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

We always cried for power to move from the hands of soldiers to that of civilians in Uganda. Well, it has happened.

The government of Uganda owes former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, Dr Ben Mbonye, an apology.

In 1997, what for many years was considered the “worst corruption scandal” in Uganda; broke when it emerged that the ministry of Defence had bought four fighter helicopters that turned out to be junk from Belarus.

Among the sensational revelations was that a UK-based company that initially wanted to supply the helicopters, Consolidated Sales Corporation (CSC) had offered President Yoweri Museveni’s brother, the worthy Gen. Salim Saleh, a bribe of $800,000 to help them clinch the deal. Saleh took the bribe, but before he could eat it, he decided to come clean with his brother.

Museveni told him to spend the money on the then-ongoing military operations in the north. Many things happened, including a commission of inquiry and a parliamentary probe. Many people, including businessman Emma Katto (who represented one of the hopeful suppliers), were dragged into this issue.

In the end, the Permanent Secretary in the ministry of Defence, Dr Ben Mbonye, took the fall. Mbonye himself didn’t pocket a dollar from the deal, but took political responsibility and as PS, was blamed for negligence. Mbonye was not a very popular man then, but later after the dust had died down, I did manage to lay my hands on a big file on the “junk” helicopters that suggested that on that matter he was not the bad guy. I read a letter from Mbonye’s minister and State House, ordering him to ensure that the helicopters were bought from Belarus. In that sense, Mbonye took the bullet for the ‘Big Men’ above him.

With the recent scandals over the billions of dollars; the theft of GAVI funds, the plunder of billions of pension funds, and the more dramatic case of the looting of donor funds in the Office of the Prime Minister, I bring this up to demonstrate the political transformation we are witnessing.

In the case of the junk helicopters, the helicopters were actually supplied. Just that they could not fly. And related to that, their price was inflated. Today, the thieves don’t bother to supply anything. They take all the money; give politicians some; then build palatial mansions and buy their wives $100,000 cars. One reason this is happening is that there has been a major shift in the balance of power in Uganda.

For many years the NRM was criticised as a military party. The role of the army, the UPDF, in politics, was decried. The junk helicopters, the undersize uniforms, and so on, happened because a lot of the money was still held and spent in the military.

However, corrupt rogue UPDF officers were, at the end of the day there was the bigger military structure that would bring them to account, if it wanted to. A lot of the money is outside the military these days, into funds like GAVI (Ministry of Health), and Peace, Recovery and Development Programme for northern Uganda. Here, the key men are chaps like interdicted Principal Accountant in the Office of the Prime Minister, Geoffrey Kazinda and PS Pius Bigirimana.

In the ministry of Public Service, men like David Oloka, former Assistant Senior Accountant in the ministry, and former Principal Accountant Christopher Obey, siphoned off possibly over Shs1 trillion over the years. But word has it that they also bought the elections for some ministers!
In the past, the army or government couldn’t prevent people like Saleh from appearing before Parliament. Today, it is putting a lot of effort in preventing Kazinda from doing so.

People like Saleh did not know where the bodies were buried. Folks like Kazinda do. And what they know could, potentially, damage the reputation of the ‘Big Men’ in government, they might even not be able to hold on to power. Therefore, power has shifted from the barracks, to the boardrooms and is concentrated in the hands of the Kazindas, Bigirimanas, Olokas, and Obeys.

These days we don’t read about UPDF, the Internal Security Organisation or Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence in the papers as we used to. In part, it’s because these organisations have become more professionally run, but also with money becoming definitive in holding power in Uganda, they have been sidelined because they don’t have the purse strings.

We always cried for power to move from the hands of soldiers to that of civilians in Uganda. Well, it has happened. Of course, the Kazindas are the wrong type of civilians, but the game has still changed nonetheless. What one man, Kazinda, says or does can cause more damage to the government, than the worst Bombo Barracks can do.

To all intents and purposes, there has been a silent civilian coup against the once-military-dominated ruling National Resistance Movement.

*cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com & twitter@cobbo3

If redistribution were the issue, Mafabi would have beaten Muntu handily, so why didn’t he? Muntu has Museveni to thank for his victory.

The dust from the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) two weeks ago is beginning to settle, I presume.

The good Maj. Gen. (retired) Mugisha Muntu won the prize. MP Nandala Mafabi, at one point thought of as favourite, came second. Tororo County MP Geoffrey Ekanya, was third. As party elections come and go, not just in Uganda but East Africa, the FDC election was surprisingly modern and open. They threw in a televised debate for us, to boot. A party member told me proudly that they had “set a new standard”.

For me, I have been trying to study the result not so much for what it said about FDC, but about the political mood in Uganda. I met Bukhooli Central MP and FDC information chief, Wafula Oguttu and I put the question to him. I asked him to step back a bit, and give a sense of the ideological forces that were contending. “You could say Mafabi was the candidate of the working class and peasants”, he said, and “Muntu seemed to capture the aspirations of the middle class element of the party”.

Going into the elections, there had been a feeling that because Muntu is from western Uganda, like outgoing party boss Dr Kizza Besigye – and President Yoweri Museveni – it was the turn of someone from another part of the country, preferably the east, to lead FDC.

However, talk of someone from another part of the country leading FDC – or succeeding President Yoweri Museveni – is not just a demand for geographical diversity. It is one way of saying it is the turn of the elite, and their relatives, from another part of the country to “eat”. In other words, the issue is REDISTRIBUTION.

If redistribution were the issue, Mafabi would have beaten Muntu handily, so why didn’t he? Muntu has Museveni to thank for his victory. This is not because, as the mean-spirited in FDC alleged, Museveni did secretly bankroll Muntu.

Rather, because the FDC election happened with all the stories of outrageous corruption filling the Ugandan air, and the Museveni State House set on pushing through an oil Bill that would allow the Executive to capture the revenues from oil, redistribution ceased to be an issue. FDC members voted for a centrist, pragmatic leadership with dependable middle class sensibilities.

For example, a future government that would back transparent rules for the oil industry, and be less corrupt. If the government was not corrupt and greedy, and had a lot of money in the bank, the issue would have been how to share the national wealth. I think Mafabi would have beaten Muntu, because many would have seen that the people who have missed out on the national cake – the workers and peasants – needed someone who would get them a large cut.

FDC, however, should not rush to take credit for having redefined Uganda’s politics. What happened in FDC is an old Ugandan political trait.

Unlike Rwanda or Kenya, when Uganda is in crisis, it doesn’t swing to the extremes. Despite the anger on FM radio call-ins, when the country is in trouble and Ugandans have to choose their leaders with the ballot, not bullets, we usually veer to the centre and towards the moderate leaders.

In 1980, with the post-Amin period having turned into a nightmare, Uganda went to the elections in December. On one hand was Obote and UPC breathing fire (and eventually possibly stealing the election). On the other extreme was Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM) leader Yoweri Museveni threatening to go to war if the vote was rigged. The only level-voiced guy was Democratic Party’s Paul Ssemogerere in the middle.

Ugandans voted for moderate Ssemogerere. Even if, as some argue, UPC still won fairly, it can still be said the mild Ssemogerere seemed a safer bet than militant Museveni. In the end, Museveni took up arms and grabbed power.

The first time UPC had a chance to choose a leader freely after Obote, they picked his wife, the mild-mannered Miria. After three electoral defeats under Ssemogerere and his successor Ssebaana Kizito, DP could have picked a more radical and militant leader. It didn’t. In 2010, it elected youthful Norbert Mao, who is as moderate as Ssemogerere and Ssebaana, but perhaps more cerebrally so.

Besigye is an usually bold and brave man, and the pain and torture he endured gave FDC the credibility that established it as the second biggest electoral party in Uganda today. Mafabi is more Besigye than Mao. After three defeats (or after three occasions when victory was stolen from them), FDC did like DP – it has swung to the middle.

This reconfirms something about Ugandan society. At base, we remain mostly averse to extremes. And that is a very good way to be.

Somalia has hundreds of small power operators. You can shout over the fence to your neighbour who is supplying the street, if the power goes off. He can’t ignore you.

I suspect if one did an opinion poll to find the most hated public services/utilities body in Uganda today, it would be the electricity company Umeme. Don’t be surprised if Umeme, which came to be after the lethargic state-owned Uganda Electricity Board (UEB) was privatised, is even more hated than its successor.

In the last year, calls have grown louder for Umeme to be nationalised and to returning the management of electricity to state-appointed bureaucrats. That would be a disaster.

While Umeme is almost as inefficient, and probably has worse customer service than UEB used to, the problem is not privatisation. Rather privatisation was done badly. We merely replaced a state monopoly with a private one.

I have argued in this column before that UEB should have been privatised into regional electricity distribution companies. Something like Umeme Central, Umeme East, Umeme North, Umeme West. They would be independent companies.

The grid would be organised in such a way that although you are in eastern Uganda, and therefore buying power from Umeme East, you could change and get it from Umeme Central if it had cheaper prices and better service. This could be achieved partly by the use of prepaid metre cards, much like we use for DSTv. You buy the bouquet that works best for you. That would introduce competition.

Umeme is hopeless, because it has no competition.
My experience in Tororo and Mbale last week convinced me. I needed to do some heavy-duty work on the Internet and went to Tororo. There was no power. I waited for hours. The few places that had generators and Internet were not helpful because the power fluctuations were horrible. I decided to drive on that horrible road to Mbale to try my luck. The place also didn’t have power.

Eventually, I found a smart café that had stabilised its generator, and had a decent Internet service.
Part of the problem is that I had run out of laptop battery, and couldn’t do some of the work from home in the village.

It is all because we swallowed Umeme’s Kool Aid and believed that this “rural electrification” thing would work. Electricity was extended to the Apokor-Maliri area of Tororo County a few years ago.
Until that time, we had relied on solar power. We were in control, and ensured that all the houses in the compound were powered, and the outside areas were lit.

We had figured out how to move to the next stage; solar-powered fridges, flat irons (actually we already had that); and solar-powered TVs when the rural electrification/Umeme people arrived. Some of them were friends, and they convinced us to get on the grid.

We did. I was the last to rewire for Umeme; because I remained distrustful. As a result, we stopped further development of our solar power plans. Now I regret it. The Apokor-Maliri area has not had power for over a month since a storm brought lines down. Electricity poles are leaning perilously along the road. Not too far from home, the transformer is sagging, and about to crash.

Over the month, over 100 visits and calls have been made to Umeme in Tororo, and nothing has been done. Owners of small flour mills, a welding workshop and so forth are in tears. The people claim that a trading town on the Tororo-Mbale Road got its supply back after it collected money and greased rogue Umeme employees.

My sense is that whether Apokor-Maliri have power or not, Umeme doesn’t lose or notice. The revenue Umeme gets from the area is probably 0.00000001 per cent of its national collection. However, if there were an Umeme East, that would be 0.001 per cent. Still tiny, but noticeable under a microscope.

The people there wouldn’t have to call 100 times for a month. When I was in the Somali capital Mogadishu early this year, I was struck that electricity supply and street lighting in parts of the city was quite stable. Certainly, there are fewer power outages in Mogadishu than in places like Mbale and Tororo.
This is partly because Somalia doesn’t, and never had, a national electricity monopoly. It has hundreds of small power operators. You can shout over the fence to your neighbour who is supplying the street, if the power goes off. He can’t ignore you.

We should borrow from the Somalis and refine the model. The Uganda People’s Defence Forces who have been in Somalia as the lead contingent of the African Union peacekeeping force can help Umeme get its head around this more democratic approach. So, let us not give Umeme back to the government. We need to break it up to fix it.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com & twitter@cobbo3

There is a group of people who have been perched at the top of the ladder for 26 years, choking off opportunities.

A senior female editor in Nairobi, on looking at the photos of American Christopher Thomas’s wedding to Tooro Princess Ruth Komuntale in the Sunday Monitor told me; “She is easily the most beautiful African woman I have seen.” Now that Princess Komuntale is someone’s wife, it is good, sensible old Ugandan manners not to speak much about her beauty.

Something bigger struck me though; at 23, Princess Komuntale represents the coming of age of a specific group of Ugandans – the “second tier” of the “Museveni era children”.
Though the same president, Yoweri Museveni has ruled Uganda for 26 years, there have been a lot of transitions in that period.

In the first 10 years, we have seen four of them. When the National Resistance Movement (NRM) came to power in 1986 and a year or so after, we had the “war parents”. These were Ugandans who got married in the troubled Obote II and/or during the period of the Okello Military Junta in late 1985, and were having their first, second, or last children in 1986-87. Many of their children have since become parents, and those “war parents” have become “war grandparents”. But we shall tell their current story in the future.

Their children, the “War Children”, as this column noted some months back, became the first tier of the “Museveni era children”. Now there were Ugandans who got hitched in the post-1985-86 marriage boom. Princess Komuntale’s father, King Patrick Kaboyo Olimi III, married Best Kemigisa during that boom, in January 1987.

That marriage, you could say, ushered in what we might call the “restoration period”, because the agitation for a return of the kingdoms (Ebyaffe) started in earnest then, peaked in 1993 with the restoration of the kingdoms and the coronation of, especially, Ronald Mutebi as the king of Buganda. That wave leveled out in 1999 with Kabaka Mutebi’s wedding to Nnaabagereka Sylvia Nagginda.

That span gave us the “restoration children”, the second tier of the “Museveni era” kids. Just to get a sense of how Uganda’s social clock ticks, many of the “restoration parents” are no longer in the childbearing business. We have become (I was in that group), “off layers” to use that pregnant expression from the late Monitor founders and social commentators Richard Tebere and Kevin Aliro.

These restoration parents have children who are old enough to be members of Parliament. Recently-elected MP Proscovia Alengot Oromait, the youngest in Africa at the tender age of 19 (and possibly in the world) is a Restoration Child. This restoration decade, was overlaid with the “Constitution Period”, from 1994 when the new constitution was passed, and 1996 when it was tested (and half-failed) in the first general election of the Museveni regime. The Constitution period, you could say, was tweaked 10 years later in 2005, when the country returned to multiparty politics, and thus we entered the “multiparty terrain”.

However, we are running ahead of the story. So how does Uganda look like to the “war parents” who have become grandparents? If any of them had political ambitions, and were expecting that the NRM honchos would rule for a reasonable 10, even 15 years, and give them space, they must have given up. Good President Museveni and his gift circle are going nowhere.

After all, there was a debate on Tuesday for the three men contesting to replace Dr Kizza Besigye as president of the opposition Forum for Democratic Change. Besigye was the face of modern Uganda opposition politics. Democratic Party leaders Dr Paul Ssemogerere and Sebaana Kizito, were among the old faces of opposition politics. Ssemogerere and Sebaana retired long ago. In an indication of how the ground is shifting, Besigye too is stepping down.

Now both the “war children”, the first tier of the “Museveni era children”, and the “restoration children” are becoming parents, and trying to climb up the ladder, but there is no space.

There is a group of people who have been perched at the top of the ladder for 26 years, choking off opportunities. These new generations are also trying to drink at the national well, but cannot do because the same old group has been squatting around the “eye” of the well, drawing all the clean water for themselves and not letting new blood get a dip.

My own sense is that folks who have been in various positions of national leadership, whether in government, the opposition, and even business, for the last 25 years, cannot nurse the kind of society in which it makes sense for the Komuntales of this world to raise their children.

Even if they tried very hard, and with the best of intentions, they cannot. That’s why their greatest achievement will be figuring out that the time for them to leave is long gone.

*cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com
& twitter@cobbo3

We can give our children the right diet, insulin and encourage physical activity to provide a level of care that allows us to delay and in some cases prevent the complications that comes with diabetes.

This year marks the fourth year out of a five-year campaign by the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) focusing on diabetes education and prevention. This year’s theme—“Protect our Future”-- is particularly close to my heart as our family gets to live it every day with our son, David, who has type 1 diabetes. Our journey started two an a half years ago when we got the diagnosis and we quickly found out there is hardly a support network and system to help families and children living with diabetes.

For the last one and a half years, through our support group, sugarC.U.B.E.S,, we have made it our mission to educate the public on childhood diabetes. Our children are typically voiceless in the greater scope of non-communicable diseases and thus ignored. Imagine a child who arrives at a clinic with convulsions and tests negative for malaria but is still treated for cerebral malaria because we live in a malaria-prone zone.

The child subsequently goes into coma and unfortunately dies. Perhaps the saddest part of this scenario is that this child’s life could have been saved by a simple blood sugar test that may have shown the child was experiencing hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar) and could have been saved with the appropriate intervention and treatment.

So why is it important to understand and manage diabetes? Diabetes places a great burden on the families who have to provide care and an even greater toll on the health of those who have it. The WHO estimates that more than 220 million people worldwide have diabetes. This number is likely to more than double by 2030 if there is no intervention. The IDF Diabetes Atlas (Fifth Edition, 2011) estimates that there are approximately 490,000 children under 15 years with type 1 diabetes.

There is probably a similar number of youth with diabetes aged 15-25. However, the estimates for numbers of children and youth in many developing countries are very uncertain due to lack of data. Research indicates that if we invest in prevention now, we will be able to reduce the great costs of chronic care that will surely follow.

Sadly, we do not even know how many Ugandan children die each year because they have not been diagnosed as diabetics. We also don’t know how many children are living with diabetes; there are 40 children accessing treatment and management services in the IDF Life for a Child programme in Uganda.

In November 2011, the Ministry of Health in partnership with Novo Nordisk launched a support programme to support children with type 1 diabetes at Masaka Regional Referral Hospital by providing access to insulin and glucometers. While this is a good starting point, we have only barely scratched the surface. The good news is that with basic care and limited resources, we can give our children the right diet, insulin and encourage physical activity to provide a level of care that allows us to delay and in some cases prevent the complications that comes with diabetes.

I appeal to you all to join us in ensuring that our children have healthy and productive lives by giving us your time, expertise, and/or resources so that we can create and sustain a holistic approach that acknowledges the existence of childhood diabetes, that provides access to education, prevention and treatment of diabetes and that allows for continuous dialogue among all the stakeholders so that we can minimise the burden of diabetes on families, communities and in Uganda. No child should die of diabetes.

Ms Namara is a founder member of sugarC.U.B.E.S., a support group for children and families living with
childhood diabetes.

sugarcubesUG@yahoo.com