Prime
Do Ugandan slaves deserve to eat fish?
Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- If you are President Museveni, you do not eat fish, because it ‘smells’; something about fish that many Nkore tribesmen discovered long ago. But you have great interest in Sujal Goswami’s work.
Sujal Goswami is the spokesperson of an association of people who process and export fish.
If you are President Museveni, you do not eat fish, because it ‘smells’; something about fish that many Nkore tribesmen discovered long ago. But you have great interest in Sujal Goswami’s work.
It brings in foreign exchange, which you need to pay for military hardware, tear gas, motor-vehicles and, indeed, all other government and non-government goods imported into Uganda.
Unfortunately, most other Ugandans eat fish. They do not mind the strong smell. And every fish they eat cannot be exported.
What a loss! The stock in our lakes is limited. Without other measures, to export more fish, Ugandans must eat less fish.
Goswami’s association thinks Parliament can fix this. There is a fishy fish Bill in the works. Why not tinker with that Bill and include a provision that it is forbidden and punishable by law for Ugandans to eat Nile Perch?
They can eat Tilapia, water snakes and what have you, but not Nile Perch; because this is the species buyers in foreign markets particularly want.
Logically, therefore, if the foreign palate for Nile Perch shifted to Tilapia, we would surrender Tilapia and turn to Nile Perch.
Another law. And if the Europeans and the Chinese simply added Tilapia to Nile Perch, we would have to surrender both and be left to fight for the water snakes. Another law.
I have admitted before, in this column, that we Ugandans are idiots. Except, of course, the rulers, who know where they are taking us. The Indian and Chinese investors in the fish industry have been watching us.
You cannot blame them for observing correctly that we are a stupid country. We can endure almost any kind of abuse by those who have power. That is where they are coming from.
Fifty-nine years after Independence, and 36 after ‘liberation’ from ‘primitive dictators’, a bunch of men fly over the great seas to come here, and muster the audacity to instruct us that our need for guns, teargas and other tools of repression, our love of fat cars and other luxuries; that to quench our thirst for foreign exchange, we should not eat fish.
They have judged that our people may scream, but, ultimately, they will do nothing to disrupt their sleep.
However, the contempt, the sheer arrogance aside, and assuming other factors remain roughly the same, a ban of Nile Perch consumption at home would probably put unprecedented pressure on Tilapia, its price shooting up.
Already too expensive for many households at about Shs18,000 for a one-kilogramme fish in our markets, higher prices would eliminate more consumers.
Moreover, the scientists who recommend more consumption of fish than red meat (generally beef) would wonder whether all the noise about teaching more science were sermons from fake prophets, whose message had no relevance in ordinary people’s lives.
But these counter arguments need not discourage the sharks in the fish industry and their friends in government.
All they have to do is make a tactical retreat, lie low on the ground, observing the enemy, the citizen.
At critical moments, this docile creature often crumbles or surrenders and sometimes even celebrates their humiliation; like when they scramble for rotten pandemic relief beans. Or when they get a fixture and a visa to go and slave in the Arab world.
Condemned to exist with this mindset, many Ugandan slaves can in time be ground until they concede that they do not deserve to eat fish.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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