Prime
Only in Uganda: Leaders create slums at home, then take holidays abroad
Author, Gawaya Tegulle. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- It is baffling that our leaders come back from these trips abroad and still make decisions that take their country backward...
Pictures of State Minister for Investment and Privatisation Evelyn Anite, apparently on holiday in the Western Hemisphere, have done the rounds on Twitter in the last few days. The substance of her tweets raises fundamental questions about the quality of leadership Uganda has, generally speaking and suggests just how backward this country is.
It brings a couple of questions to mind: when government leaders visit the western capitals, do they ever learn anything useful to implement back home? How can we have such widely-travelled, highly exposed leaders, running the country in such a shoddy and shabby manner? What kind of ‘compare-notes’ conversations do they have with their counterparts in the developed world? Can they even sustain a proper conversation with them?
The western world is, without doubt, the most developed, the most sophisticated part of the planet. When you get there, you realise that it is possible to have a country where systems and structures work smoothly; governments change very easily without the slightest bloodshed and the economy works for just about everyone.
In fact it is perhaps, in part, because of comfortable conditions there that many of the inhabitants of those lands do not get seriously persuaded about things like going to heaven. It is relatively easy for the prospects of a good effortless life in a beautiful heaven to move the heart of a poor African who struggles every single day to put food on his table, dress up and educate his family and even get a decent roof over their heads.
The African takes a good look at this hard life and decides that it is worth every while to do his best every day to strive for heaven. But for many Europeans and Americans, where things work just fine, pictures of heaven do not move them – for if whatever you are saying is true, then they already have it.
It is baffling that our leaders come back from these trips abroad and still make decisions that take their country backward. Do they seriously have any stakes here?
The same leaders that enjoy western capitals because of their beauty still manage to come back and sell off every green space - football fields and beauty parks - in Kampala and major towns, so that people can build huge shopping malls.
They put aside physical planning blueprints and allow people to build anything, anyhow, anywhere and everywhere, so that most of Kampala is just a slum; nothing that anyone can come and benchmark as a modern city. So they do whatever they can to make money in Uganda and then run abroad to spend it.
The pattern is emerging. You make decisions that kill the education system in your country, by paying teachers badly and putting up very funny structures that you call schools, and which you can never risk putting your own children in. When it comes to your own children, they either attend international schools here or you fly them – usually at taxpayers’ expense – to study in the finest schools and universities overseas.
You kill the health system in Uganda by poorly funding it and building funny establishments that you call health centres; places that you yourself can never go to for any reason. Then, at the slightest attack of a headache or stomachache, fly yourselves abroad to the finest hospitals, at taxpayers’ expense.
So while the taxpayers work their socks off to ensure that there is money in the economy, those in power simply scoop it up without regard to the felt needs of the country, without regard to obvious national priorities and go spend the monies by the billions abroad.
Patriotism: Nationalism or just indoctrination?
Sometimes things get to a point where you wonder about those that lead the country, considering what they are doing to rob the country and disorganise it completely…which country do they call home? And it doesn’t take any iota of genius to arrive at such a question: you just look at the trend of things.
Mr Tegulle is an advocate of the High Court of Uganda
