Writer: Benjamin Rukwengye. PHOTO/FILE.
There is an old joke about poor people and their audacity. You might have heard it before. A raggedy folk walks past a palatial home and wonders why the rich are stupid. Why would they build a swimming pool when they don't know how to swim, and their children are in boarding school? Or why leave so much bare land for a compound when you could convert it into an urban farm and grow fruits?
This week, for a very brief and embarrassing moment, I caught myself thinking like them poor folks. With some prompting from a friend, I took a walk around downtown Dublin, Ireland, after my evening class, to get a feel of the Christmas flavour.
As I did, I quickly admitted to myself that it was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever experienced. The elaborate lighting, echoes of laughter and music, random bands and musicians on street corners, the colour and warmth of it all. I nearly forgot how awfully cold it is.In that moment though, I started to wonder if "these guys" don't have more pressing public services to allocate this money towards. But then I quickly snapped out of that trance.
This is Europe. Of course, they have all these problems. Their healthcare needs a lot of fixing. Their schools have problems. The cost of living is high. Transport and mobility could get better. And exactly because of that, they need to invest as much in the intrinsic economy as well. How else do their people let off steam and continue to believe that things can and will get better? How else would they build a sense of community and civic consciousness? How else would they cultivate a common identity and rally together to solve more pressing problems? It is not enough to have a good road and pristine school buildings. It is equally important that your people find joy in the smallest of things.
All the more reason why the constant moaning over Nyege Nyege is ludicrous and misguided. It also explains the recent emergence of dubious characters masquerading as purveyors of the Gospel. People need hope.
Some find it in the bottle and gyrating, others in the Bible.Yet that isn’t enough because you can’t know what will or won’t work. What’s for sure is that the gradual disintegration of the state has pushed the citizens to extremes that will be hard to come from. The rise in violent crime, drug abuse, teenage pregnancies, and social breakdown is symptomatic. It speaks to the breakdown of public services, which has forced people to fend for themselves. Those who can’t are left to suffer what they must.
Yet, we can still find a balance, especially if we enlist institutions that are plugged into the communities: churches and mosques, cultural institutions, schools, and community-based organisations. Those are the lifeline. They don’t have to build the hardware, but they are crucial to the software that allows a distressed, mistrusting, and exhausted citizenry to hope some more.
Wouldn’t it be great if all these were co-opted into the annual celebration of notable public holidays such as Women’s Day, Independence Day, Eid, Christmas, and Easter holidays? It would put communities at the centre of these celebrations and decentre government, its inefficiencies and partisanship. Of course, that would require overcoming our parochial tendency to politick. Unfortunately, only the naïve would bank on that happening.
Thirty-eight years of one-man rule have eroded public good and given rise to fortune-hunters and self-seekers.
Something has got to give or we shall lose even the little we have. Ergo, we need to do more. Progress isn’t just about the number of jobs created. It is about more than the number of kilometers tarmacked and how many new health centres have been constructed. We need to go beyond the numbers, especially because they don’t have a good look. We need to give citizens something more to look forward to. Something to get excited about. For now, we are just poor and sad.
The writer, Benjamin Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds.
