Carol Atuhirwe, State failure and the Ugandan spirit of survival

Then a most beautiful, tenacious resilient, smiling soul; in great pain due to the debilitating infirmity of lung and throat cancer succumbed.
Last week Carol Atuhirwe breathed her last. And what a long painful journey it was. But she smiled and smiled all the way. She remained positive till the end.
If there was anything for us to learn, it was the way Ugandans react to State and government failure. Theory teaches us about the social contract. A political grouping (never mind its moral standing and reputation) approaches a citizen and places an agenda on the table promising to make their lives better if the group is elected to lead the State for a given period. Then the citizen supports the group - now a government- by paying taxes to fund the proposal.

By now it is a contract. The citizen expects to have good roads, schools, a functional justice, law and order sector, security and, of course, a healthcare system to take care of them when they are infirm, among many others.
But most times this contract just ends in failure and frustration for the citizen. It is often said that a politician’s promise is more brittle than a lover’s oath. That is where Carol and many of us find ourselves. The hospital is fast becoming a hospice unlike what it says in the NRM manifesto.

But in life there is no room for a vacuum. When the government fails to deliver what the State is supposed to, we find alternatives to save our skins. Elsewhere, people die crying out to the government for help .
It was very moving when Carol announced that she needed help. An indefatigable extrovert, with a very kind heart, Muhereza Kyamutetera, came up with a fundraising drive. Hundreds of millions of shillings came in from well wishers surpassing the targeted amount and Carol went for treatment in India where she died more than a year later.
(The story is not complete if we don’t tell it loud and proud that Carol donated a whooping Shs54 million that was excess to her need, to the Uganda Cancer Institute to help others in need of treatment.) May Carol Atuhirwe rest peacefully till we meet again.

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What we saw in the case of Carol is a lesson of adaptation to the failure of the State. It has a history. The resilience, innovation and survival instinct in times of adversity has become a part of the Ugandan fabric. Such times often bring the best out of Ugandans. They forget everything and fall back on their natural devices bearing in mind that they could be next because they live in similar conditions.
For instance, in the Uganda of Field Marshal Iddi Amin in the 70s when commodities were scarce and times where were tough, many respectable parents put their reputation and dignity aside (taxi industry is considered the preserve of the lowly in society) and used the family car to make a few taxi trips to augment their earnings.
Garages in homes were cleared out to give way for commercial poultry keeping. Mothers baked bread and cakes. They also tailored clothes for their children and neighbours. Children were taught how to cross the road as they walked to and from school in groups.

In other cases, parents shared the roles within the neighbourhood with children going to say Kitante Primary School using the car of one parent and those from Nakasero using another. One parent would take the children while another would do the return trip. Because of insecurity, the bar on the verandah of a shop or the garage in the neighborhood called a kafunda, for it was in a small space, became part of the drinking culture.
When the security forces were hunting a parent, the children would be taken in by a family while the parents hid or went into exile where the children would be smuggled for a re-union.
In such times, you could not afford to only associate with people of your tribe or religion for you never knew when you would need your neighbour’s help. You had to be your neighbours’ keeper for on your own, you were weak and exposed. Circumstances forced goodness on you. It still does as is with the case of Carol Atuhirwe.
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But then there is also another reaction to State failure. When Uganda in the late 80s under the NRM adopted the Bretton Woods Structural and Sectoral Adjustment policies (SAPs) ‘chaos’ reigned. Ugandans adopted a new method of survival to create their own state in the failed arrangement.
For instance, when public servants who occupied government houses were thrown out yet they had not built their own from the meager salaries they received overtime, the race to own houses begun. When the hospitals went into cost-sharing and those suffering from say enlarged prostates had to beg or died like dogs, the cases of stealing from the public for ones ‘pension and health insurance’ commonly called corruption, escalated. The same happened when the era of free university education ended and one had to pay for tuition in millions of shillings for their children.
Hence the current paradox of a parent whose monthly salary is say Shs2 million but spends about Shs8 million a month to keep the family going.

Nicholas Sengoba is a commentator on political and social issues. [email protected]
Twitter: @nsengoba