Corruption and incompetence making Uganda a failed state

I will begin with quotations from two famous people to try to help readers understand why some of us have to criticise the current leadership almost at every turn. 
There is almost nothing to praise the leadership for unless it puts food in your mouth, or you are profiting from its corruption and incompetence.

The first quotation is from the American writer and humourist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was known by his pen name Mark Twain. It says: “Loyalty to a country always; loyalty to a government when it deserves it.”

The second quotation is from Thomas Jefferson, who was the third president of the United States. It says: “The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.”

It is hard to be loyal to a government such as the one we have in Uganda. Ugandans who call Uganda a failed state are not unpatriotic, of course. They use the unflattering term because, in many ways, it aptly describes their country.

As The Economist wrote this past September, everything in a failed state breaks down: You have electricity in the homes of leaders but in the homes of the led you have darkness. Some roads will be decent while most are impassable. Public hospitals will be shunned by politicians and anyone with a decent source of income.

Schools will be in a dilapidated state. Teachers will beg students to buy them cigarettes. Some female students will get degrees purely on sexual merit, not academic.
Most people in a failed state tend to be desperately poor, while political leaders tend to be grotesquely predatory. If you live in Uganda, you know this is incontrovertibly true. 

Corruption in Uganda is endemic, and individuals close to top leaders have been named by Western nations in major scandals.  For nearly 15 years, Uganda’s score on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) has been consistently poor. It has never moved beyond 20s; countries where corruption is almost non-existent score 80 and more.
Not a month goes by when we have not seen media reports about corruption and incompetence. This week, we were treated to the story of unusable locomotives bought by the Uganda Railways Corporation to the tune of Shs48b.

The National Medical Stores tells Ugandans it has not released Covid-19 vaccines for the Ministry of Health to distribute; the Minister of Health addresses reporters and tells them the very vaccines have been administered to Ugandans secretly.
I will cite one more example to illustrate how Uganda is managed by shockingly incompetent people, and why our leaders should be ashamed. 

When I started writing this column, there was no electricity in the house. Umeme, the power distributor, does not distribute electricity for free. People pay for it. At least most people I know do.
Umeme serves 1.5 million customers, not the entire Ugandan population of 40-plus million people. But sometimes there is no electricity for 24 hours even in Kampala, the capital. All this happens in a country where leaders appear on TV and proudly say that they have built enough dams to generate electrical power.

There were power outages in 2005 when Umeme secured a 20-year concession to distribute electricity; there are still power outages in 2021. There will be power outages in 2025 when the concession expires.
And because we live in a failed state, the concession will be renewed — which will be an insult to the intelligence of Ugandans.

Mr Namiti is a journalist and former
Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected]    @kazbuk