How far this country has sunk with Makubuya and Bbumba

This year we mark 50 years since Uganda became an independent state. Twenty six of those years have been under the uninterrupted leadership of Yoweri Museveni and his band of revolutionaries.

It is enough time for us to say how far we have come and predict with a degree of certainty where we are going basing on major trends and happenings from the past and the present.

The entire life of the current (9th) Parliament, which is about a year old, has been one of probing and exposure of government’s failures, especially on corruption. Six ministers have been forced to step aside or resign as a result.

What has caused the trouble for all the ministers is basically stealing or an attempt to acquire wealth by grabbing, outright theft or taking advantage of their official ministerial privileges to illegally gain an unfair economic advantage. All these acts of theft are carefully masked in the term ‘corruption’ that is now a fairly acceptable euphemism for raw theft.

Looking at the woes of the latest victims, especially Prof. Khiddu Makubuya, helps to summarise the state of Uganda under Museveni and where we are going if the same system and people are in charge in the near future.

How did Makubuya, a professor of Law with letters from the prestigious University of Yale, end up being led down the garden path (if at all) by a one Hassan Basajjabalaba? Basajjabalaba was initially known as a hides and skins trader. Now his name is synonymous with various dubious huge ‘compensation’ deals. This activity has bequeathed the title ‘businessman’ onto his name.

The 26 years of Uganda under Museveni have been the years of the breakdown of any semblance of order in as far as the proper workings of government and its institutions are concerned. Power and real money is now concentrated in the hands of a few cronies who are well connected politically like Basajjabalaba.

Those who aspire to have a share of these related commodities –power and money- must climb down the high horse and submit themselves to these cronies and do their bidding so as to partake in the grabbing at the high table.

That is how professors and other presumably respectable people under the Museveni regime have managed to roll themselves in the mud and do despicable things for their survival.

For his part, Makubuya as Attorney General stunned the world with some of his advice, especially when he claimed that Dr Kizza Besigye should not stand in the 2006 presidential election because he was ‘tainted with illegalities.’ Yet Besigye was only a suspect (and therefore presumed to be innocent) in cases which he later won! Makubuya remained Attorney General.

Many professors and distinguished people tied dried banana leaves around their bodies in support of the third term claiming that Museveni was the only one with a vision to lead Uganda. Many have privately expressed misgivings.

The source of this pragmatism is the knowledge of the power equation. For instance, if you fall sick and you are in the good books of the President and his cronies, you stand higher chances of acquiring an air ticket to Europe for treatment at the expense of the taxpayer. If you are on the wrong side of the same President and his cabal, you will have to take your chances in the death traps that our local hospitals have become and prepare to die like the rest of us.

So, the ultimate goal is to please the President and his cronies and do everything that is their bidding, including taking risks to break the law for the good of that same president instead of say resigning. But it does not stop with politicians alone. There is a photo on the Internet of a group of leaders of the Uganda Journalists Association receiving over Shs150 million in cash from Ms Amelia Kyambadde, then PPS to the President, to put up their headquarters-- something they have never done to date. Yet journalists are supposed to watch government and critique its expenditure.

With the sort of power equation that Museveni has built, we all become vulnerable and susceptible to being bought and silenced with money because there are no state institutions or a social safety net to take care of us in our times of need.

That is how low we have sunk 26 and 50 years on, and continue to sink. It will be very difficult to rise out of this predicament because the only insurance and guarantees one has for survival is being in the good books of those in the higher echelons of power. The saddest part is that to enter those good books may most times require us to do very bad things. The present and the future is worrying.