be surprising? The reason is that the transition of power from the military to elected representatives in Uganda has been messy, and not happened as neatly as it has in Ghana, for example. It remains “unresolved business” and will have to come to a head one day.

Indeed some scholars have argued that Uganda didn’t democratise. That the NRA still rules as an armed movement, but did two things: It formed the UPDF to create a semblance of a conventional army; and dressed up the NRM rebel movement in civilian garb.

Which leads us to the next and last question; why did they need to “civilianise”?

Because in this way, it can collect “democracy rent”. Every form of rule has its side benefits. An Idi Amin-type military dictatorship, or the “revolutionary” and one-party rule of the NRM had its pay-off.
There was little bureaucracy, so things got done quickly.

If you got a contract, even you bribed for it, you would be sure to do the job and collect on your inflated invoices. There were few, and even then embattled media, to stick their nose in the story. And the courts did not have the “democratic” space that they fluked in the Constitution to make independent rulings, so the possibility that you could go to court to challenge the awarding of a contract and get a fair judgement was nearly zero.

Unlike today with over 60 independent FM stations and a Parliament where MPs defy the president, things were easier – even for the corrupt.
The problem is that donors, local and internal investors, don’t trust that system, so they put in less money, and you have lower private sector wealth created. This means you collect fewer taxes, and have less donor money, and therefore less resources for patronage.

Whereas a corrupt chap in the old regime had an easier time, he had little to steal. Democracy opened the money tap and brought big money (the democracy rent), but also intrusive journalists and independent MPs.

In the old regime, the government had to control people through a vast security mechanism, which it didn’t have enough money to pay for. With democratic rent, it can control the people through patronage. By sharing some of it with the security agencies, it gives them a subjective and selfish reason to protect the political order.

With a military coup, Museveni and NRM would lose the vast democratic rent. And the security establishment would have to base its loyalty to the state on ideology, not bread and wine. It’s clear which of these is the sweeter and more rational deal for Museveni and Kiyonga – the latter.
Would they give it up? Yes.

Continue agitating for Museveni to go home, weakening him in the process, and opening doors for even worse forces and relatives, who are watching his struggles patiently like vultures. Thus if it is not Museveni, then expect worse.

So we are told that at the ongoing ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) retreat, Buyaga representative Barnabas Tinkasiimire plucked courage and told President Yoweri Museveni to his face that he should restore term limits and retire.

Over the past 10 or so years, both the Opposition and a few NRM politicians have asked Museveni to go back home and tend his cattle, as he himself likes to say. For the Opposition, that is expected. For the NRMs, it is not surprising that they would say it behind Museveni’s back. What is unusual is to stare the tiger in the face and speak truth to it.

But I shall not focus on Tinkasiimire’s plunge, because that will be failing to see the forest for the trees. We usually hear calls for President Museveni, now among the longest ruling leaders not just in Africa, but also in the world, to step down during certain events. One, when we have diseases like “nodding disease” and the government responds in a lazy and uncaring way, at a time when reports have it that money meant for drugs has been stolen.

Secondly, when there are shocking cases of corruption, beginning with the GAVI funds that were meant for vaccination and fighting tuberculosis; to the recent saga of Northern Uganda reconstruction looted in the Office of the Prime Minister; to the robbery of billions of shillings worth of pensioners’ money.

Thirdly, when military campaigns go horribly wrong, as they did in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo some years ago; when Joseph Kony’s Lords’ Resistance Army was elusive and wreaking havoc; or when the army committed atrocities against civilians, again in the north. As happens, the army has been out of the news in the last five or so years. Gen Aronda Nyakairima, the most low-key UPDF army commander since Maj. Gen. (retired) Muntu Mugisha, seems to have done a good job of cleaning the military’s nose. He has also proved that perhaps the best way to be army chief is to do the job quietly, not in a market with all the clamour around you.

The effect of all these agitations over both the NRM’s and Museveni’s record over the years has been to frame three choices for Uganda. The first choice is for Ugandans to choose to live with an incompetent government that can’t fix roads, deal effectively with mudslides in Bududa, get on top of nodding disease, and so on.

The next is to choose a corrupt government that pockets every money it sets its eyes on – Uganda shillings, US dollars, or Euros; and whose officials steal everything even if it is nailed down (like a radio mast), locked away in a vault in the Bank of Uganda, or buried away deep in the drawers in the Treasury.

The third choice is to stick with an aging and belligerent president, with his circle of oligarchs.
I was wrong. There is a fourth; continue agitating for Museveni to go home, weakening him in the process, and opening doors for even worse forces and relatives, who are watching his struggles patiently like vultures. Thus if it is not Museveni, then expect worse. So, the devil we know. In many ways, this is closely related to the third option.

Absent from all the scenarios is hope, or something that is not as bad and morally illegitimate as the country now has. Call it the “Monti option”. In November 2011, with Italy in deep financial trouble and its womanising and corrupt prime minister Silvio Berlusconi having turned it the world’s laughing stock, the rogue was ousted. Mario Monti, a technocratic chap, unelected, took over and stopped the economic bleeding.

There is no “Monti option” not so much because Uganda doesn’t have a Monti, but because the discussion about the way forward is not being cast widely enough, and those who are disgusted with Museveni’s rule think he has stank the presidency, and just by leaving it, Uganda will be better.
In this way, we have become stuck with the three options. So I will be courageous like MP Tinkasiimire and make a choice. I choose an incompetent NRM government.

Yes, I know that with an incompetent government some roads will continue to go to rot; Mulago Hospital and others will just get worse; and little will be done to combat diseases like nodding disease. However, on the latter, I can say that we can blame God, not Museveni. It would have divided the country even more if Museveni had been accused of having brought nodding disease.

That is the beauty of an incompetent government. It is less likely to dig us deeper into a mess, and do things like increasing public debt (your children and grandchildren’s debt) because it is refunding donor funds stolen by corrupt officials using taxpayers’ money.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com & twitter@cobbo3

Something truly remarkable has happened in Uganda, and reveals a lot about how the country continues to change.

For the first time in a long time, the country went through several months without a new district being created! Also, not only have there been no stories about districts with incomprehensible names being created by President Yoweri Museveni, neither have I heard of any part of the country threatening to go to war if they were not given a district.

I am tempted to bet my index finger on this: If you got the “Great District Creator” Museveni, and put him and some of the brightest Ugandans in a television quiz without prior preparation and asked them to name all the districts in a trot, none of them would.

Something else has also happened. These days you go for weeks without reading or hearing on TV a story about a Local Council chairperson (from 5 to 1). Also, if you asked a regular primary school kid what Local Defence Unit (LDU) means, she will most probably not get it right. Some weeks back, General Salim Saleh made a complaint that would have been very strange just 10 years ago. He lamented the fact that there had been no local government elections.

Some years ago, the more hysterical Ugandans were making alarms about how the country was becoming a “communist style” nation, with an LC official at every corner monitoring even when you went for a bath, and that a time was coming when to date and marry the woman of your choice, you’d need some NRM mandarin to give you permission. That there would be no village path you could walk without having to show your ID to an LDU or paying the blokes a bribe. And, in a grand finale, we would all have been corralled into 250 districts, each with its array of District Intelligence officers tormenting us.

This giant NRM “communist state” has been a mega flop. Question is why?
First, it illustrates the limit of the patronage state experiment. The NRM Big Men sought to buy support by creating as many “eating points” and distribution outlets as possible, which is what the LCs and districts later became (we should remember that in the early years the LCs – then called Resistance Councils – actually played quite a useful role). The LDUs were, strategically, an attempt to soak up demobilised soldiers and co-opt restless youth into state structures so that they would not be available to be recruited by regime opponents. However, the return to multiparty politics actually did soften national tension, considerably reducing the prospect of uprising. To appreciate this fact, is to understand why with the return to multiparty politics in 2005, the last vestiges of resistance by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army inside Uganda collapsed totally in 2006. This allowed the UPDF to take off to do peacekeeping in Somalia the next year.

If you look at what’s happening in Kampala; the Walk-to-Work protests, the activism of the Opposition in Parliament that gives it clout well beyond its members, you might think that political temperatures have risen considerably. They have in Kampala, because multiparty politics transferred all the political contestations from all over the country and concentrated it in Kampala. The countryside though is largely poor, apathetic and cynical – even apolitical- with all the NRM-contrived structures rotting away and its functionaries going hungry like the rest. We got to this point because the logic of patronage meant that the new supporters of the regime were the ones who were allowed to eat the moneys for districts, schools, hospitals, and civil servants up-country in the long chain that is supposed to deliver it downstream.

The corrupt chain replaced political mobilisation. With that the NRM finally stopped being a revolutionary movement, and became a traditional political party. Money from the Treasury and Bank of Uganda, which is what fuels the patronage pipes, can only go so far. You need what TIME/CNN’s Zakaria Fareed calls “earned wealth” – from modernising farming, innovation and creation of new industries, not oil or minerals. However, that doesn’t happen with the kind of corruption Uganda has. All this is good.

Many illusions have been shattered. We have learnt that nation building isn’t easy. That the groceries that come through the patronage pipeline soon end, and before long it’s only the ‘Big People’ in Kampala eating. That “bringing services closer to the people” through districts might sound seductive, but the reality is that the districts often bring nothing. The Big Brother state many NRM feared was building has ended in a whimper. Ugandans are much wiser, and our land is now fully fertile for democracy in the future. The irony is that for that to happen, the NRM needed to be corrupt. The revolution needed to eat its own intestines.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com & twitter@cobbo3