Let delivery of social services be priority

As the year comes to an end, and as we prepare to usher in 2020, which will predominantly be a political season, there are things that we won’t tire to beat the drums about – provision of social services.
Yesterday, this newspaper reported that patients at Kangulumira Health Centre IV in Kayunga District have raised the red flag. And they ought to be listened to. They say they suffer trauma as result of sharing wards with bodies, which sometimes take days before they are claimed.
A study by this newspaper last year found out that many mortuaries in the country are in dire state. For instance, we established that many hospitals did not have mortuary facilities, and those that had, had limited space, lacked refrigeration services as well as poor standard tables for postmortem and laboratories for testing specimens.
Yet even in hospitals that have refrigeration services still charge. For example, in September, we reported that Dr Nathan Onyachi, the director of Masaka Regional Referral Hospital, said they would charge Shs50,000 per night for a body of a person who dies from the hospital wards and Shs100,000 for those who died from outside the facility. The fridges can accommodate up to 18 corpses at a time.
The mortuary story is just a pointer to the many social ills bedevilling Ugandans. The floods that have ravaged parts of the country, leaving in its wake deaths, destruction of property and infrastructure, have also tested our preparedness to manage such disasters. In the capital Kampala, for example, a downpour at the weekend left parts of the city submerged, with floods destroying property, paralysing transport. It left five people, including a police officer, dead.
Many experts have blamed the floods in Kampala on wetland degradation and poor drainage system. Yet we do not seem to learn from the havoc wreaked season in, season out.
When the floods dry out, they expose roads that have been washed away. They either do not have good bridges or have developed numerous potholes overtime due to poor maintenance or the total lack of it.
Throughout the year, we have talked and written about poor education system, corrupt justice system, nepotism, sectarianism and corruption, among others. Our appeal is that as we prepare for the new year in two weeks time, let us hold all those who seek public office to account. All the politicians coming back to seek reelection should be able to demonstrate clearly what they have when they were given the mandate more than three years ago.
We won’t stop lamenting about these issues until they are dealt with.
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