Grand corruption leaves Uganda’s future uncertain

Uganda’s on social media have spent this week exposing the Parliament for all manner of gross abuse of power. The revelations are inebriating. There isn’t enough space to get into the amounts that are going to people’s private vacations and whatever other reason they can find to pay themselves off for doing nothing.

The biggest revelation however is that as it turns out, there is lots of honour among thieves. The public has largely accepted that those in positions of power will hire and contract their children, relatives and side chics. We see it quite often. What caught many people by surprise is that the opposition is as complicit, in the spaces where they have power or those where they share it with those in government. Nowhere is this a lot more so than the Parliament of Uganda.

From the looks of it, it is not just the families of deceased members of Parliament who are clamouring to have their kin replace them. Apparently, the easiest way to get a job in the House is if you are a relative of one of the big shots. Human resource policies and guidelines be damned along with opposition politics, grandstanding and posturing.

But let us return to this in a moment. This week, I saw a post on X/Twitter, where a son told the father that he was going to pass his exams, go to university, and eventually get a government job so that he can steal, get rich quick and help the father pay school fees for his siblings.

There was another funny story in the papers this week. One of those that shouldn’t be funny but Uganda being what it is, sometimes you have to laugh to avoid crying. The police had arrested a primary school head teacher in Bushenyi, for issuing Uneb results to her students after the national examinations body withheld the school’s results over alleged malpractice. If you were someone who cared and were looking at all these things, what would you make of them? What would you make of Uganda? And not just this Uganda that you are experiencing but the one that is about to come. The one where teachers are orchestrating the falsification of examination marks for 13-year-olds. The one where these same children want to get into government because that is where it is easiest to steal and make something of yourself.

The one where politicians on either side of the political aisle have agreed that the country is the menu and that there are no more pretenses about the smash and grab. What would you make of post-Museveni Uganda, whenever it inevitably comes?

A teacher once told me how he had gotten around to dealing with problematic curriculum content that for example cited John Speke as the discoverer of the Source of the Nile. To get around this obviously nonsensical assertion, the teacher told his students, “For The sake of passing the exam, please write ‘John Speke’ but all of you know that thousands of locals lived in the area for thousands of years before the White explorers appeared.”

One of the most proven yet interesting ways to effective learning is role-modeling. It doesn’t matter how much talking you do, kids do as they see. It appears that soon, many parents will reach a crossroads.

How do you inspire your children to put in the work, be honest and care about the welfare of others when on the evidence of it, doing the reverse is the quickest way for them to build wealth in “this new” Uganda?

Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. @Rukwengye