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Uganda needs a Thomas Sankara
Author: Phillip Matogo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Ugandans are exceedingly angry with government because they still see a lot of waste.
During the week, the residents of Jinja City witnessed streets without taxis following a sit-down strike by taxi drivers protesting the soaring fuel prices in the country.
“The business is no longer sustainable because of increasing prices of petrol. We can’t keep increasing the fare because it’s unaffordable for passengers. The business is not profitable at all. We want government to find a way of subsidising fuel,” said one taxi driver.
Police was called in to intervene as street fires kindled the spirit of rebellion against a state of affairs which government claims it cannot control.
I agree, government’s hands are tied by a global reality shackling warm possibility while unshackling cold actuality.
A recent World Bank report was stark in its warning of high global inflation accompanied by lukewarm growth, reminiscent of the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s which hit Uganda in the solar plexus during the regime of Idi Amin.
The World Bank report, designated as the Global Economic Prospects Report, forecasts Uganda’s economy being further hobbled by the slowdown in global growth, exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its global effects on commodity markets, supply chains, inflation, and overall financial conditions.
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Indeed, the war in Ukraine has delivered a glancing blow to the global cereals trade, leaving increased food shortages in its wake.
Uganda and her neighbours the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, and Madagascar, which rely heavily on wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine, are expected to experience elevated food inflation. The World Bank report says concomitant to a spike in the costs of living, the growth outlook for countries like Uganda is anticipated to become more pear-shaped courtesy of the global economic slowdown.
According to the report, stagflation could lead to austerity monetary policies in advanced economies, further impacting emerging markets and developing economies adversely.
We thus find ourselves, as a nation, standing on the shifting sands of a situation which is bound to get worse.
Nonetheless, Ugandans are exceedingly angry with government because they still see a lot of waste in government as senior officials are still living in a bubble of privilege while widespread resentment bubbles over into the protests we saw in Jinja.
What Ugandans expect from government is a little dying on its part, the same way Ugandans are being asked to die a little by readjusting their lifestyles to surmount mounting economic crises.
If government does not understand what that means, I shall explain. Ugandans, broadly speaking, want government to behave in the manner of the assassinated leader of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara.
Yes, Sankara got rid of the government fleet of Mercedes cars and made the Renault 5 (the cheapest car sold in Burkina Faso at that time) the official service car of his ministers.
As if this was not enough, he reduced the salaries of all public servants, including his own. Here, we should target the salaries of well-heeled public ‘servants’ while leaving the long-suffering civil servants alone.
Again, Sankara forced civil servants to pay one month’s salary to public projects, it would be welcome to see the same here. In Ouagadougou, Sankara converted the army’s provisioning store into a state-owned supermarket open to everyone (we have subsidised army shops, they would serve this purpose).
Basically, we expect government to let us feel that we are all in this together.
This requires its living within the means of the people instead of outside the bounds of sanity by expecting Ugandans to suffer peacefully and behave like the salt of the earth as self-serving government officials salt away our financial resources.
