How we can do better to make Uganda better

Next Saturday will be a special day for Christians all over the world. It is the day they remember the birth of Jesus who, we are told by his fans, lived frugally and was a role model for people who take morality seriously. It is also the last Saturday of 2021. We will soon enter a new year.

But as we celebrate this year’s Christmas and look forward to the new year, we can do two things that can make Uganda a much better place to live.

First, it would be good news if Ugandans who take Jesus seriously endeavoured to emulate him. They do not have to live frugally, especially if they make their money the right way. 

However, they should never be the same people we read about in newspapers for embezzling public funds, forging signatures or academic degrees to contest elections, giving female students marks on sexual merit, entering premises of Kampala lodges with concealed car number plates to sleep with married women and (sometimes) men.

A Christian who is a big fan of Jesus should

not go to Boston on a visitor’s visa and refuse to leave after their visa has expired — and then turn around and rail against crooks in our government. Some people will struggle to see the real difference between the Christian and the people he/she criticises.

Yet if you live in Uganda and you observe the ways of Ugandans keenly, you know perfectly well, as this column has noted previously, that many Ugandan Christians and Muslims use Jesus and religion for PR. 

The level of dishonesty, deception, duplicity, sophistry and bare-faced lies among leaders and those they lead has reached worrying proportions. 

The people who are doing this are lucky though. They talk about Jesus, for example, and say that he died for their sins, but when they steal money where they work or sell expired goods, Jesus cannot come out and say: “I have all my life believed in honesty and my track record is well known. I disown you and I cannot allow you to use my name.” 

Political leaders who are protected by soldiers and police officers because they know they have made countless enemies and would, therefore, never set foot in, say, Kisekka Market without armed escort often tell us that God is protecting them. Because God does not and cannot talk — we know this from experience — the crooks and criminals using his name get away with everything.

So, on Saturday we are going to see Christians flooding places of worship, but the truth is that the figures around whom religion is built would be ashamed to have anything to do with many of those Christians, some of whom are religious leaders.

The second thing we should do to make Uganda a better place is to take our work seriously, especially work that we are paid to do. We set pretty low standards for our work, and that is the principal reason we keep admiring people in the developed world for doing things that we should be able to do ourselves.

Nothing is going to change for the better if we turn up late for meetings, organise events that have disorganisation plastered all over them. We test people visiting Uganda for Covid-19, and they have to wait forever to receive their results. We fail to get reliable electricity even in the capital, yet we have increased power generation by building news dams.

Let us adopt the work culture and standards of people whose countries run this world.

Mr Namiti is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk

[email protected]    

@kazbuk