Philip Matogo
“It is hard to live in Uganda these days due to the increase in prices of edible commodities, more so sugar, which is also made in Uganda. It is a pity for the citizens because their hands are tied indirectly through levying high taxes. Above all, unemployment, which is the primary cause of poverty in the various parts of the country,” Daily Monitor reported Democratic Party president Norbert Mao’s quotes from the archives this week.“
Lastly, people work hard and get some capital to start a small business, and it collapses due to high taxes. Time has come that we have to say no to this regime that cannot fix all these problems,” Mr Mao, who is currently the Justice and Constitutional Affairs minister, added.Indeed, living in Uganda is no walk in the park.
The ground beneath us seems to have shrunk to a straw we keep clutching at as we drown. But drowning might be what we need to breathe some life into how we live.You see, we have been acting as if our economy can operate independently of our patriotic pursuit of self. All we have cared for is how money found its way to our gaping pockets.
So, as long as we were feeding our families, we did not care whether Uganda was fed.The country’s national interests took a backseat to our private interests. As we made money, especially during the roaring 1990s, we did not care how poorly our country was being run. All that mattered was that we could smilingly pay our bills, even as our politics convulsed in its death throes.
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Sure, there were plenty of political soothsayers who warned that we were on the wrong path, but we were too busy gorging ourselves on a diet of fallacies to listen. One of those fallacies is that unemployment causes our poverty. It does not. Unemployment manifests our poverty, it does not create it.Our poverty arises from a mindset that he who has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force must monopolise everything else.
This monopoly places a ceiling on per capita levels of business activity to ensure there is no threat to its hold on power.
In the process, we have a government which encourages the wealth of its citizens insofar as that wealth is not weaponised politically. Since nobody knows how much money it takes to overthrow a government, it is assumed that if the population is kept poor, then the government will be preserved.
In the process, the ruling elite chooses to de-concentrate business ownership among those who oppose it while economic power is concentrated where it protects the state, by preventing change. This does not take into account how poor it leaves Ugandans caught in the crossfire of those who seek change and those who deprive them of the resources to achieve it.
As money stays at the top, instead of trickling down, there is no hope for the distributive justice Mr Mao advocated for. So, we must appreciate that as long as our politics is about eating, this will not change.
That’s because, under this dispensation, there will always be rulers who eat the most. And their commodious appetites will not be starved on a menu of reforms.
This is how they perpetuate their dominance. But this is clearly not sustainable.There must be a course correction. As supreme court justice Louis Brandeis said more than 100 years when railroad, steel, and banking barons like JP Morgan monopolised the US economy, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few … but we can’t have both.”
The writer, Philip Matogo, is a copywriter
