Prime
‘For God and my country’, which God?
Writer: Benjamin Rukwengye. PHOTO/FILE.
What you need to know:
- The Supreme Court, which is mandated to determine the impasse, has not sat to pronounce itself on the matter for over two years now. You are not paying attention if I need to explain to you why that is so. The consequence of that however is that one of the accused’s lawyers, Mr Eron Kiiza, was violently arrested and summarily sentenced to nine months in prison – for contempt of court, apparently.
Around 2013 or thereabouts, a certain organisation pledged Shs1 million to the charity foundation I was party to. This was their contribution to a campaign to build a dormitory for a community school that supports orphans and vulnerable children.
When we followed up on the pledge a few days later, the officer – our go-between – said she was working on it and would get back to us when it was processed. She did get back to us soon enough but with an intriguing proposition. She wanted 30 percent of the pledge as her “cut” for helping us get the donation.
We told her to pass on the entire amount as had been pledged and processed or keep it if she couldn’t. She kept the money, and we moved on to do our bit to bring the change we wanted to see. It has since become common practice, especially with procurement officers – both in government, the private sector, and the civil society space. You can’t get a contract for anything without “tithing” – regardless of the amount. As a result, contractors barely have enough to execute the actual work – because they also want to skim off some. So, the beneficiaries get about 20-30 percent of the quality.
However, to ensure that we don’t fall for the fallacy that corruption is only about money, let us examine the decadence that has become characteristic of Uganda’s human capital component. Again, there is no difference between what happens in government and the private sector. Recruitment and deployment processes are so convoluted that solving a Rubix cube is the better alternative.
In many institutions, it is not clear who is the boss of whom. There are no reporting lines. Instructions and decisions get countermanded by others who aren’t always of senior rank. Those who should know are sometimes as confounded as those with no interest. More often than not, those tasked with the execution of routine tasks are in over their heads. Which then compounds our ability to manage complex tasks.
The net result is that you have this now very Ugandan system where the obsession is to spend half the effort on stealing public resources and the other half on pleasing the master. The god. The one to whom this country supposedly belongs.Laws, processes, systems, and any sense of decorum are now inconvenient things whose purpose has been eroded. As Thucydides mused, we are in a situation where “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
That is the context in which this week’s events at the General Court Martial should be understood – if there is such a thing as making sense of Uganda's madness. The general agreement – at least from those who understand the law is that the trial of opposition doyen, Dr Kizza Besigye, and his colleague Obeid Lutale – both civilians – in a military court is an illegality.
The Supreme Court, which is mandated to determine the impasse, has not sat to pronounce itself on the matter for over two years now. You are not paying attention if I need to explain to you why that is so. The consequence of that however is that one of the accused’s lawyers, Mr Eron Kiiza, was violently arrested and summarily sentenced to nine months in prison – for contempt of court, apparently.
The incident is shocking but certainly not surprising in the same way that the Kiteezi debacle, the repeated shootings and killing of civilians, the landslides in Buduuda, the near-collapse of the justice, law, and order system, and everything else is shocking but not surprising. This is a gradual march to Armageddon.
The writer is the founder and CEO of Boundless Minds, a mentorship social enterprise.
