President Museveni recently instructed the Attorney General, KK, to originate legislation prohibiting the use of national identification cards as collateral for loans by money lenders and other financial institutions.
KK, whose initials mean “Okay-Okay” in text-speak, was given this brief during a meeting of members of the Central Executive Committee of the National Resistance Movement at State House, Entebbe.
This is surely a welcome development as the unlawful practice of money lenders confiscating national identity cards (IDs) from Ugandans will leave money lenders with multiple identities.
Oh yes, a money lender having so many IDs in his possession will inevitably suffer from a multiple identity disorder.
And if, say, 1,000 money lenders suffer from this disorder; we will have a mental health crisis on our hands. Then we might need a hospital, besides Butabika, to handle these cases.
The government will then have to issue promissory notes worth $379.71 million to finance the construction of the ‘International Specialised Hospital for the Mentally Unwell Money Lenders of Uganda’ in Lubowa.
The Lubowa hospital will then take forever to be completed and the Minister of Health, her Permanent Secretary and some of the legislators on the Committee on National Economy will be openly denied access to the site where it is being built.
This will happen even though the Ministry of Health is supposed to supervise the project and Parliament is constitutionally mandated to carry out oversight of the same.
Then we will have a governance issue on our hands that will lead to the president defending a whole Italian, like Paulo Maldini did when he defended goalkeeper Sebastiano Rossi at the Fifa World Cup.
This will not go down well with Fufa as the president is required to defend the Uganda Cranes from, Um, Fufa?
This confusion is real. That is why money lenders must stop confiscating our national IDs.
That said, how about the money borrowers confiscating the money lenders’ National IDs?
For example, if I borrow money from a money lender, that money will technically be mine until I pay it back. So the money lender must provide me with an ID for wanting to “borrow” the money back by my repaying the loan.
Besides that, the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA) have, in the past, said that national IDs remain the property of the Government of Uganda. This is because the government was created in its citizens’ image and so what is ours is theirs (government officials).
This is why public funds keep coming up missing.
The Inspector General of Government (IGG) has put up missing posters all over the country, but nobody can locate where the funds are; which is something that has taken the word ‘fun’ out of the word funds.
No wonder nobody is smiling. Everybody is broke. And that is how money lenders end up dishing out so much money.
Yeah, their money substitutes the missing public funds that were supposed to help grow private funds but instead ended up funding public officials’ private parts, as the late Nasser Ntege Ssebagala would call them.
We understand that some money lenders have more national IDs than Uganda owing to the rate at which they confiscate them. But having all our IDs in one place, the money lender’s office, contributes to unity in diversity.
That’s because a diverse number of Ugandans have been brought together in the form of the collateral they give to money lenders.
We could call this collateral nationalism. And thanks to this brand of nationalism, disunity in uniformity will be collateral damage.
Conversely, again, president Museveni has often spoken against identity politics; which is aided by the existence of identity cards. I mean, if there were no identity cards, there would be no Identities and thus identity politics would be cut off at the knees.
Taking its place would be Anonymity Politics.
Here, the absence of identities will render us all anonymous and give us the national superpower of invisibility.
Imagine Uganda being invisible on the world stage.
Man, it would be great because then we can march into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and rob it undetected.
So let the money lenders have our IDs. We’ll take the DRC instead.
