Sowing the stubborn seed

We have spent much of this half of the year in agony over the prices of things; fuel, which keeps climbing day and night and looks set to hit the five figures per litre sometime this year. 
It makes you look wistfully back on the old days when driving was carefree. It is not any comfort that it’s happening elsewhere in the world too, signalling that perhaps our redemption is not as close as we wish it were. 

We don’t like it but we have normalised the price of oil and soap and the other things in between. This is how it’s going to be. Can’t make ends meet, buckle up and get acquainted with a money lender.
The other thing that is being written into our DNA is the tolerance for political fun and games at our expense. The helplessness that we are swallowing like a daily pill is intoxicating. And it is everywhere. You log into your WhatsApp group to check updates and you come away depressed. 

We have discovered so many ways to say, “I give up”. The MPs are going to take an extra share of the national pie for no reason at all, well, grin and bear it. There is nothing you can do about it. They won’t refund it and they are not sorry. Wait for the next election cycle and if you don’t like your current representative, trade them in for a new model. 

Money is going to keep disappearing down the rabbit hole and while we can make valiant efforts to chase after it, we will lose the trail at some point and the perpetrator will get away with the loot. 
They will build a fancy house or construct a mall with the ill-gotten gains and we will be proud of them. It is a small country after all and these are our friends, cousins and in-laws. 

More young people are going to keep signing up to go and work abroad. Some will just take the short cut and offer a kidney for cash because the alternative seems too far off in a future that has been long in coming. 
The number of illicit activities will grow in direct proportion to the number of people looking for easy money. Drugs, sex, organs; nothing is off limits and if we cannot make a name on the straight and narrow, then we will become the capital of shady activity. 
The other day people were joking about selling toes, or at least I hope they were. When you start to look at the so-called Good Samaritan twice because you doubt their intentions at an accident scene, you know you are living in a bad movie. 

Of course, we will excel at certain things, as we are bound to do, like the conservation of mountain gorillas, where apparently we have outdone ourselves and ended up with a good problem, too many of them. 
Occasionally, we will find a good thing, be excited about it in the moment and then take our eyes off it for two seconds only to wake up wondering, “whatever happened to Covidex”. 

We are smart, we are brainy, athletic but we are also our own worst enemy. We do indeed have enough brilliant people to figure out the economic situation; how to improve standards of living and stop corruption but an attempt to unravel what has been ingrained will be fought viciously for old habits, however unpleasant, die hard in spite of our good intentions. 
Let’s be careful how deeply we sow the bad seed for it may prove cumbersome to uproot when the time comes.

Ms Nampewo is a writer, editor and communications consultant     
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