Benjamin Rukwengye
While preparing for this column, I tried to find out why school uniforms were introduced but couldn’t find anything conclusive. What I gathered is that there needed to be a form of identity among workers of certain industries and that is where uniforms started.
This culture would then get adopted by schools for pretty much the same reasons but also, apparently, for purposes of egalitarianism. You can see why that would make sense, considering the fact that it then became easy to tell a student from one who wasn’t, or one school from the other by just looking at the uniform.
Mostly, it allowed for students to “look the same” and not have to wear different clothes as that would make it difficult for those who couldn’t afford good clothing. A friend once told me a story about a cousin who had opted to become a career student. Apparently, having left Uganda pursue their undergraduate degree in the United States, the young man came back to a job that had been fixed for him in one of our ministries but the salary was little to nothing.
He wasn’t high enough in the ranks to steal in the way that he saw his siblings and cousins doing so within the same year, he opted to go back to the US and enroll in a Masters’s programme. He did return when he was done, hoping he would get in at a higher and more lucrative level, only to discover that the politics and work culture were nowhere near what his elite education had prepared him for.
His old man had fallen out with the system and close family friends were not as helpful as they had promised when things were going well. At the time we were having this conversation, he had spent more time in school than at work – amassing all manner of academic qualifications without the professional experience and expertise to back them.
There were two contrasting images (videos) this week but not so dissimilar on how or what they say about Uganda. The first was of students showing up for prom in what could be a scene from the movies. The second was of traders publicly telling off President Museveni in the ongoing dispute over the Efris tax management system.
The students’ display of wealth and opulence can be excused because it is not their place to not enjoy life and their parents’/benefactors’ money – however it is earned. That is the prism in which we need to see their actions of hiring helicopters and getting chauffeured in the latest state-of-the-art vehicles.
It is not their money. They don’t go to schools where things like that are out of place. And mostly, they live in a world where they see teens doing similar things to celebrate birthdays. That is how aspirations work. And those who are finding it hard to accept or trying to regulate it will certainly fail.
However, it would be foolhardy to be blind to the country in which they live. And that is why schools and our education system need to teach civic consciousness. How alive are these students to the country in which they live? To the fortunes of others, agemates, and peers, who can barely find a meal or stay in school because they cannot afford it? And that is the risk that we face as a country where the rich continue to quickly pull away from the poor and the poor sink deeper.
They live in the same country but without a common uniform, it is hard to tell that the two groups are co-existing – until every so often, the poor show up to forcefully harvest from the rich.
This is why that video of traders roasting the President in Kololo is quite instructive. It is the first time we have on record, showing Ugandans going hard and speaking truth to power. The President was evidently caught off-guard. No amount of briefing and preparation could have given him a hint of what was to come.
In many ways, the traders are behaving like the poor who when pushed against the wall, hit back in somewhat expected ways. You know, the same way that we can expect those deprived of a good education and opportunity to show up when prom has faded into very distant memory.
Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. @Rukwengye
