These are the citizens of a post-Covid-19 Uganda

Author, Charles Onyango Obbo. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

  • In his analysis, the Ugandan middle class is losing its livelihood and savings, and will emerge extremely impoverished from the lockdown at whatever point the virus is defeated. 

I am in a closed Uganda expatriate forum, and the last three weeks have been tough. Every other day, there is a post of a post about a “high value” Ugandan professional who has succumbed to Covid-19 in the current surge of the virus in the country.

 The count is nearly up to 10 doctors alone. And then there are the WhatsApp groups with horror stories of a people being choked by suffering in the new lockdown to stem the spread of the virus.
 Most of this could have been avoided, but the imperatives of the recent election met with the country’s endemic corruption, and the proverbial incompetence of the Ugandan state, to fuel the current deadly wave. But today, we shall not dwell on that.

 Beyond the state, one has to wonder what is happening to a people, to their society. Reading the deaths reported on the forum is strangely similar to reading old issues of Drum magazine reporting on the years of military ruler Idi Amin. They are full of doctors, bankers, and lawyers disappearing never to be seen again, or their bodies turning up in Namanve forest, or floating half-eaten by fish on River Nile or Lake Nalubaale (Victoria).
 They are also eerily similar to the period after Amin’s fall in April 1979, when the internal power struggles inside the interim government, the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) led to a spate of killings, which took the lives of many doctors and lawyers, as factions sought to discredit the dominant leadership, and show it as unable to provide security to the people. 

 The flipside of the lockdowns, and of the curfews, though necessary, still have echoes of the nightmarish 1970s and 80s, when Ugandans cowered in their homes, afraid to venture out after nightfall, terrified of the footsteps outside their streets and, worst of all, the knocks – even if was a cat scratching - on the door. This time, on the positive side, it is not a soldier, State Research Bureau gang, or National Security Agency (NASA) agent at the gate, but a virus, an equally deadly adversary but one that approaches quietly, and which can’t be kept out by the high fences and electric wires. 

One thoughtful Ugandan tells me he fears an economic and social collapse “if we can’t come up with a poor relative of the stimulus packages we saw in the US and Europe for people and small businesses…and a national mobilisation using the army, if necessary, to get vaccines and personal protective equipment (PPE) to frontline workers who need them”.

 In his analysis, the Ugandan middle class is losing its livelihood and savings, and will emerge extremely impoverished from the lockdown at whatever point the virus is defeated.  The loss of top talent might not be as extreme as it was in the combined effect of flight into exile and their deaths like in the past, but an extended withdrawal of their labour, input and industry from the economy and public life, could have far more damage. This is because we live in more technologically advanced times and a country whose population has tripled from the 15 million that it was at the start of 1986.
 One can also see the disruption of the national market that was witnessed during the Amin and Milton Obote II, and under President Yoweri Museveni with the northeast and north roiled by war.

 You couldn’t carry your cows on a truck from Mbarara to Arua, if you wished to. You couldn’t ferry beer risk free from the factory at Luzira to Gulu. Tribal and regional politics emerged along with it. Sam Odaka, a Samia, and Obote I Foreign minister and Obote II Planning and Development minister was a Jinja MP in the 1960s. By 1980, it was unthinkable that he would win there. Outside Mukono, in the rest of Uganda constituencies have become more nativist.
 The violent enforcement of lockdowns, and the economic misery has radicalised politics, sending many people to the extremes, as they stew at what they consider the thievery and mismanagement that has compounded the Covid crisis.

 There are, however, also a lot of creative energies being spent to create things. People are into a lot of do it yourself (DIY). They are learning to weave. Folks are mastering new languages. They are producing wonderful content on Facebook, Instagram, on Tik Tok, and joining creative communities in other parts of the world. They have fallen in love again with the land, and are planting and tending trees and crops.
 They are looking for, as one of them told, a “national leadership on compassion”, and are not getting it. When the dust settles, the people they will embrace as leaders, will be very different from anything the country has known.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3