Prime
Museveni’s fishermen aren’t bus drivers, refuse to help them at your own risk
Author, Benjamin Rukwengye. PHOTO/FILE.
What you need to know:
- Mr Benjamin Rukwengye says: How is it excusable that more than a year after the first lockdown, we still have people fighting over oxygen cylinders at hospital gates and families stocking up for when they will need oxygen?
That night, she tucked her babies into their beds and went to sleep. When she woke up the next morning, the lower part of her body couldn’t move or feel. Just like that, Shamim’s bubbly life had been brought to an abrupt halt. She would never be able to hold her babies, teach English literature, or do anything unaided again.
It took over a year of hospital runs before her internal organs eventually gave way, and she passed on. In that period, those who could, had visited and helped out with whatever little they managed. You never really ask a Ugandan how much their medical bill is or if they need help with it. You just give if you can. Since falling sick as a Ugandan is the pits, friends and relatives just use whatever fork they can to try and fill it up.
After she passed on, there was the indignity of negotiating with the hospital to release her body for burial. She had accrued an astronomical bill over the course of her illness. At the burial, we made hasty contributions towards the bill, after it was announced that a family friend, a doctor, had stood surety for the body to be released.
I have never followed up to find out if the balance was eventually raised or what course of action the hospital took to recover its money. It’s not just Shamim’s family and friends that have had to endure the burden of preserving life. It is not something that anybody should ever have to endure but that’s the way it has always been – for most Ugandans.
When we had just started the children’s charity, 40 Days Over 40 Smiles Foundation, over nine years ago, we often got approached with requests to run crowdfunding campaigns for medical support. Most were a matter of life and death so it was natural that we wanted to jump in. We had a discussion and decided that because it was a blind alley from which there was no way of knowing when to stop, we shouldn’t even start.
The pain is that subconsciously, all of us knew that there was a possibility that someday, it would be one of us needing it. Over the last 10 years, the curve of #SaveSoAndSo fundraisers and carwashes has been growing thick and fast.
Functional systems study these kinds of trends and act on them. You develop a national health insurance scheme; you build and equip hospitals; you grow the efficiency of the system to anticipate and respond; you invest in health communication and citizen agency. You give a chance to your population to fight and live long enough, if you want them to contribute to economic development.
Even for thieving politicians, bureaucrats and their friends and kin, a healthy population is great because it guarantees a larger kitty for them to steal from. The fact that we had years to learn from and prepare for eventualities such as this – but didn’t – should tell you a bit about the governors and the governed.
Let us start with the governors because the responsibility to think and serve is on them. How is it excusable that more than a year after the first lockdown, we still have people fighting over oxygen cylinders at hospital gates and families stocking up for when they will need oxygen? Or that all these years later hospitals are apparently requiring families to deposit land titles before getting treatment?
Of course, we know why! There is a confluence of budget shortages, meeting with a questionable human resource quality, and theft. Ergo, even if a lot has been done, it’s hard to see what and where because the system is largely corrupt, inefficient and often riddled with incompetence. Consequently, if and when we make it out of this, it will in spite of and not because of.
Now, onto the governed, who are dealing with the consequences of whatever decisions have been made for them. A lot of this mess persists because those who are qualified – or claim to be – are just okay existing as sanctimonious “ba actually” in the private sector or civil society. There, without the burden of public accountability, we can project and pontificate. Well, now there’s a common enemy and it’s time to decide if we’ll get Museveni’s fishermen thinking or just let them continue cantering this bus on a road to nowhere.
Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. [email protected]
