Bashing Besigye's Radicals only justifies Elite's "Do not disturb" sign

ELITE DRAMA

Many Kampala–based elites have indulged in a rendition of bashing Dr. Kizza Besigye’s brand of politics and labeling his avid supporters as intolerant, radicals and people blinded to loyalty.  I wish these elites could reflect on their own contribution to the change agenda in Uganda.

This anti-KB slur-train originated from an unscrupulous section of elites who turn to bashing Besigye to whitewash their tainted conscience and justify the "do not disturb" attitude toward change and matters of accountability. People who use uncharitable slurs to describe Besigye and his impassioned supporters should first pass credibility test. How less radical are they?

Recently, these sordid commentators enjoyed the two-second fame that accompanies celebrity bashing. In the process, they exposed their ulterior motives and hanged their gullibility on the wire.  A recent such cynical attacks in the media cautioned people to flee town from an advancing KB’s radicals.

Uganda is full of such jokers. These are elite who may be socially conscious and yet political adolescents and blinded by their morbid powerlessness. The ambivalence of such groups always resulted in betraying the change agenda. In fact, most of the so-called Besigye radicals are average Ugandans whose sincerity and love for their country subordinate elite’s parochial pursuit for affluence.  This group threatens the marginal elite for their uncompromising resolve for change in the socio-political environment.

In the contrary, it is a fact that traditional Besigye-bashing party are known for their propensity towards brown envelops and affluence. They could not gain rent from status quo without excelling in this enterprise.

Incidentally, our elites have remained indifferent to calls for change. Instead, this group scorns change agents while sitting on their hands on top of the fence.  When the call for action beckons at them, they quickly flush the “Do Not Disturb” sign at change agents.

Uganda is weary of the monopoly of Museveni and it only debases us for an elite nation we are, to exist in three decades of a one “visionary” rule. The elite should be debating the requirements of the change process and materialising a post-Museveni Uganda instead of demoralising change agents. Unfortunately, you find these elites too engrossed in their narcissistic mindset to see the public utility of such efforts.  

The people’s president, Dr. Besgye has built for himself a reputation that attracts trust and he has been reliable through endurance and self-sacrifice against tyranny. Many of the elites have benefited from political spaces that the regime has unwittingly conceded due to KB’s activism.

However, the elites will not fight constraining laws like POMA but Besigye. Instead, they are critical of Besigye while unbothered about the collapse of public institutions. In fact, their opportunistic posturing is to conspire towards collapsing these institutions.

The ballot, prayers, and compliance shall not defeat a three-decade establishment of Museveni’s system of repression. This realization is the cause of the fault line between defiance and compliance that has emerged in FDC. These ideological positions have merits, and should face the rigors of sober contemplation and testing without throwing each side in the greasy sink.

Lastly, the KB attacks are not value free. First, it serves the state agenda to dislodge KB from the body politics of opposition in Uganda for Museveni to obliterate opposition by 2021. Mr. Tamale Mirundi recently called that “renting the minds of the elites in opponents”. Second, whenever change is about to occur, the forces of inertia emerges, complete with its torque. The closer the change is, the stiffer the resistance. Third, our unpredictable and unreliable elites who treat life as mere theatricals tend to resist change the most. They claim a level of sophistication upon which to frown upon the inconveniences of change and change processes. This lot remains conveniently unconscious of the widespread social inequalities and the political undercurrents that have radically transformed our society from a progressive, liberated and optimistic nation into a den for thieves, doom and pessimism.

END

Museveni's role in forced displacement is understated

FORCED DISPLACEMENTS

Africa with a landmass of 30m Km², twice the size of Europe, and with a population of 1.2billion inhabitants, is also the continent most afflicted with preventable incidences of violence, and natural disasters that cause displacements. The consequences of violence alone, on displacement and human life are remarkable. The 2017 Global Report on Internal Displacement indicates that of the 6.9million internal displacements caused by conflict worldwide in 2016, 2.6 million people were displaced in Sub-Sahara Africa.

Uganda recently enjoyed a spotlight over its unique refugee integration policy by the UN Secretary General, Mr. António Guterres. While Uganda may have the best refugee integration policies, the role of Uganda in causing mass displacement in the region was unfortunately understated.

The UN deserves apprehension over its traditional reactionary responses to situations of conflict and violence in Africa. Uganda, under the 31 years of dictator Museveni has involved itself in unacceptable incidences of violence, leading to mass displacements and suffering- in DR Congo, Rwanda, Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda. In all these instances, the UN stood by and watched, while intellectualising whether genocide were occurring or not.

The UN seems specialised to be present after the facts of conflicts and disasters. One wonders, which other world organization is there to help the wretched of this world averting conflicts and preventing the destruction of human kind and human environments.

The sight of displaced African people and malnourished children with flies on their faces in this twenty-second century is embarrassing. African people deserve better!

Everyday news from Africa is that of tragedy, nothing novel about ground breaking discoveries, world class acts of human excellence or a major scientific breakthrough by an African. Since independence, Africa’s narratives stalled – poverty, war, disease, disaster, dictatorship, malnutrition, high child-maternal death, unemployment, human rights violation, etc. The stories are so usual that people from western hemisphere prefer tourism of Gorillas than waste time on African people.

The UN praises these dictators, in the process it covertly abets the proliferation of the continent with arms, allows predatory trade agreements, and trades in stolen African resources while legitimate African products are excluded from the lucrative global markets. What really is in the UN for the ordinary African people other than relief aid?

The real traitors of Africa are the greedy and unconscionable African leaders who come to power as “liberators” and turn to conspire against the African people as predators.

There is no justification for a leader to stay in power for three decades. Patterns have emerged where such leaders have abandoned the causes of their African people. Many stay in power as captives of foreign interests to exploit Africa by dehumanising Africans.

The longer they stay in power, the more foreign debts accumulate, poverty and disempowerment are entrenched, and human rights violation becomes the mainstay of their hold on power.

The loot exacted on the Gambia by its former deranged despot, Jammeh is one such evidence. However, the wealth of African leaders accumulated at home and those stashed abroad, shows that contemporary African leaders are worse than former colonial administrators. At least, the colonial administrators were clear with their intention to appropriate African resources to feed European civilization. They never pretended to liberate Africa for Africa.

Most disturbing is the effect of displacement in Africa on its economic progress. Displacement immobilizes, confines and destroys labour.  Displacement denies Africa conditions for its labor to harness its resources and feed its children. The armed conflict dehumanises and further alienates Africans from their land and natural resources. Transient state of displacement furthers the vulnerability of children women and persons with disability to diseases and death. Under the current breed of African leaders, living conditions are made impossible such that resourced, educated, skilled and strong Africans must flee the continent to benefit other continents.

END

LAnd Grab: Museveni's colonial-era land grab aims to under-develop Uganda

LAND GRAB

In critical development, colonial legacy is synonymous with under-development of Africa. That a post-colonial Museveni is reproducing under-development by replicating colonial era economic exploitation approaches is quite surprising.

When colonialism took root in Africa, their motives were to exploit Africa and its resources to feed European consumer capitalism. Indigenous Africans were valued only for labour, exploited, and disposed as needed.

Major aspects of the colonial tragedy included Museveni-type land possessions - forced mass displacement, internment in squalor and restricted movements. Leave reserves (villages) were tolerated for purposes of rendering self for labor or colonial duties.

We know well that whatever infrastructure and development put in place under colonial rule were primary to hasten the success in resource appropriation, mostly raw materials, and containment of Africans and to mitigate hindrances. From the railways, schools, hospitals, and Police, etc., these institutions served colonial purposes. Indians and black laborers received residues as rewards associated with labour attachments.

These modes of development disrupted, excluded, deprived, and stalled cultural, social, political, and economic developments of Africa. In essence, it was the development of Europe and under-development of Africa that became the colonial landmark.

I am sure Museveni knows these facts very well given his previous Marxist orientation. That he should replicate these colonial vices to further the underdevelopment of independent Uganda, defeats logic. The widespread land grabs and displacement of Ugandans from their ancestral cradles are no different from Colonial evacuations. Colonial era injustices continue to shape social and economic inequalities in contemporary society. We should be correcting colonial wrongs, and not perpetrators.

The discourse of colonial under-development, and its mechanisms are highlighted in various seminal works by Rodney Walter(1942-1980), Andre Frank Gunder (1929-2005), Amatya Kumar Sen (1933-), Irogbe Kema, Arturo Escobar and a host others. 

Reflecting on the last three decades of Museveni’s regime, we distinguish three overlapping phases; the period consolidation of state power (1986 – 1996); transformation into the state (1997-2001); consolidation of monocracy (2002 -2011), and; transformation of absolute autocracy/Oligarchy(2012 – present).

For Museveni, his promise to professionalize the army marked the initial strides towards his transformation into the state and consolidating monocracy. Thereafter, state affairs became a monolithic one. The promotions of the “Bahiima Generals” typified the ethnicized consolidation of the state in his hands.  

The sectarian overhaul of the state did not end with the army. The appointment of Gen Wamala Katumba and later Gen Kale Kayihura were later to transform, “ethnicize” and militarise the Police. Under the military stewardship, the civil component of the Police force collapsed into a reincarnation of South Africa’s apartheid-era police and Nazi-era Gestapo. The typical Museveni Police specializes in criminal suppression of political dissent, and subjugation serves to maintain status quo. Museveni is fused with the state and Uganda is his personal estate.

The above highlighted processes may not succinctly represent the organizational and structural setup of the complex system that maintains Museveni in power. However, it is obvious that the concept “development” under this regime means anything but development. One of such is developing individuals within the power nexus of the regime, through illicit transfers of public resources to private realms.  Such, explains the under development. The current proposal to amend the constitution to deprive Ugandans of land is one example of coordination failure. This proposal is not only suspect. It is cynical, opprobrious, and abhorrent.

We should operationalise Article 26(b) of the constitution in concert with provisions in the Bill or Rights as empowering practices. Indigenous rights to land should remain uncompromised. Rather, we should allow willing sellers and buyers to engage unfettered; even then, local people should contribute land as their share to an investment, whether industrialization, mechanization or infrastructure developments. Locals should retain shares in every investments and development that involves displacement. This model is untested, and yet has the potential to eliminate imperialist under-development models.

END

Brutality cannot solve Kampala street mess

 KAMPALA CITY

Hon Betty Kamya (BONK) stewardship of the Struggle for urban space between Kampala City’s affluent and its impoverished street Vendors is too mechanical, illogical and primordial. Ms. Kamya, the Minister for Kampala should learn one lesson - that social problems mechanical force never solves social problems quite effectively. Introducing mechanical and rudimentary methods to re mediate socioeconomic inequalities and failed policies only leads to destruction of life, the very essence upon which a safe, clean, and inclusive urban space is contested.

Ms. Kamya is not the first Minister to moot this idealist and yet simplistic proposal that the inner city is not for urban poor. She does not seem to understand the dynamics of a city, Kampala City! This grandiose is symptomatic of the bigger dilemma of poor planning that pervades nearly every urban setting in developing countries.

Without taking Ms Kamya to the fundamentals of what a modern city is, or should be, we owe her the duty to remind her that a city is also a living entity on its own right. The city has spirits, faith and aspirations to grow. As such, it must live normally, feed and excrete, breathe and expire; grow, decline and renew; expand and sometimes shrink. It is for these traits of a living organism that cities suffer wear and tear, grows old and at times large, calling for repairs and expansion in its infrastructure.

In this milieu of liberal market economy, Uganda has moved steadfast, into the money economy. The object of daily life is money.  Everyone now wants money, irrespective of how it is got. A 2016 Aga Khan University survey of 1,854 Ugandan youths found that many young people value hassling and do not care much about integrity; and value wealth, not minding much how one accrues their wealth, as long as they survive jail, and interestingly, the youths believed that corruption is profitable. Only 12% of those expressed interest in farming. In essence, the flight of rural to urban of our working force in search for money is partly the problem of Kampala City.

Second, Kampala is not expanding fast enough to accommodate the infrastructure demands for the underprivileged- the ones Senior Presidential media advisor Nagenda prefers to call the “unwashed” of the slums. While dwellings for the corrupted affluent, working, and middle class individuals have littered every hill around Kampala, affordable public housing, and commensurate public facilities to accommodate the spillage of internally displaced and migrant workers are not springing up.

Instead, the regime sells urban spaces for investments, Malls. Land for poor people are appropriated by land-grabbers;  widespread land conflicts, unequal distribution of resources and services, and persistent natural disasters – drought, landslides, presence of oil and so forth, brings people to Kampala. Many Ugandans find themselves transitory. Kampala therefore is a collecting centre of the victims of the chaotic life experiences in rural areas, and its attraction for money opportunities allures many.

One would argue that street vending is harmful to the economy of the City. It deprives legitimate and registered tax-paying enterprises from profiteering and paying taxes. Upon scrutiny of this claim, you find that street venders are only an extension of these businesses. They are a ploy for the big businesses to evade taxes, and yet the city has no modalities to tax the Vendors given their equally transitional businesses.  Fair enough!

Maybe ED, Ms. Jennifer Musisi has learned a thing or two from the Lord Mayor – that mechanical force cannot solve socioeconomic inequalities.

For my contribution, I propose the formation of Business Investment Area (BIA) within the City and tasking them to manage vendors. This idea will form the basis of my next article. However, for now, BONK should go slow. We should solve social, economic, and political problems with commensurate social policies, not with brutality or mechanically.

End. 

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