All Ugandans don’t like corruption. They know it and identify it easily when it happens. Diabolically, corruption is a means; it also has character. It appears that corruption is a cultural way of the people upon which they procure favors. I long concluded that the white collar bureaucracy is an impediment to African development and its demand for accountability is an alien concept in the African brain far from being realized.
I will be accused of being Eurocentric and an avid anti-African mindset. I am actually Pan Africanist professing Afrocentrism. My defense is obvious. Africans are no longer Africans in the real sense of African traditions and have never been for the last three hundred or so years. This is obviously projected in the mindset. Africa is a dichotomy of West or East; Arabs or Euro-America. They are either Christians or Muslims. They are all afraid of identifying with negated African traditions considered backward and primitive in the purview of the Western civilization.
Generally, Karl Marx ascertained that religion is a poor man’s opium. Africa is a highly polarized place in terms of religion, but it is also a place for the wretched and largely illiterate. “Illiterate” as determined by the western standards, an imperial calibration. In those terms, majority of Africans are illiterate and minority, usually those educated in the western system are considered elites. Here is where they learn social and political philosophy – the mode of western reasoning, so alienating to the African social realities and the basis of Siasa.
Corruption has never been a sole problem of Africa, but that of humanity as a whole from time immemorial. Corruption persists in every continent of the world but manifests in different forms. We are only rich, poor, corrupt or accountable in as far as we meet or fail, thereof, to meet the standards of the West. No matter how varied their history and social evolution, we as Africans must conform!
The manifestation of “corruption” in a contemporary society like Uganda thrives on its socio-political culpability to this vice. The origins of corruption in Uganda is entrenched in NRM/Fronasa ideology being espoused by the likes of Yoga Adhola and Museveni, also called “Siasa”. Siasa is a concept upon which Kyankwazi was founded and it implies mass mind manipulation using lies and deceitful techniques– simply put, a grand scheme of brainwash.
Common sense dictates that when a social contract is cultivated on the foundation of falsehood, then it is naturally shaky. Ugandan society is now reaping the dividends of Siasa and that is evident by the lack of conscience among NRM cadres in public service who arrogantly debase public trust. First and foremost, the NRM regime is not legitimate entity since it forcefully usurped the majority will to secure a social contract. As a consequence, the justification of continued tenure of the regime is encumbered upon excessive use of sophisticated forms of brutality. This also sustains the lifeline of the regime’s cultivated corrupt, inept and kleptomaniacs. Every regime in Uganda has proven to provide its own scalawags; Rapscallions or Scoundrels.
Given the natural order of things, the compendious choice of action is to persist in regime overhaul. With it might comes the unfortunate collapse of the predatory pseudo middle class set on the public purse. Previous regimes had its own corporate bases and they too collapsed immediately upon the advent of the NRM fascism. The challenge is ours since every generation has an obligation to stand up to be counted or winnow into submission. The Siasa harvest is ours to pick and dry or uproot and discard. Its debilitating impact on social services remains a social threat as it diminishes our humanity. I loathe saying the obvious but a false social contract is simply untenable!
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