Happy Independence Day, but our work is still cut out
What you need to know:
- By now it should already be abundantly clear that we are better together than apart.
- At 62, a human being is expected to have long come to the conclusion that their body is greater than the sum of its parts
As Uganda marks 62 years of flag Independence today, the vibrant civic society we once hoped would shape our shared life after the Union Jack was lowered remains elusive to this day. The answer to a seemingly simple question, that is: who exactly are we, is not quite forthcoming.
Oftentimes, the question of national identity is met with our diversity being uncritically romanticised. It should not. As the recent fallout from the statistical rounding errors of the 2024 census shows, every tribe and tongue in the country appears to be light years away from lifting their voice as one.
This, perhaps, explains why a national collective like the country’s fertility rate was placed on the back-burner.
By now it should already be abundantly clear that we are better together than apart. Yet the ugly sub-nationalism that insists that everything is the fault of some other group seems to be gaining traction with each passing day.
At 62, a human being is expected to have long come to the conclusion that their body is greater than the sum of its parts. They are also expected to be, for the most part, self reliant. Scoring poorly on both accounts, as postcolonial Uganda keeps doing, should bother us with a far fiercer urgency than anything else.
There’s something extraordinarily immediate and intimate about the way the final arbiter of national viability should be handled.
The government has in the recent past made clear the fact that value addition to our country’s resources, which cannot only be counted off the fingers of one hand, offers a better opportunity for shared life to flourish. We could not agree more.
A cursory glance at the numbers, for instance, shows that the of $70 cents Ugandan farmers earn per kilogramme of their low-grade coffee pales in comparison to the price tag slapped on the final product squatting on the shelf of a supermarket in the Global North.
When players in the Global North add value to the low-grade coffee—essentially by way of roasting, grounding into powder and packaging—the retail price of the final product could soar to just under $13.
During the recent UN general assembly in New York, USA, Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja stopped short of describing such an outcome as an absurdity. It is indeed absurd, as is the fact that Uganda imports over $362 million worth of steel and steel products annually, yet it is home to the world’s purest iron ore.
Such trade asymmetries assailing Uganda can be blunted when we resolve to work in concert. We can, however, only start to pull together when the morbid cultures of patronage, clientelism and nepotism are supplanted with meritocracy.
The politics of the tribe has also to truly give way to a political economy which has the combating of inequality and protection for the poorest of the poor at its core.
We, as a country, are not in the place that a thriving 62-year-old should be. This is largely because we have chosen to shoot ourselves in the foot on multiple occasions. Rather than reinvent the wheel, a better future will doubtless be secured when radical changes to our early 20th century mindset are pursued with welcome regularity.
