Govt using outdated law  to fight Covid – Besigye

Dr Kizza Besigye, considering how the virus is attacking us and the response that we have from the government and other respondents, aren’t we losing the battle on this virus? 
We lost the battle very early on after the virus arrived in the country…. there were two important things that should have been done. The first is that in managing the pandemic, you need a high level of trust of the population. Social capital is very important in managing the pandemic; people must believe that you are acting in their interest. The institutions that manage the pandemic are critical. To have the right institutions, the right framework of the law in which your actions are based.  

We reached an extent where people are asking why it is not about the pathogens or the food we eat. This time we are vulnerable.  
I said part of the reason we are where we are is the institutional management. This doesn’t mean that where they had institutional management, they didn’t have other problems.  I am tracing this to two factors. One is institutional management that would bolster public confidence and acceptance of what public institutions are telling them. Once you lose the social capital of the management body that you no longer believe in, then your advice and control measures will not be effective and that is one of the areas that was a major weakness here. First of all, we didn’t involve everybody in the planning process and the Constitution of Uganda envisaged that when you have a situation that endangers public safety of everybody, then a state of emergency needs to be declared and managed in a manner that has been laid out from the Constitution.

We chose not to go that route. Instead, the framework that was used was under the Public Health Act of 1935, a colonial law that has not even been updated, which places the responsibility of managing public health emergencies in the hands of the chief medical officer of Uganda and that office no longer exists. Even that was not followed. Instead they followed highly political and partisan institutions -the Office of the Prime Minister, the RDCs and then gave directives. That further undermined the belief of the people in what was being done. 
I understand you are not in leadership but you are a leader in your own way. The disease is ravaging Ugandans…. So, what do we do now? 

Ugandans must understand that health and, especially public health, is a public good. It is one where we should make our collective choices together on how to deal with it, which can only be responded to by our collective resources. We must gather our resources to respond together. It is not something that you respond to individually and manage, and that’s why I am a very strong advocate of universal health care…. It is critical that you have a government that can respond. If the government is not up to the job, then you get what we have now. What can be done starts with us. Government does what is demanded of it. If there is no demand side, then the government will not do anything. The solution must be ourselves (Ugandans) and how we seriously take public management to be.

I have heard some people say for every known Covid case, there could be 100 or more invisible ones and now we have over 70,000 people who have tested positive. It is almost impossible that these people have not infected other Ugandans. 
We did not have a plan of tracing how the thing is moving. Instead, we focused on looking for people who were coming from abroad and maybe what contacts they had but we must have a plan for popular general surveillance tracing to see whether it has emerged, especially in our case where all our borders are porous. It is not that you will only depend on people coming through the airport or through Malaba. You must have a very effective robust surveillance plan that guides you to know where the pandemic is going. We allowed importation to continue flowing through the borders by locking everybody up and allowing trucks to move day and night. And then we made a policy blunder of putting the election that picked the virus from those towns and now dispersed it into the country and that’s how we lost very early on the monitoring, the ability to follow and manage the transmission. Once that is lost, then contact tracing is useless.  

We have lost about 800 people to Covid-19, but when you look at people dying daily due to other complications, the number is so huge. 
 ... there is no data in Uganda that anybody can go by to tell how many people have died of Covid-19. Part of this is budgetary constraints, the choices we make. Last year, we borrowed nearly $2 billion for Covid, which was over and beyond what was in the budget. This was for the emergency borrowing from the World Bank, IMF, Stanbic bank, borrowing domestically for supplies and others. This is why I blame Ugandans more than even those who steal our money.  Nearly Shs1 trillion was taken to Mr Museveni’s home and the country should be demanding [for answers]. It was for classified or secret spending work. passing these supplementary budgets. What secret work is there during the pandemic that needs so much money when anybody else is starving? Children are dying in homes; doctors are dying without protective equipment. 

The government has come up with a plan to give vulnerable people Shs100,000 each.
  A lockdown is a plan but it cannot be the only one. At the very time of the lockdown, the country should have been told how people were going to survive. If I take you to Luzira for two weeks, I am considering how you will eat…; If you acknowledge that people live hand to mouth, you should plan before you tell the country that you are going to lock them down. You don’t lock down and then begin to look for money. What this pandemic has done is to expose our shambolic public management of this country. 

The pandemic has become a public health tool problem. what is it that is going to save us?  
 First of all, anyone who gives us money is doing us a disservice. Giving us money that is going to be taken to people’s homes is an enemy against the people of Uganda. We must have a plan. Secondly, we must think as Ugandans how we can and should assert ourselves because even as we say that, we know that they will likely not care. We must organise and unite our voices to demand better.  

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