Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
The President used his pulpit at the Martyr’s Day celebrations to shield his regime against criticism from pro-gay rights lobby groups and the countries that support them.
“Like on the issue of homosexuals, they talk outside there so much,” Mr Museveni said in off-the-cuff remarks. “They don’t know that Uganda is a land of martyrs. If you want to play around, you play around with Uganda. You will see. You will not like it.”
This was performative politics at its best. First, it was before a captive religious audience and the remark was received with a roar of approval. Like a man who walks through a morgue with a machete threatening to cut down anyone who moves, no one expected any dissent here and none was voiced.
The threat was also deliberately vague because it was for domestic consumption. We did not put our navy in the Indian Ocean on high alert, send a warship to the English Channel, or carry out an unscheduled military exercise with our nuclear weapons. There was nothing to see. We did not even so much as recall our envoys from Washington D.C. or London in protest. The martyrs were brave lads, no doubt, but they lost.
Our relative military and economic weakness does not mean that we should be a doormat on which others wipe their feet. In fact, I am as indignant as the next person about the double-standards that the West often shows, including cherry-picking which human rights violations to punish and those to look away from.
But how long shall we attempt to hold the fig leaf of anti-homosexuality to hide the nakedness of our social, economic, and political shortcomings? Let’s take just one example from each of those categories.
We have a ministry in charge of housing and still own a majority stake in the National Housing and Construction Company; how many low-cost houses have we built in the last 20 years? Where is the low-interest rate mortgage scheme that the President had in his manifesto in 2006 to assist young Ugandans to get a foot onto the property ladder? What have the gays got to do with it?
Or take economics. For close to 15 years now we have been stuck in a vicious cycle of low (and often jobless) growth, low wages, low productivity, and stagnation that has left us with more people below the poverty line than we had at the start of the last decade, and a rapidly expanding debt portfolio with little to show for it. In fact, without the pressure valve of labour exports to the Middle East, we would have a much worse crime problem on our hands. What have the gays got to do with it?
Politics is supposed to give us solutions to social and economic problems. The reintroduction of multiparty politics in 2005 was meant to open up the public space to competing views and policy proposals of how we should build national consensus and forward movement. Yet our politics is stuck in reverse. The intentional muddying of the political class has rid it of progressive talent and replaced it with crass consumerist and commercially accumulative types. As a result, everything – from legislative agendas, and budgetary allocations to even wise and well-intentioned executive policy proposals like the rationalisation of government agencies – is now up to the highest bidder. What have the gays got to do with it?
Nothing. They have nothing to do with it. Most folks will have a view about sexual minorities; these views, whether in support or opposition, have to be accommodated and all rights respected. To attempt to make sexual preferences the major policy debate of the day is to try to run away from the real problems facing most Ugandans. It’s a red herring. What are the real issues? Here the Afrobarometer, a fairly credible survey that has been measuring the pulse for over two decades is instructive. In its most recent survey, in January 2022, young Ugandans ranked health, water supply, and education as the most important problems the government should address. These were followed by roads/infrastructure, unemployment, and fighting corruption.
The pollsters also asked respondents about their confidence in these problems being resolved. Only 48 percent thought Uganda was headed in the right direction; seven in every 10 said they had experienced moderate to high levels of poverty in the previous 12 months and another six in 10 said the government was doing a bad job of improving the living standards of the poor.
If Uganda is a country of martyrs, it is these young people whose futures are being sacrificed. The anti-gay sentiment is good for rallying the masses, whipping up religious and nationalist fervour, and concealing wrongdoing. However, it is a lousy tool for improving service delivery or creating jobs. It is time to stop playing to the gallery and start doing the right things to improve the lives of all Ugandans.
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @Kalinaki
