Ugandans are modern people with the mindset of hunters and gatherers

We have become like children. We spoil the toy we have knowing that mummy or auntie will buy us another.

As we approached the headquarters of the once vibrant Uganda Railways, a nostalgic old man gave me some tales of what the railway was at its peak. He travelled in clean cabins with leather seats to most parts of the country and to Kenya as an inspector. It kept time and was a reliable mode of transport that made many proud.
The story is now different. After years of abuse, the railway is mainly a goods train. The few times it does passenger service it makes news with short, carefully planned trips to Namboole Stadium or to Mukono to defeat the purposes of striking taxi drivers.
Most of the lines and the slippers have been vandalised and sold as scrap to steel mills. The fate of the railway is the same suffered by many of the things we inherited from the colonialist.

Factories, schools, hospitals, museums, stadia, bridges, hotels, our foreign missions, etc. Most of the infrastructure has been run down and is dilapidated due to lack of periodic maintenance.

The tragedy of our times is that though many have had formal education, we have failed to divorce ourselves from the habits of our forefathers.

The (wo)men of old had the fortune of living large in the midst of what Mother Nature provided free of charge. To feed the family you simply walked into the forest with your spear, looking for wild prey.

If you were a lousy, lazy, loafer who did not fare well as a hunter, you had the option of gathering nutritious wild fruit and vegetables (dodo, nakati, jyobyo, ntula etc.) The forests were so large for the relatively small populations and provide energy in the form of firewood free of charge.

Like is said of the Basoga, when reprimanded for chopping down trees with reckless abandon, their answer was dhjhameera dhjyenne (the trees grew on their own).

Our forefathers adopted an extractive culture to live and survive. You just took from your surrounding without necessarily giving back or replenishing. Even for the cattle keeping communities, the nomadic practices meant that they just moved on to the places that had water and grass and left the ones that had been depleted.

In these communities, good roads were very rare. Such people would never appreciate the need to build and maintain good roads for they served no purpose.

This background did not teach us the importance of being frugal in the way we used what came into our possession or preserving and maintaining anything. It was all about use and move on to the next opportunity.

These practices have lived with us as we move on to towns and into the modern sphere. And it is not only about misusing and failing to maintain infrastructure. The same applies to the way we deal with the human resources.

If one has an option, many would prefer to work for white people and not their Ugandan kinsmen because Africans do not pay well or would not be ashamed to cheat their workers. It all comes from the habit of taking; this time human sweat without giving back.

What else has exacerbated this problem is the ever present donors. This newspaper some months ago did a picture news story depicting several abandoned ambulances in different states of disrepair. Most were donated and were brand new but lacked a small spare here and there.

Donations have not encouraged the thinking process for those who benefit from them. We have become like children. We spoil the toy we have knowing that mummy or auntie will buy us another. We do not think hard about the source or what it takes to get the toy.

The sum total of societies that lack a maintenance culture is that they are extractive and destructive but rarely creative. They are parasitic consumers and not inventors. They have no worries that induce them to think long and hard about what they have or what they need to do to acquire more. They simply relax and wait for what comes their way, misuse it and wait for the next. The hunter and gatherer is still alive.

Mr Sengoba is a commentator on political and social issues.
nicholassengoba@yahoo.com