Lake Victoria boat tragedy was 30 years in the making - expect more

The death toll from the cruise boat that capsized in Lake Victoria off Mukono District at the weekend reached 33 on Monday.
There has been a lot of blame and finger-pointing about what happened. It seems true, though, that the boat was carrying about 100 people, almost double the passengers that should have safely been on board.

Secondly, that only a handful had a life vest handy. Thirdly, there are concerns about the safety of the boat, but it was allowed to sail either because the police was not serious enough, or the cruise party overwhelmed the police and they let it go (the official version that the police is putting out).

There is a strong view on Ugandan social media that there was a failure of law and safety enforcement by the State. However, that might be an idealistic view of what is possible in Uganda today, and how President Museveni works.
We are talking here about what you might call the grand “Uganda-Museveni Bargain” in which both the politicians and the elite have been complicit.

To illustrate this point, two days after the Lake Victoria boat tragedy, Museveni was in Nairobi for the Blue Economy Conference. Trust Museveni to serve up the best sound bites, making him a trending topic on Kenyan Twitter.

Museveni argued that democracy was “problematic” because you “need votes from forest encroachers and wetlands invaders” so you basically have to go easy on them, and “bribe” them not to destroy the environment. Otherwise, if you enforce good environmental practice, you will lose elections.
Many people found his latter statement problematic, but he still made an important point that best explains what happened on Lake Victoria on Saturday.

The unwritten bargain Museveni made with the Ugandan elite from about 1988 was simple. In exchange for their political support, he would allow them room for corruption, leeway for tax dodging, violation of building rules, encroachment on forests and wetlands, and government would turn a blind eye if they disregarded safety requirements that would save lives (life vests on boats, fewer seats with mandatory seat belts in matatus or taxis etc.) but would increase their costs and reduce their profits.
This is how boda boda became delivery vehicles for NRM elections and its two-wheel wing, and intelligence organisation, making enforcement of safety provisions like helmets very hard for many years.

A series of events happened between 2000 and 2005 that were to change that. Externally, in Rwanda, Paul Kagame formally became President, enabling him to drive the reforms that have taken Rwanda to the top of the tree today in way’s he could not previously do when he was mostly the power behind the throne. In Kenya, the liberal Mwai Kibaki was elected President, ending Daniel arap Moi’s 24-year-rule that had wrecked the region’s leading economy.

All of a sudden, Uganda had competition for foreign direct investment that it had not had to deal with for nearly 15 years.
At home, Kizza Besigye happened in 2001, and fractured the “east-south-west elite consensus” that had guaranteed Museveni a free political ride. And in 2005, there was a referendum that returned the country to multiparty politics, but Museveni then lost the boost that would have come with that, by pushing to also scrap presidential term limits.

So, regional factors undermined Uganda’s competitiveness, and together with our internal political developments further increased the ability of businesses, forest encroachers, and wetland invaders, boat operators, boda boda, to extract more patronage concessions from the Museveni State.
By 2010, Kampala was falling behind and simply not working at a time when its neighbours were beginning to talk of smart and tech cities.

Though Museveni almost certainly sought to undermine the Opposition that now seemed to have a stranglehold on Kampala by appointing Jennifer Musisi to lead a technocratic and rival new Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA), it marked an important exit from the bargain that he had with all sorts of elite groups to cut corners in exchange for their political support because the economic cost had become too high.

A new conflict has emerged as these groups feel Museveni has broken the bargain, and they withdraw their support, forcing him to resort to more and more violence.
Now just over a fortnight ago, tech advisory service AppsAfrica.com announced the winners of the 2018 AppsAfrica Innovation Awards in Cape Town.

Of the 14 winners, one was Ugandan. SafeBoda, that allows users to hail what is billed as the safest boda boda ride in Uganda, won in the Best African App category.

In nearly all sectors, from boda boda to marine, the state had vacated safety because of that “bargain” we spoke of above, that it even created a big market for private innovation with apps like SafeBoda. Tragically, the Saturday boat accident came before we had a SafeBoat app.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data
visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site. Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3