When the poor think it’s their right to steal from the rich

Nicholas Sengoba

What you need to know:

  • The habit of the poor eating from the rich may soon degenerate into the poor outrightly eating the rich if they become a stumbling block -as they erect barriers and fences.
  • It is scary. Shared prosperity even if it requires costly affirmative action is something we can no longer take lightly.

A few years ago, my dear mother’s wandering spirit took her to what we commonly call ‘outside countries.’ There she would remain for the better part of the year.
So, yours truly had to house-keep and supervise her farming. I am a town rat, born and bred in the city and its ways. A part from the agricultural lessons which we enjoyed immensely at King’s College Budo, I had little experience in the field. Farming was a new challenge which I took on with gusto. Many things, did I learn too.
First, and most important was about the village. The village is not a place, it is a force which engulfs one if they stay there for long.

The communal spirit there means that people do not erect fences. There is an unwritten law that what one owns is shared by everyone. This contempt is so normal, you get used to it if you stay long enough.
So early on an easy Sunday morning you find a stranger in the middle of the garden that has been left in your care, cutting banana leaves. They expect you to understand that they are having visitors from town so they have to prepare a good meal with your banana leaves which are more mature than theirs.
Towards lunch time you see some little children gathering greens from the same garden. Their argument is that these greens are weeds which grow on their own. Besides ‘Mummy sent them to get greens!’ Oh, the cheek. (I have on many occasions bought seeds for these greens and fertilisers too.)
As time went on, I discovered something very important which in town manifests itself in a similar fashion.

In Uganda if you stay in a community and are better off (it may even be a mere perception) than others, you experience two things.
First there is a feeling that you have benefited unfairly from ‘the system.’ (Why should you be doing well when others in the same country are struggling?). So there is a silent and malicious animosity towards you.
Second those around you will use this as an excuse to try and (forcefully) get free things from you.
So with time, I got to see this contempt of people simply wandering into the gardens to pick what they wanted, turning into outright theft. The huge healthy bananas, plantains, potatoes and cassava would simply disappear from the gardens overnight.
The argument was that what they were taking belonged to someone who ‘had more than they needed!’

They added that the mangoes, pawpaws, bananas, pumpkins etc. that they randomly picked here and there were mere drops from the ocean that would not deplete the ocean. Any effort made to reprimand them was taken as an abuse of an indelible human right. They adopted all manner of psychological warfare like dropping dead chicken heads (not the chicken) on the doorstep to threaten me with witchcraft.
In the city, I once nabbed a young man attempting to remove the side mirror of a vehicle. As he made a hasty retreat, he told me that the owner of the Toyota Prado is one of the corrupt who would lose nothing by buying another side mirror!
Yet in his case, he was hungry and needed to ‘exist.’ His existence depended on ‘just taking’ from what he thought were ‘thieving rich people.’ ‘Mwana, naffe tulina okubeera wo mu cite atte abembutto enenne obulawulli tebubaluuma,’ we also have to survive in this city; those little side mirrors are nothing to the wealthy.

That is what informs all this hand bag, phone, jewellery snatching plus the activities of the iron bar hit men who hit a victim and ransack his pockets. These have become a norm in Kampala and other urban areas.
It is the basis of the used car parts business where young men wake up in the morning and their job is to snatch side mirrors, indicators, car radios, mats and window switches from the cars of what they call the rich. They take them mainly to Kisekka’s Market and put them on shelves for the rich to go and ‘re-distribute’ their wealth.
Back to my mother’s gardens. When she was almost giving up as the return of investment was tending towards negative, she decided to seal off the whole place making it impossible for intruders to access free food.

Surprise, surprise she now has the problem of dealing with huge surpluses. Now she knows the potential of her farming but left many quite angry.
So when we put up walls and fences, from where do these people get food to feed the children?
You shudder to imagine that they may get desperate one day and try to forcefully get back what had become theirs.
The habit of the poor eating from the rich may soon degenerate into the poor outrightly eating the rich if they become a stumbling block -as they erect barriers and fences. It is scary. Shared prosperity even if it requires costly affirmative action, is something we can no longer take lightly.
Nicholas Sengoba is a commentator on political and social issues. [email protected] Twitter: @nsengoba