Power, money and the early onset of amnesia and impunity in small people

It is a scene that plays out in several banking halls: A queue is shuffling slowly to the front where a lonely teller busies herself feeding notes into a whirring money counting machine. The other teller positions are unmanned.

Young bankers, trying to look busy and ‘corporate’ dash in and out of back offices, stopping momentarily to press their security tags against the electronic locks that allow access into the unseen back offices brimming, one imagines, with other people’s money.

Fresh hires (and older ones keen to impress HR and snag coveted promotions) wear their ID lanyards proudly around the necks. The veterans, either having arrived, or given up on arriving altogether, defiantly produce theirs out of pockets or from belt hooks attached to distended waistlines.

You can tell which segment of the market the bank targets by the sights, sounds and smells in the customer queue. If you are standing behind a boda boda guy in a bulky jacket and who smells like he does 50 breaststroke laps in the Nakivubo Channel every morning, you are probably in a micro-finance branch, or one of those mass-market banks.

If the fella ahead of you is going on about containers stuck in Mombasa, it is a trader’s bank. Mr Container might barely be able to sign his name, but his bank balance is so hefty, it would hurt you physically and emotionally if the paper on which it is printed fell on your feet.

Every so often, this relative dullness is broken by the entry of a flashy nouveau riche, who marches into the banking hall and, completely ignoring the queue, zooms to one of the newly-manned teller positions before the next-in-line customer can react.

Most Ugandans, sedated by religion or resigned to impunity, will look at each other, shake their heads, and wait for their turn. Others, fed up of all the bullshit, will at this point shout: “Oi! Excuse me! There is a queue, please join it like everyone else.”

Often the errant customer, genuinely lost in thought when they walked into the banking hall, will quickly realise their mistake, mumble apologies and shuffle to the back of the line. A few times, however, the queue-jumper, raised without values and or guardians, will turn around and defend their right to be rude and disrespectful, often followed with that clichéd question: “Do you know who I am?”

Now, Dear Reader, it is not clear if that question was posed to the audience in the banking hall in Soroti a few days ago when a minister, according to a report in this newspaper, turned up and tried to jump the queue, drawing protests from other customers.

What is clear is that had your columnist been in the queue, the answer would have been ‘no’, and genuinely so. Such is the size of Cabinet that one cannot be expected to remember that there is a junior minister in charge of Teso Affairs – and let’s be honest; the incumbent, a one Agnes Jaff Akiror, does not have streets named after her, or pending patent applications.

The details remain sketchy. It appears that, having forgotten her own identity and finding no help whatsoever from the customers, Ms Akiror ought to have called an ambulance and checked into a health facility for observation for temporary amnesia or “not feeling herself properly”. Instead, a bank teller said, she telephoned the area police commander and reported that she had been attacked.

Now, if you know anything about the conduct of provincial police officers, “these are the things they enjoy”. Two protesting customers were swiftly arrested and, by the time of the newspaper report, had been in detention, without trial, for five days. The police said they could not prefer charges without the minister’s testimony; the minister could not provide a written statement because she was busy with affairs of State.

So the two men, whose hustle helps pay the salaries of the bank teller, the police officer and the minister, were taken away from their families and work and kept in custody. For. Five. Days. Because they called out a junior minister for jumping the queue?

Will the minister give a full statement and, if in the wrong, a full public apology or more? Will the bank offer these men compensation? Will the Prime Minister order an investigation? Will this high-handedness by the police ever stop? Will the good men and women in the forces speak out against this and other cases of impunity?

It’s not surprising that we ask strangers if they know who we are. We might remember our names, but many of us can no longer recognise what we have become.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.