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Where are the institutions that work in Uganda?
Author: Angella Nampewo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Not all of us will agree that we were treated equally or fairly before the same service.
It is great to receive feedback on the articles I write. It is not always positive or friendly but it is good to know that someone cared enough to pen a reply. When I wrote last week about the chaos that lives among us, some reached out to propose solutions while others simply wrote in to confirm their agreement. The one response that got me was the one where a reader proposed that while many parts of our country are malfunctioning, perhaps we should check what is working.
I have spent the whole week thinking which parts of the Ugandan system are working but my audit has been interrupted so many times by the tragic portions of life that I almost did not write this article. As I started to write, floods swept away several villages and a major section of road in the south west of the country; doctors went on strike, and when I was contemplating the next paragraph, a truck got stuck in a pothole-turned-crater down the road and I got distracted.
If you send out questionnaires about essential services in Uganda, you may get a spectrum of answers based on who the respondents are, where they come from and how involved or uninvolved they are in the affairs of the country. I am often taken aback by how much we do not know about life even in our very neighbourhoods. We need more than just domestic tourism. We need a mandatory tour around our towns and cities as a civic activity.
It is always interesting to watch the surprise when a tragic event happens and you hear the question, “Did that happen in Uganda?” Yes, a lot of bad things happen in Uganda; wizards and their disciples practise human sacrifice; government officials steal more than half of the money meant for public projects in kickbacks, children sleep on the streets and some are defiled by their parents.
It is also true that good things happen in Uganda and there are still some people with good intentions who even often go out of their way to do right. The trouble is that not all of us will agree that we were treated equally or fairly before the same service; there are few services in Uganda of which that can be said.
In fact, I have had some good experiences in the recent past, dealing with certain public agencies and service providers but it is hard to say if my experience is that of the next guy.
One or two public bodies may make the list of perfectly functioning bodies but again, I cannot vouch for that on the basis of one woman’s experience.
Therefore, those who are trying to find which institutions are working in the Uganda, at least I can tell you where not to look. According to the findings of the Fourth National Integrity Survey report 2019/2020 there was a lot of corruption by the police at 70 percent; courts 53 percent; land tribunals 53 percent; public hospitals 47 percent; district service commissions at 45 percent and agricultural extension services at 43 percent.
From the recent exhibitions we have had on Twitter, one can easily remove the health sector and the city authority in charge of Kampala roads. We can also subtract the Office of the Prime Minister, from which the iron sheets, goats and other materials were siphoned. Intern doctors, MPs, journalists and a large section of the public are still nursing wounds from police brutality.
Remove these from the list and let us start a fresh process of elimination next week until we find an institution that works.
Angella Nampewo is a writer, editor and communications consultant
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