Our people in Uganda are dying from preventable causes

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEATHS

Most Ugandans die young and from preventable causes. The Ugandan Ministry of health claims in its 2016 report that Malaria is the top killer of Ugandans while the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the top funders of Uganda’s health care system claims that Neonatal disorders, HIV/AIDS, and Malaria in third place, are the three top causes of death in Uganda.

 Few people really write about death (mortality, rigor mortis, demise, fatalities, etc) until a prominent person dies. However, Ugandans have been dying at an acceptable rate for a young population. Only that no one cares except for the red soils that devour them. The red earth is feeding on us too!

 Deaths and funerals are very important social occasions in the Ugandan tradition. Many people are called to order the moment they are threatened to imagine how many people would gather on their graves during mourning when they pass on. The crowd that gathers at your funeral determines how resourced or important you were to your community in your lifetime.

 Sometimes, your reputation gathers for you the most important decision-makers from among your people, to mourn and eulogize you. Not these days anymore when the prospect of soda and food can attract anybody. Most funerals are attended by children yearning for sodas and meals anyway.

 The e-burials under the aegis of the coronavirus pandemic should have made dying even difficult for those obsessed with popularity at death. But a dead man is a dead man, anyway. Death is a neutralizer such that the dead offers nothing new except the material loss for those indebted to him or his recipients mourning for their lost source of livelihood. I doubt people these days mourn the dead as it was in the past! How else would you explain that widows marry the next week and widowers the next day?

 I must assert myself here that deaths in Acholi regions are mostly preventable. it comes prematurely, and you know, the culture of not screening for ailments is partly to blame. Nonetheless, across Uganda, chauvinism kills more than diseases. The idea that you are not sick until you have pain, or that you are pretending of sickness to avoid chores, places many at risk of dying young.

 Cancer, for instance, is eating up people like the cow gobbing roughages. HIV/Aids has affected everyone and Ugandans no longer bother about it. They have accepted to live with it, and this has reduced stigma. With the advent of medicine, the viral load could be managed to an undetectable level and people are living to their full potentials.

 Malaria has been with us and seriously, I never knew of anyone who ever died of malaria, until I read in the media that malaria kills so many people. I have known of children who died of malaria and never an adult. I once told a Canadian friend that I suffered terrible bouts of malaria while in Uganda in 2017. The dude almost fainted. I had to explain that Malaria is not contagious – that some horny female Anopheles mosquito just flirts with your blood and deposits the protozoa that make a home in your liver for few days. Once you take an anti-malarial then hydrate, then it is gone! What I have failed to understand though, is why African governments spend so much money on weapons and not on research to combat malaria 

Deaths in Uganda have a political economy to it. The politically connected and powerful tend to have large unrestrained mourners attending to their funerals. We saw that with Lt. Gen. Lokech (RIP) and recently with BMK’s funeral. A humongous crowd seated skin-to-skin in total violation of the pandemic SOP of 2 meters apart. But they mourned, finished, and went home – no police disruption. Meanwhile, our schools are still closed until 2022, right? 

I have seen that people are fast and blissful at celebrating death and least enthusiastic at preventing it. In the many WhatsApp groups, I am enrolled, everyone is busy collecting money for funerals (Mabugo) and none collects money for health insurance schemes so that the ill can get the medical care they need and not die young. Some even innovatively begin to collect money to build a house for a dead man. People cash out of empathy and it is unconscionable, outright! Death has been used on occasions to reap money, and yet no one accounts for the fact that the deceased died from a preventable death. We are killing our people deliberately and that is social murder!

End.

Ugandan MP have become the "New Government"

"THE NEW GOVERNMENT"

For years, we have referenced the difference between “government” and “State”, terms that have been loosely used as synonyms. Discerning these terms is crucial for understanding public policy.

Using a simple explanation, the state is what already exists – the people, society/country, with its constitution, laws, tax systems, security apparatus, institutions, et cetra – such as the colonial and post-colonial states of Uganda. The government, on the other hand, is the interested group(s) that contend to impress its ideology upon the state - to control and steer it. Such as the Obote and Museveni governments. The state does not change much on its own but the government changes at every elective year or during coups, revolutions, death of a leader, and so forth. This change affects how the state operates or is operated. In the case of NRMO, the government has fused to become the state itself through dictatorial permanency!

The foregone analogy helps to understand an emerging phenomenon that defines the nature of governance in Uganda, today. This article argues that the slow death of local government has ceded the role of local governance to the Members of Parliament as the new governors.

The local government arrangement was a compromise for federalism as was popularly demanded in the CJ Odoki’s Constitutional Review Commission that resulted in the 1995 constitution. At the time, some Ugandans had desired Federal governance while Buganda clung on a less understood and historically divisive “Federo.”

For decades, local government flourished with the hope that it would unite Ugandans, bring services closer to the people, make people’s voices visible in decision making at the local levels, and make local government leaders to be accountable locally. The way Hon. Bidandi Ssali articulated local government was such that it is a bottom-up policy approach that made administration and governance truly pro-people.

The central government ceded much of the public service administration to the local government through the Local Government Act, 1997 (as amended). Schools, hospitals, education, water and sanitation, cultural ceremonies, local infrastructure (roads), urban planning, including security among others, became the responsibility of the local government. The central government would finance the districts through its ministry of finance and economic planning.

For decades, the balkanization of districts in Uganda as an entrenchment political strategy for the ruling NRM created more pseudo-districts that are not viable through their tax generation. Consequently, the quality of public service has generally declined instead of improving, and the people are more alienated from decision-making than intended. Rent-seeking has created self-assured “Thiefdoms” in these districts as opposed to broader accountability and transparent practices.  The operations of the local government have become enigmatic and its functions are simply paradoxical. The lapse in local districts' performance has caused a political crisis that gave now makes the high-earning Members of Parliament become the new government in the place of local government.

Being an MP attracts a decent earning and in poor districts where there are four or more MPs, the collective monthly or annual income of their MPs outstrips such a district revenue collection. Further, districts like Kitgum has repeatedly failed to absorb central capitation grants. Consequently, the local people have abandoned seeking services from the local and central government only to turn their gaze of helplessness at their MPs.

Being an MP in Uganda today means running the everyday life of all constituents such as paying fees, acting as a husband to widows and father to orphans; being a health worker – providing ambulances and building health centers as well as pharmacies; being a chief mortician. paying for burials and body relocations; Being a chief witness at weddings and marriage counselor, a local conflict arbitrator,  a counselor of widowers and the terminally ill; agents of witchcraft, funder of flimsy business propositions, a chief mourner at funerals of people who die from purely preventable deaths, a transporter, teacher, priest, road builder, and even a cattle rustler in some districts!

The central government has reneged on its duties to fund local governments appropriately and the ministry of finance’s micro-management of local government accounts for some of these lapses. However, the central government has insisted on lavishing MPs with resources in ways that undermine the local government, and consequently, the MPs have gradually inherited much that local governments should do. This way, the MPS are constantly under duress from their insatiably needy constituents and their performance is judged not by the legislative requirement, rather by how they solve service gaps that the local and central government should have performed.

This also explains the rise in perpetual corruption, decline in legislative deliberations, and decline in the quality of leaders at all levels of governance. Additionally, the high commercialization of politics and its violent nature speaks to the level at which the MP transmits state tyranny, escapes credibility scrutiny, and evades accountability. In the end, when an MP is defeated at an election, they quickly depreciate physically, mentally, and financially. Most look up to a concession with the giver – Museveni – for fringe benefits or appointments.

The cost of public administration must be addressed to ease resources for local government to operate. The Ministry of finance should harmonize how it transmits funds to the local governments and ease up on micro-management which humiliates local leaders. Practically, the Parliament is bloated and needs reducing drastically. Districts that are impracticable need to be dissolved and a criterion to attain a district status be set based on the ability to collect taxes that can finance at least 60% of its operating costs. The MP should not be a “government.”

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