Mr President, sir, I thank you for the work you are doing in steering our country especially through these trying times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Your timely intervention in implementing measures to mitigate the spread of the virus went a long way in elevating the position of Uganda with regard to the impressive fight against the deadly virus that has seen us register just over 2000 cases and 20 deaths at the time of writing this letter. This indeed is quite impressive considering what has been seen happening elsewhere.
In the course of the struggle against the pandemic, however, there has been a variety of qualms that have marred the fight against Coronavirus that threaten to ruin the good work we have registered thus far that I write to address in this letter.
1. The endlessness of the lockdown. In my opinion, lockdowns are meant to be a short term solution, giving government time to scale out long term measures of combating a grave problem. It therefore made a lot of sense when you announced that schools would be suspended for one month, public transport for 32 days, and many other short term measures that followed. The shortness of the lockdown periods gave hope to the population that in a short while, they’d return to work to earn their daily bread. On the other hand, that shortness stopped people who had saved something from investing it in new commercial activities as they hoped to return to work shortly and ended up using their savings to satisfy their domestic needs. With the continued lockdowns however, it came to a point where all they had saved got used up, a thing that bred frustration and contempt of the directives you instituted in the fight against Coronavirus. Today as I write this, so many people are openly defying your directives, not because they disrespect you, but because it has come to a point where they have had to choose between staying home to have their property thrown out of their rented homes by their landlords for failing to pay rent dues, to die from hunger or venture into their workplaces and risk contracting the disease!
Mr. President, in my humble view, after installing the lockdown, it would have been prudent for you to create a survey committee that would go on ground to find out the feasibility of the lockdown and see if it was effective or not. That was not done. We who live in communities are alive to the fact the measures you put in place to fight COVID-19 were only respected in the first 3/4 weeks. After those weeks, people started socialising again as though there was no health threat! People resumed taking Malwa, converged at Ludo games, played football, went to bars using the backdoors, etc, but saw no surge in infections amongst themselves!
Those you had locked out of their arcades would gather at arcade verandas without masks everyday. Others with cars turned them into shops and did business in connivance with KCCA enforcement who would collect kitu kidogo from them on a daily basis! That served to congest the City streets, especially at Nabugabo! In the end, it made the directive to social distance a mockery! Many of the arcaders whose shops had been locked improvised and started operations in Kikuubo, congesting it even further! That’s probably why we are recording increased cases. We could be paying the price for the mistakes we made earlier in the lockdown! I now hear you are planning to lock the country down again! That is an extremely ill-advised move. The fact that people you stopped working, the non-food market vendors, are in full operation now in markets like Owino, is evidence that civil disobedience is beginning to creep in among the population, a very dangerous trait in your administration!
2. Failure to answer people’s cries effectively. In trying to run to your people’s rescue, your men embarked on a food distribution spree in areas of Kampala and Wakiso. Unfortunately, there were lots of misgivings in the process which rendered it flawed. First, the distribution was too slow so much so that by the time half of the targeted population was reached, those who had received food first at Bwayiise were already crying for more! There was discrimination in the distribution of food. First, those with metallic doors, fences and so many others who on the outer seemed well off weren’t given food.
You had said every individual in a household would receive 6kg of maize flour and 3kg of beans. At Kasubi where I stay, regardless of the number of people in a home, only 4 pieces of 6-kilogram bags of maize flour and 4 bags of 3-kilogram bags of beans were given!
No sugar or powdered milk was given to any nursing mother in my area, yet you had announced them as part of the package to be given to that specific group!
At Lubya, Munaku, Masanafu and other parts of Kampala, not a single person received food! Many families were sadly captured on camera feeding on banana peels!
In Wakiso District, a vast majority of the citizens there didn’t get any food at all! The ugly scenes of over 12 tonnes of maize being hidden in a church at Bweyogerere days after the distribution had been declared over indicated that much of the food didn’t reach the masses because it was stolen by some bad hearted government officials! The suffering of the masses because of lack of food and money to pay their rent dues has pushed many of your supporters away from you, Mr. President and, unless you do something to turn that around, their anger will definitely be made manifest in the coming elections!
3. The closure of schools. When you closed schools in March, everyone agreed with your decision as it was important to find out the dynamics of the new disease. As a result, as you said, over 15 million young men and women were sent home to be protected from the virus. As time has gone on, however, we have realised that our children are not safe at all being at home! They were safe at first when their parents were also locked down and were at home as well. But when they returned to their places of work, the poor children were left in the hands of the vulturous men who have feasted on them like there’s no tomorrow! As a consequence, many of our girls in their thousands have been sexually molested, impregnated and hundreds of them have been married off! They have no chance of returning to school!
Those have a big likelihood of having contracted HIV as pregnancies and HIV happen through the same route! Now, protecting our children against COVID and subjecting them to the danger of contracting HIV is beyond logic, in my view!
In the same line, the fate of the private teachers is enshrouded in uncertainty! Many of them had last been paid in November last year others in February this year by the time you locked down the country!
They’ve suffered gravely. Many have already been thrown out of their apartments and are starving inhumanly! Yes, you generously gave them the 20 billion shillings, but that’s too little given the number of those whose bread and butter is school! You said the private teachers amount to 350,000 people. I want to dispute that figure.
The private teachers are a lot more than that. The 350,000 could be the registered ones, but there are many others who had just left college and weren’t registered. Those were not counted. Even when the conditions for being a part of those to receive a share of the 20bn were issued, appending a teacher registration number was highlighted! That definitely throws out those who had just left college and hadn’t got registration numbers when you declared a lockdown! When you factor in the support staff who are also in their thousands, the 20bn simply can’t do anything to soothe the wounds of the school beneficiaries who have been rendered jobless by the suspension of schools!
4.Loss of jobs. Mr. President, it’s true the lockdown was instituted for the good of all Ugandans in your effort to ensure that we remained alive and safe! It is also true however, that for those of us who live in towns, there’s no life without a livelihood! In towns there’s nothing that comes free! We buy water, food, charcoal, pay rent bills, electricity bills, everything including garbage collection bills! If one fails to get money they wouldn’t be able to access all that! This is the situation many Ugandans are facing today, Mr President. Many of us have already lost our jobs and are unaware of what will happen today or tomorrow! Many have already received notification letters ordering them to pay rent or vacate their apartments! It’s a very scary state your people are going through at the minute!
Mr. President, from the reports we read globally, COVID-19 is not that much of a threat to young people, putting their mortality rate due to COVID at 1%! Considering how many of them could have picked up HIV and other problems due school suspension, I think it would be wiser to reopen schools with restrictions to save the current generation from being wasted! In the same vein, the other sectors like places of worship, sports and entertainment should also be considered for reopening as not doing so will create wounds that may never heal!
Finally, Mr President, I think the best way is to continue teaching and enlightening the masses to guard against COVID-19 as they are all back to work! It’ll be very hard for the population to follow all the guidance and directives you’ve given when many of them are starving and suffering all sorts of frustrations, but would likely comply better when they are allowed back to work. If we can take schools as an example, teachers exert their control over their learners and can easily ensure compliance with the COVID-19 guidelines more than any other sector among those still suspended! Ensuring compliance is much more effective than locking the country down again!
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