Coming from Rwanda to Uganda is akin to letting a kid out of a stiff, regimented, starched, rule-bound Catholic school environment into one where rules seem to have been designed to be ignored and broken. Think of the 1920s Speakeasies (Illicit Bufunda) that criminal gangs operated despite (because of?) the ill-fated alcohol prohibition in the United States. Think of the Hugh Heffner Playboy mansion where sex, drugs and alcohol mingled freely with movie and music stars in hedonistic abandon that lasted more than a generation. Think of students stepping out of class at 5pm and taking a walk behind the boys’ hostel to the hooch joint where they sit in their corner and the teachers in theirs, with everyone imbibing in the lethal spirits served up by big-bosomed, heaving, madams.
Uganda is bedlam; barely anything works; government officialdom is synonymous with corruption; it is odd to work in public service and not be a thief; even our Parliamentarians, led by the Lady-Macbeth-like entitled and peacock-preening Speaker, are as selfish as pampered cats. Despite many people calling it a God-fearing country, Uganda’s religious prelates haven’t shied away from accepting taxpayers’ money in unmarked brown envelopes and even personal vehicles whose source of funding has not been disclosed.
Uganda’s is the kind of sordid, shameless, depraved, wantonly hedonistic environment you see in the movie The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (https://decider.com/movie/the-cook-the-thief-his-wife-her-lover/) with its outrageous sexual and murderous abandon. But it nonetheless looks and feels appealing because chaos appeals to our base instincts especially when it allows us to get away with riding Bodas on the sidewalks and with no safety gear whatsoever, driving contra-flow (and on pavements) because we are government bigwigs, setting up and operating potentially dangerous businesses without licenses, paying bribes for blank official forms that are available online free of charge, building our perimeter walls in road reserves, constructing structures with 1/3 of the required materials in order to pocket the difference, offering a traffic cop a bribe before they ask for it, mention it. Deep down, we know that these things are not right. But we live in a culture that allows them to happen without consequences. Uganda has normalized a culture of getting away with it in all sections of society and across all generations.
Ugandans, like most human beings, want to go to heaven but we don’t want to die. We look at Rwanda and try to convince ourselves that they have died already and have not gone to heaven. This, however, flies in the face of the running battles we have with officialdom over ill-equipped and unstaffed hospitals, decrepit state schools, ignorant and/or arrogant public officials, uncollected garbage, unpaved roadways, nightclub bar noise, Pentecostal church cacophony that runs into the wee hours, and so on. That is proof right there that we want Rwanda’s cleanliness, their orderliness, their expectation of the government working for rather than against them, their equipped and functioning institutions. But we choose to poo-poo the strides they have made because to acknowledge them is to acknowledge our own self-inflicted failures.
So we sing the perennial refrain: Rwanda is a prison; Rwanda is boring which is why their girls cross the border by the busload to come to Uganda’s nightspots; Rwanda is run like a military school and so on.
All of these perceptions are valid and can actually be off-putting to people raised in a culture of hedonistic excess, dysfunction, incompetence, and routine rule-breaking. Conversely, paying bribes to get anything done might make you revel in having become a class act at cutting corners. Then, one day, you will wake up and see your country’s leader of Parliament driving a Mercedes Benz that is expensive enough to build two hospitals in your district. As you mull over that, you will die because, due to the funds that were destined to buy ambulances having been stolen by a government official who is also your relative, there was no ambulance and paramedics to deliver you to the hospital in time to save your life.
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