Where you live and work determines your health

MIGRATIONS

Where we are born, grow, play, work, retire and die determines our health. Place, according to the World Health Organization, is a determinant of health and this explains why a built environment is also a determinant of our health. Place matters in everything we do. Place reinforces and validates our identities, and values, and shapes the context of our perspectives.

This article is an abridged version of a speech that View Global Services Inc provided to newcomers in Canada recently. The theme of the event was to motivate and inspire newcomers to make sense of their new immigration status in their new place - Canada.

As we know, it is extremely difficult for ordinary Ugandans to get the coveted Canadian visa, and more so, harder even for those who apply and are denied. Those who make it to Canada, however, have opportunities to succeed in building for themselves a meaningful life through hard work and accepting integration in the multicultural place that Canada offers.

The lesson learned in legal immigration is that changing places has numerous advantages. A person may have limited opportunities and skills to thrive in one place, and yet in the next place, these opportunities become boundlessly useful. Migration is the benefit of globalization.

An analogy using a bottle of packaged water illustrates how value changes from place to place. “The water bottle is probably 20 cents in a Costco supermarket,” he said. When you buy the same water bottle in a convenience store, it is probably $2.00. For the same water bottle brand, you pay probably $5.00 in a restaurant and pay $10 for the same bottle of water on a plane or a five-star hotel. The lesson is that our values change from place to place like that water bottle. It is up to us to find the place where we are valued the most.

Place matters. My high school physics teacher, Mr. Kijjambu, once challenged us to travel around the world to complement our learning – to expand our horizons. He always rebuked those who found themselves born in one place, lived, studied, worked, and died in that same place. Mr. Kijjambu cautioned, such as an unexamined life, and warned us about falling into the grip of poverty. He reminded us that poverty has a way of constraining one’s hands and legs and closing both their mind and eyes to prospects in this world.

Arguably, many people are afraid of change. Migration is energy and resource-consuming. Stability, and settling in a familiar place where one has an established social network and a routinized way of life provide safety and comfort. That, too, is undeniable. Valid. Legitimate.

The limit of such thinking, though, is saturation and stasis. When ideas in society become saturated, such a society can develop. The lack of development also limits prospects leading to a scarcity of resources. How the societal resources in such a situation get distributed or shared among the people becomes unequal leading to conflicts and poor health.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the place one lives matters. Africans and the poorer communities were the last to receive vaccines. Being born in Uganda for instance is not the same as being born in Japan. By being born in Uganda, your life expectancy is set under 60yrs while anyone born in Japan is expected to live to their 90s.

Place matters because it provides context for your material and living conditions that determine your health, and validate your identities and values. Although Africa is constructed as permanently needy, even within Africa, some internal legal migration should be made possible. We share ideas, improve our capabilities, and build a better world if we found better places suitable for us to realize our true potential.

END.

Gen Kainerugaba’s Presidential Ambitions are Infantile and Oedipal

 

Gen. MUHOOZI KAINERUGABA

I can bet with confidence, in this article, that Gen MK will neither be on the ballot as a presidential candidate nor a president-elect in 2026 unless he executes the oedipal method.

Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba’s (MK) train of presidential ambition has been fired up by tweets and seems now ominously unstoppable. Will he be the first person to depose a dictator over Twitter?

 But wait a minute, has Gen Museveni, the father, a lifelong president, and Gen MK’s Commander-in-Chief declared a position on succession or transition?

The characteristic actions of the President on this matter of succession speak louder than the rancor of Gen MK and his overzealously opportunistic supporters. Clearly, Gen MK’s expectation to replace his father in 2026 is simply infantile, diversionary, and at most, oedipal.

The question that this article raises, is not about the materiality of Gen Museveni handing over power to his cub. This which concerns the conscience of the nation is that with this steam of succession politics, have we, as a country rationalized institutional chauvinism and discarded the foundational ideology that fosters nationalism? Can we state, unequivocally, that the NRM-O and its leaders have arrived at the end-point of their ideological evolution?

I may not have answers to all the above questions myself, however, what is clear is that each time we indulge in this succession debate, the chauvinistic element of Chwezism emerges. The most logical justification of this succession debate is situated in reinventing a Chwezi “historical” might over the East African region.

This chauvinistic tendency is ingrained in the tweets such as the ambitions of capturing Nairobi, the prospects of caving a Chwezi empire to include Eastern DRC, or praises for uncle this and uncle that, including fabricating relationships with Egyptians, Ethiopians and exalting the Russians.

These tweets are not random. They must illuminate repressed knowledge or myth that resulted from being exposed to the power and how that power is mobilized and sustained. Far from those who may dismiss the General’s tweets as misgivings of inebriation, I see in them a pattern of premonition rooted in his father’s myth.

Additionally, the succession discussions feed into the ambiguous theme of transition that Hon. Norbert Mao fronts to justify his transition from opposition to the government. Like Gen MK’s false hope of becoming President in 2026, Mao is also “being driven like a wheelbarrow” to cultivate a false public narrative of a non-existent transition that is otherwise possible only upon God’s beckons.

Previous trends have shown that Gen Museveni says only things he has no intention of doing and effectively does only things he never says in public. For instance, in 1986, he promised never to cling to power, now he is one of the longest-serving presidents. In 1986, he was totally averse to corruption and vowed to end poverty in Uganda, now corruption and poverty, and two leading tourist attractions to Uganda. Somewhere, he promised the return to constitutionalism, rule of law, and securing persons and property, now the constitution is worthless, kondoism is back, everyone is insecure and private properties are being vandalized or appropriated under gunpoint.

Precisely, the contradictions of Gen. Museveni are our motivation to empathize with his son. If his goal is to become President in honor of his mother, then he may as well execute the Oedipal method and we move on!

END

Historia: Musevenism and puppet politics

The claim that opposition leaders strive to become western puppets has pervaded the current Uganda election landscape. Mr. Kaboggoza Kibudde, in the DM of December 20, 2020, penned an article titled: We need leaders who will not be Western puppets”. The article was strange and exposed the author to scrutiny. Mr. Kaboggoza took a swipe at Dr. Kizza Besigye and Hon. Robert Kyagulanyi for seeking and mobilizing foreign support in their effort to ouster the lifelong western darling, dictator Museveni from power.

For purposes of convenience, Mr. Kaboggoza cherry-picked facts and distorted history to support his arguments. First, Mr. Kaboggoza compares Dr. Kiiza’s claims to have won elections that were rigged to the bogus claims that outgoing US president, Trump is making. This is typically comparing oranges with stones.

Mr. Kaboggoza should know that Mr. Donald Trump is an incumbent president who lost an election.

The election that Trump lost was within precincts of a functional democratic institution operated by people of great integrity, the same system which made Trump President.

Incidentally, most of the prominent elected officials in the Trump contested states are Republicans, most of whom Trump recommended for those positions. Mr. Kaboggoza’s comparisons are as fake as Trump’s own litany of cases which have failed to progress in court for lack of evidence.

Neither Dr. Kiiza nor Hon. Kyagulanyi have been Presidents, and none could survive the nexus of global forces in which Uganda must operate. Uganda has long been a victim of neocolonialism, in which Mr. Museveni is the most reliable puppet of the western powers in the region. No one in the African continent has curved in so fundamentally to the whims of the West as Mr. Museveni over the decades.

Mr. Kabogozza may e one of the bazukulus who hardly read history or was too young to have known the evolution of Mr. Museveni from 1986 to date. The Museveni who promised Ugandans a fundamental change in 1986 is not the same Museveni we have today. In 1986 Museveni spoke very spitefully of western powers and imperialism. He preached Pan Africanism and formed various economic blocs, such as the Preferential Trade Area (PTA), and later was instrumental in forming the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) with a view of enhancing Africa's autonomy and reducing dependence on Western Markets. The 1986 Museveni believed that Africans were cheated in global trades controlled by the industrial west. In fact, at one point, Museveni even proposed that Africa should resort to barter trade to undermine the influence of US dollars.

When Museveni came to government, Margaret Thatcher was in power in the UK from 1979 and Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a US election on November 4, 1980. These two ultra-conservative leaders were ferocious in their single-minded promotion of the free-market economy. The two leaders enacted policies that ignited a wave of global neoliberalism as the solution to the post-1970s economic woes.

Museveni’s early Presidency was faced with mounting foreign debt repayment challenges and the country was faltering on all its debts. The World Bank and IMF were emphatic against such loan defaulters and urged these failed states to adopt a system that could reboot their economies to guarantee debt servicing.

In October of 1987, Museveni flew to an IMF/WB meeting and later met President Ronald Reagan. That meeting whitewashed the Marxist Guerilla in Museveni. Museveni returned a US and western puppet from that time. That visit prepared Uganda for the worst. Museveni was ideologically reorientated to the liberal free-market economy.

By 1990 we had devalued our currency and embarked on structural adjustment programs – retrenchment, radical disposal of national assets, and opening of the private sector while suppressing public service. The rest is history.

Over the years, Museveni has not denounced his links with Sweden, his dealings with lobbyists in Washington DC and the European Union, and the UK foreign office. Museveni’s friendship with Israel, Russia, China, North Korea, etc., remains public knowledge; his rental mercenary business in Somalia to the US and imperial control of DRC and Southern Sudan among others, have paved the way for the perpetual exploitation of resources by his western allies - a public knowledge too!

Mr. Kabogozza, if we are to talk about a western puppet amidst us, no African leader, other than Cameroon’s Biya, who literally lives in Switzerland, can challenge Museveni. For, Museveni’s very hold on power depends on his being an effective stooge managing neo-imperialist wars and a market economy in the region.