What is Uganda’s real problem?

Author, Augustine Bahemuka. PHOTO/FILE/COURTESY


What you need to know:

  • “What can we as citizens and beholders of our motherland, do when there is no accountability from our leaders?"

This existential question is borrowed from a polished Sunday Monitor columnist, who traced Uganda’s post-independence problem[s] behind the curtains of colonialist history. It further drove me into deep reflection about one phenomenon, which has progressively gravitated into serious consequences, some life-threating, and yet still not attracted adequate attention, at least not enough to spur the kind of activism that we recently observed on social media regarding the worrisome state of roads in Kampala and public hospitals countrywide.

The rise in temperatures, scattered rainy patterns and floods caused by human activity, which presents crystal evidence of the scale of environmental destruction that we have caused; and yet efforts to avert the situation remain unmatched. Two occurrences come to mind.
 
It is not the first time. The erosion of Katonga bridge in the Lwera swamp has come at such a huge cost. Over and above the short-term plans laid out by government to build a temporary metallic bridge, in view of restoring calm and businesses along this route, the root cause of the problem remained silent. Like other swamps in the country that have been indiscriminately encroached on for extensive rice-growing, Lwera has not been spared. 

We are paying for failure of government to dialogue a long-term settlement of the controversial “private ownership” of this wetland. 
There is also talk about investors and powerful government officials who have vested interest in Lwera wetland. Unfortunately, such complex syndicates that sprouted throughout different sectors of our society, bolstered by their strong linkages to influential politicians, whose undying greed surpasses even the least of their love for Uganda, if any. 

Elsewhere,  head of the Judiciary Chief Justice Alphonse Owiny-Dollo raised his utmost fears about the wide-scale destruction of the green cover in northern Uganda through charcoal trade. Owiny-Dollo spoke of a “diabolical plot to desertify”  the north where any sprouting green tree has not been spared by charcoal burners. 

I had mixed reactions to the Chief Justice.  On one hand, that the unregulated charcoal trade and logging has caught the eye of government is soothing; but on the other hand, his utterances seemed to insinuate that even the fourth most powerful person in the land is as baffled as we the wanaichi. Well, just to bring it to the attention of CJ Owiny-Dollo that the desertification plot perpetuated by greedy well-connected cartels is not only a threat to the northern region, but to the entire country. 

Attempts to fight such cartels using lawful ways are quickly suffocated by the impunity that they enjoy, given our toothless government agencies, such as Nema, in the face of politically unwilling folks.  A friend keeps referring to how difficult it gets day-by-day to be Ugandan. Many of us have felt this way on many occasions. 

Of course, all countries have their own unique problems, but we would not want to compare ourselves to them. There are many questions raised than we can get answers. Who is accountable for the effects of environmental degradation? Who is responsible for supervising such wide-scale economic activities carried out in water catchments and other gazetted areas to ensure better management of the effects? 

More importantly, what can we as citizens and beholders of our motherland, do when there is no accountability from our leaders? It is extremely unlikely that a Ugandan investor will be granted a licence to utilise a wetland, for instance, for economic activity in the West or East Asia country. Unfortunately, the reverse is true in Uganda. 

What then is Uganda’s problem? Is it the leaders? It is thought elsewhere that leaders are a reflection of their society. Are we then our own problem? 

Mr Bahemuka is a commentator on issues of peace and society. [email protected]