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A beginner’s guide to Uganda’s ghosts
Author: Charles Onyango Obbo. PHOTO/FILE
Last week, President Yoweri Museveni was breathing fire, warning of the impending arrest of the thieves who had stolen funds for the Parish Development Model (PDM) poverty alleviation programme.
Under the PDM, each of Uganda’s 10,694 parishes is to receive Shs100 million, and in turn, each household will get about Sh1 million to invest in a project. Now Daily Monitor has given us more detail on the nature of the corruption plaguing PDM, reporting that in parts of the country, it has been discovered that there are many ghost beneficiaries who have been registered.
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It would have been surprising if PDM ghosts hadn’t emerged. Uganda has a long and proud history of ghosts. There are diligent citizens in this country who keep a register of ghosts and their various characteristics. I tried to get them to update us on the state of the log, but they were not available, so I will report here what I learnt from them the last time they allowed me to peep at their work.
The Ghost Voters. One of their most impressive work, if memory serves me well, was around ghost voters. They had patchy data on ghost voters in the December 1980 election that was stolen by Milton Obote’s Uganda Peoples’ Congress, but they were very detailed with the picture from the 1996 election onward. Nearly 85 per cent of ghost voters, according to their research, voted for the incumbent president and the ruling NRM.
The ghost voters are very disciplined, usually being the first to vote on election day, with many casting their ballots before polling stations open. Some typically show up to vote after voting has ended and counting is underway. They are model voters who don’t ask for goodies like soap, nguli, or money to vote for candidates. Ghost voters are to be found all over Uganda, in the small towns, the cities, the villages, everywhere.
The ghost voters show up only once every five years, except for the few places with by-elections.
The Ghost Pensioner. The ghost pensioner is not always in the headlines but is one of the most enduring and deadly features of public life in Uganda. The male version wears a faded suit, a sweat-stained hat, a wrinkled tie, and shoes that have made about ten visits to the cobbler. The female version wears a heavy old sweater and a weather-beaten head wrap. Once a town or city resident and a civil servant, the ghost voter today lives mostly up-country.
Trillions of shillings belonging to honest working men and women who have done this country proud are paid to these ghost pensioners. They are responsible for one of the biggest acts of national betrayal in the history of this country. They have left many retired civil servants with nothing but long, pained faces and broken lives.
Ghost Students and Schools. These student and school ghosts have also roamed Uganda for a long time, but the true scale of their actions became apparent a few years after the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) in 1996.
About three years later, following complaints about the falsification of student numbers and money going to schools that didn’t exist, the government carried out a survey. The findings were shocking. Where schools that were teaching hundreds of students were supposedly standing, investigators found anthills, brickmaking sites, and (this one needs double-cross checking) witch-doctors shrines. As late as last week, there were media reports about ghost students. In some university departments, ghost students who were away in Europe or the Middle East doing “kyeyo” and didn’t attend a single class miraculously passed their examinations and got honours degrees. These ghosts aren’t going anywhere.
Ghost Soldiers. This is either no longer a big problem or the army has gotten very good at keeping it out of sight of prying journalists. When the UPDF got embroiled in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1997, it got worse. Rogue commanders were collecting and pocketing salaries and money for supplies for men who weren’t anywhere on the ground in DRC – or back home in Uganda.
But it must have been a good gig in one way – ghost soldiers don’t die. Today we have ghost military salaries, especially for those troops with the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia.
Ghost Government. However, the most pervasive ghost could be the government. Every day it wakes up and pretends to govern; but only delivers hospitals with ghost medicines, ghost doctors, and ghost nurses; schools with ten times more students than the recommended numbers with ghost textbooks. Classrooms that are collapsing or are overgrown with grass and students sit on anthills that have germinated in the rooms. These ghosts are rampant upcountry.
The government pretends to ensure law and order, but the order of the day is lawlessness and dysfunction – except if it threatens the throne.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
