Gov't not doing enough to protect our girls in Arabia

Government is not doing enough for our girls in Arabia

Morris Komakech

The social media is awash with gory tales of many Ugandan girls suffering inhuman treatment – torture, sexual molestation, confinement in squalor, death, and denial of pay in Arab countries where they seek menial employment. The Daily Monitor story of the 30 girls who returned from Qatar confirms this troubling state of affairs. Evidently, the fatal fate of 22yrs old Nakachwa Sumayiya reported in the DM of July 30, 2017 shows that our government does little to protect the rights and lives of our citizens in these places.

Life in Arab world is culturally dramatic requiring adequate preparatory training.  Just in April, Minister Janat Mukwaya assured the nation that Uganda signed bilateral agreements with some Gulf Nations to safeguard the rights of these workers. Legislators need to follow up with stringent mechanisms to monitor, review, and enforce these agreements. These countries must account for the abuses of our citizens.

According to the Gender Ministry, Uganda has 65 fully licensed and operational employment agencies exporting surplus cheap labour. These agencies should commit to stringent obligations over the safety and evacuation of our girls.

Government is not doing enough!

Unfortunately, for Ugandans, it is the dysfunctional state syndrome where the people who own the employment agencies are also those within the nexus of political power. As such, they are above reproach and at own liberties to dispose Ugandans for profit. At the minimum, these agencies should provide save exit plan in countries that undermine women’s rights.

The plight of these girls illuminates contradictions in the fragile economy that resorts to selling human labour abroad. One wonders how Uganda will achieve the middle-income status on slave export.

The colorful economic growth indicators are the most deceptive. Having endured rigorous bureaucratic adulterations, these indicators make sense only on paper. Their real effects manifests in the vulnerability of our young populace to human trafficking and modern slavery.

Recently, Mr. Museveni praised UPE and USE as the cornerstone for youth skills development. Incidentally, UBOS tells us that 83% of youths, who form nearly 78% of our population, are either under-skilled or unskilled; as such, they are mostly unemployed, under- employed or unemployable. These correlations only make absolute sense given the quality and investments in UPE/USE.

The youth unemployment rate also tells us that the economy is not expanding and diversifying fast enough to accommodate the employment needs of our large youth population. Employment opportunities are in low pay services sector, and concentrated in few urban centres; Government distributes it jobs on sectarian basis and; lucrative opportunities are ring-fenced for regime loyalist and foreigners –Indians, now Chinese contractors, and others.

Clearly, UPE and USE potentials are under-utilized, leading to the low quality of human resource that we dispose off in Arabia. Many of these girls are not seeking high-end tech jobs. Those high pay, high-end skilled jobs belongs to Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. Ugandans do the menial, dirty, undervalued, precarious, and shunned low-pay jobs that machines do elsewhere.

Ugandans could do better if the regime expects to harness and sell its surplus labour abroad. These girls bring in foreign currency to sustain the regime. The labour must have value, and it must attract protection from host government, employment agencies, and our government.

Parliament of Uganda should review and tighten some of human export laws to protect these girls. Continued inaction affirms that our government is the active agent committing our own citizens into slavery.

It is disheartening that foreigners, especially those Arabs come to Uganda where they are treated on red carpet. Imagine that they extend their cruelty to Ugandans even at home, where they openly discriminate, assault, murder, sodomize, and rape our people. Instead, the law protects these criminals. In Uganda, the foreign investor is above the law. That means, Ugandans are disposable both at home and abroad.

The End.

Allow Public Debate on National Health Insurance

NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE

Until the advent of structural adjustment, the Ugandan government provided quality and equitable universal health care and tertiary education. Under the liberal market milieu, both sectors are on a steady decline.

Health care and education are critical aspects of the economy because they shape the human capital for economic development. A healthy and educated population is the engine of economic growth, and determines whether Uganda will become a middle-income country.

However, under the liberal market environment, the government has retracted from its core obligation to universal health provision. Its budgetary allocation is less than half the 2001 Abuja declaration where Uganda committed to allocate 15% of its budget towards improving the health sector.

Recent increase in budget allocation for the health sector from UGX 1.270 Trillion in the FY2015/16 to UGX 1.853 trillion in FY2016/17 still leaves a glaring gap in healthcare financing. The 2016/17 health budget is far below the amount needed for Uganda to sustain high quality human resource and meet its health sector obligations. The Civil Society Budgetary Advocacy Group ascertained that the current budget still leaves 72% of the health sector-financing budget in the hands of the donors, given the slow private sector investment in healthcare.

Although several proposals to bridge the health sector financing gap by introducing health insurance, it has attracted limited public debate.  The proposal by Dr. Francis Runumi, the Commissioner and Director in the Health Ministry need further public debate. Dr Runumi has single handedly shaped the debate on health insurance that will shift the obligation for health financing from public to private - in the murky market economy.

Dr Runumi proposed the Social Health Insurance (SHI) common in low and middle-income countries. The assumptions underlying SHI are that the affluent would subsidise healthcare costs for the poor; the single wealthy subsidises for families, and the young subsidies for the old, etc.

From the onset, this proposal is problematic, because of the intricate complexities of health insurance buying in an “open-palm” society like Uganda. A 2010 peer reviewed study by Juliet Nabyonga Orem and Charlotte Muheki Zikusooka questioned the equity factor in the proposed NHI. They concluded that in the short term, the NHI would achieve the important equity characteristics of pooling, cross-subsidisation, and financial protection. However, they cautioned that success of NHI would be limited by a fragile liberalised market place that would influence accredited Insurers. The study was quick to observe that the current method of disbursement would in the long term, escalate the disparities in healthcare access among the population.

The characteristic of the labour market and human resources determines the success of any health insurance. Uganda, with an estimated population of over 39 million, with 19.5% living below the poverty line, and 72% of unbanked Ugandans (FINCA Observation). The workforce estimated to be 15% of its population has less than 2 million people with formal employment. health Insurance requires buy-in or renewals that requires reliable income. Many Ugandans are employed in small private enterprises, while majority are in subsistence farming. Given that health insurance is better serviced within an economy that emphasises full employment, the challenge of adopting the most appropriate National Health Insurance is daunting.

Debate should focus on the Private Health Insurance (PHI) for the affluent segment of society and the Community Based Health Insurance (CBHI), popular among the poor. A 2012 Systematic review of health insurance in Africa and Asia published in WHO Bulletin, highly appraised CBHI as favourable for improving resource mobilisation, encouraging health utilisation, reducing out-of-pocket expenditures, and increasing community empowerment. However, by Ernst Spaan and colleagues, noted that CBHIs tended to exhibit weak financial sustainability due to low renewal rates, high claim-to-revenue ratio, and high operational costs.

In sum, with 90% youth unemployment in Uganda, widespread economic inequality, and low financial inclusion within an inelastic market economy. Any NHI modeled after any  industrial countries’ will create more disparity in healthcare access. At least, Uganda should avoid the USA’s highly inequitable and predatory health insurance model. Next, we examine CBHI and policy implications.

END.

Cheap Opposition?: The whole country is on sale for cheap

BUYING UGANDA

This weekend was an embarrassing one for the two-faced Opposition. They must be walloping in humiliation with the revelation by chief-buyer, that Opposition members including their MPs are cheap in the political market.

The cheapness of our Opposition is a matter of interpretation. It reveals the outcome of social transformation under the three decades of NRM corrupted rule. Mr. Museveni has previously applied numerous tactics, including doling out brown envelops, but most effectively, through political appointments to extract from the midst of Opposition, their most tenacious cadres. That is how he purged life out of DP in the early 90s and sucked the living hell out of UPC recently.

Characteristically, when Museveni fails to woo opposition characters, he jails them and even capitulates some from a productive economic lifeline. The economic alienation makes this country so unequal in wealth distribution, such that corruption became the natural means to equalize. Uganda has transformed into an economy where corruption is a means of production for many. Those privileged to own opportunities to steal public resources are at the top of the food chain. Many of them ally with the regime solely to safeguard their loot, while the NRM uses their “success” stories to entice members of Opposition.

Without any competitive buyer, the monopoly holder naturally sets the market price of goods. Where the supply of “good conscience” becomes too much, the price naturally falls. It has fallen to a low point where a mere lavishing of his targets with praises such as “good or better member” of Opposition can win him such an Opposition leader, cheaply.

The confusion over who pays better is even worse among the youths who should be flashing out this absurdity. The 2016 general elections brought out the worse among the youths – the Poor NRM Youths vs the jobless brotherhoods. They oscillated between Amama Mbabazi’s camp and Museveni camp, looking for who pays higher. Politics to them is for eating; wellness of society is reflected as an aggregate of economically well off members in this money nexus.  

In contextualizing Mr. Museveni’s mockery of Opposition, one needs to understand Museveni’s innate contempt for multiparty democracy and rule of law.  The Opposition has demonstrated little understanding of the exploits of a Multiparty Political dispensation in that sense. Some expect Mr. Museveni to “allow” them to operate. Museveni’s mission is clear – finish the Opposition by 2021. The revelation of cheapness of Opposition therefore is a blow to opposition credibility and further to undermined multiparty politics.

On its part, the Opposition unconsciously or consciously plays to the tunes of the Piper. The Opposition obeys every draconian law; lack ongoing agenda to engage electorates until the time of elections; exhibits too much in-house treachery – betrayal and snitching that goes unpunished; lack ideological identity or policy preferences distinct from that of the ruling regime; and consistently fails to demonstrate the ability to offer an alternative government.

As such, the Opposition is confusing to the electorates and youths because the only difference between NRM and the so-called Opposition appears to be the briskness of their leaders. Opposition is not about hatred, envy, ignorance and the drive to remove a regime. It entails a systematic organizing to form an alternative government in the waiting and to produce alternative policy framework to push society forward. In that sense, the Ugandan Opposition is atypical, unconscious, and unprincipled.

Not only Opposition politicians are on sale in Uganda. The whole country is. From traditional leaders, church leaders, youth, women and worse of all, the NRM carpetbaggers. Even with their numerical strength, the NRM secretariat still buys their MPs to pass egregious laws towards the life-presidency or mortgaging Uganda. If the regime buys conscience from Opposition, it pays heftily for loyalty from within.  The cheapness of the Opposition is not distinctive; rather, it is a continuum of Museveni’s corrupted rule.

END