Uganda’s devils and glories are in the details

"One shot as UPDF, Police raid Nabweru over explosives”, Monitor declared in its headline on Monday.

The paper reported that at least six people had been arrested in an ongoing joint operation between UPDF and police in Nabweru North, Nansana Municipality, in Wakiso District after they were allegedly found in possession of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

The photograph in the paper, and others elsewhere online, showed something one is likely to miss. Like those stories of the army and Police crackdowns on protests and during elections, the background in the photographs is rough and grimy. The ground is full of potholes and rubbish. The buildings are dirty. The people look beaten down by life. Sometimes, security forces are shown fighting people over drains flowing with dirty water and piles of plastic waste.

Does the violent repression to squalor, or the squalor to violent repression?

The miserable state of the land is continued, especially in the “minor” stories that are not about President Yoweri Museveni’s declarations or big and smaller men murdered in the frenzy that is taking over the country. There’s one about a near epidemic of defilement that is ruining the future of girls in the Busoga region as they are dropping out of school in record numbers.

A distraught district official laments that defilement cases are “between 70 per cent and 80 per cent of the sexual offences we record in the entire Busoga North region.”

One of the most disheartening parts is nine words in the middle of a sentence halfway down the story. “Some parents look at defilement as a financial breakthrough”, it said. Life is so hard for parents that they see the defilement of their daughters as a blessing. There is a chance that the men who defile and make them pregnant might give a little money for the upkeep of the children and mothers, and they will get a share of the money! That is the height of economic desperation.

Tucked away is another story detailing how Ugandans who have been overwhelmed by life are taking extreme measures to end their misery in Kasese.

The paper reported that; “In the space of four months, more than 40 people between 20-40 years have been reported to have committed suicide in Kasese”. It was not the only story about people increasingly resorting to suicide, but it had the highest toll. There were also a couple of stories about a new development; local leaders, most supporters of the ruling NRM, protesting over the government’s poor state of roads and service delivery.

On the weekend, local leaders in Mbarara and members of Parliament had clashed over the weekend over the provision of public goods in the area. Local leaders blasted their MPs in Kampala for failing to lobby the government for better service delivery in the district.

“As Mbarara district, we have a challenge; every year and every quarter, our budget for road funds is reduced. For example, in the last third quarter, we were supposed to get more than Shs140m, but we received less by Shs20m and in the fourth quarter, we were supposed to get Shs140m but received Shs70m,” Mr Venansi Kiiza Munanukye, the Speaker of Mbarara District Council said. Compared to a story about the wrenching poverty in Karamoja, the lack of service delivery in Mbarara reads like a faraway First World problem. Poor Karamoja doesn’t seem to catch a break. A few days earlier, a story about the scandalously unequal awarding of student loans reported that recipients from one region largely dominate beneficiaries.

“This list shows that Bushenyi, Busia, Isingiro, Kabale, Kasese, Luweero, Mbarara, Mukono, Ntungamo, Rukungiri Sheema, Mitooma, [and] Tooro as those with the highest number of beneficiaries,” Mr Richard Gaffabusa (Buwamba County MP) said. He added that the selection appeared not to consider regions that are “most vulnerable in terms of poverty.

“There is no district in Karamoja that we all know to be the poorest region [in the country], no district in Acholi and West Nile, and these are the regions that the country knows [to be poorest],” he said.

Other tales of national decline were in remote parts of the publication, like one reporting that Makerere University would do a study to determine the causes of perennial poor performance in Biology by pre-university students in the country.

The tragedy of all this is that it is happening in a country where there are factors that could make national greatness possible. The paper has an upbeat story about the  Africa Trade Index by South Africa’s Standard Bank (Stanbic), which said that Uganda has the best trade-enabling environment among East African countries.

Both the devil and glory are in the details. The misery, the punishment life, the corruption, and signs of state crisis hidden between the lines, are sucking the best out of the nation.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3