Can the IGG fight corruption where shame is abolished?

Uganda’s IGG Beti Kamya is dreaming of succeeding where all her predecessors failed; significantly reducing corruption under President Museveni. Pessimists observe that the powerful soldier-politicians who twisted and sweated before various commissions of enquiry are still at the high table.

The villains who demonstrated their ability to move around shady money and foreign exchange have collaborated and played the system to emerge among the richest men in the land.  Some of the President’s staunchest ‘supporters’ openly claim that the country’s so-called ‘mafia’, an alleged criminal group, has connections with the first family.

The pessimists conclude that, like in other countries so deeply entangled, reducing corruption requires a change of government. Most of the President’s chosen officials understand this, but of course cannot make such a pronouncement. 

Unfortunately, given how the Opposition is persecuted and the entire electoral process manipulated, an overall NRM defeat at the polls is very hard.

It is precisely such a scenario that led the framers of the 1995 Constitution to include two-term and age limits on the presidency.

With both limits now removed by the same manipulative practices, the constitutional law expert and retired Supreme Court Judge, Prof George Kanyeihamba, has been advocating that President Museveni appeal to his conscience and retire voluntarily.

In some Bantu languages, ‘okuswala’ is used to express what Kanyeihamba is getting at. You do the right thing to avoid ‘okuswala’. 

Kanyeihamba’s advice sounded quite rational, if doomed.

That was before Kamya appeared at the Saturday 8am-10am talk show on Top Radio two weeks ago. Kamya trashed Kanyeihamba’s reference to the concept of kuswala. To the IGG, Kanyeihamba’s idea was idle talk; Museveni was still in power because he was winning elections. The IGG asked: ‘What if Mr Museveni does not kuswala?’

It was an extraordinary rhetorical question, coming from the IGG.

But here comes the mother of contradictions. The IGG has been proposing two ideas: a State-led audit of the lifestyles (or perceived spending power) of government officials against their known income, and a citizen-driven form of penal action that taunts and ostracises corrupt officials at churches and other public gatherings.

If the IGG conjectures – apparently with satisfaction – that the most powerful person in the land may be deemed to plan and execute his political actions without the capacity to feel shame, we have a problem bigger than a mountain.

The IGG divulged what everybody suspects, that the people who cream off the spoils of power through serious corruption write and sign nothing that directly implicates them. They use civil servants who take responsibility. 

But if Kamya knows this, President Museveni also knows it, and he has the power to sack many offending politicians without a trial. In many lawful societies, politicians take responsibility and resign or get fired without a court process.

Mr Museveni used to refer to the philosophy of ‘obuntu’, the whole gamut of African thought on morality, justice and human rights, in which the concept of shame is intertwined with virtually every taboo and sanction. In our related cultures, in our very being human, we cannot speak of a civilisation, or a human being, let alone a democracy, where shame, or okuswala, is abolished.

I nowadays hear the cliché ‘mindset change’ being peddled around as if it is a new idea. But the whole moral edifice on which to fashion a new mindset, and on which the IGG can construct anti-corruption citizen activism, collapses if the concept of shame is not restored to a central position.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.

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