{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Poor Mutebile, look what became of that orphan he brought up - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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Poor Mutebile, look what became of that orphan he brought up - Comment
Uganda's financial guru, Emmanuel Tumusiime Mutebile, is still shaking his head, four years after he was bamboozled by mere politicians.
Mutebile is the undisputed father of the country's modern economic reforms. He was at the Treasury during the early years of the current regime (which will soon be clocking three decades in power) and presided over the fiscal reforms that created purpose, order, and discipline in the country's public finances.
Then 15 years ago, he moved to the central bank as governor, where he has sanitised the country's monetary order. You would expect him to be preparing for retirement as a contented man. Wrong.
Today, Mutebile is like a man who adopted a malnourished orphan, fed it and brought it till it grew into a strong teenager, then watched helplessly as some local tough turned it into a drug addict.
Last week, he told an international science gathering how in the run up to the 2011 elections he unknowingly released floods of money that caused anarchy in the economy. He is reported to have lamented the monetary "chaos" that ensued as a result of the billions that went into electioneering and messed up the shilling and the economy.
He then offered his profuse apologies to the nation and vowed that he will not repeat what he did, with another election coming up in early 2016.
For the record, he was not pleading guilty because as banker to the government, he just released the client's deposits and could not stop whatever mischief happened thereafter. The ruling party has told off the governor, saying he was never told at gunpoint to do whatever he did.
Mutebile is reported by the press to have used words like being "misled." In a sense, therefore, he must be feeling like a mother who was misled into procuring the poison that killed her baby, after being misled that it was for another purpose like killing pests.
But will enforcement of discipline at the central bank save the country's finances? Mutebile is more likely to be in for more heartbreaks, followed by pleas of "sorry but not guilty," from the look of things.
In recent weeks, managers of the public finances have appeared before committees of parliament and their casual attitude does not inspire any confidence.
There was this permanent secretary who told MPs that yes, some ten billion shillings disappeared from his office in the past financial year but he does not know where the money went, how it was spent or who spent it.
But the top prize goes to the management of the Uganda Railways Corporation. They turned up before the parliament committee on statutory bodies and said that the government must continue servicing a multimillion-dollar loan although nobody knows who lent the money, what it was for or how it was spent.
Such stories elicit sighs from the public. You no longer hear any uproar when such revelations are made. You just hear sighs, and more sighs. We have become a sighing nation.
And our top financial guru is equally disturbed. It is our country and much as we are not guilty, we are deeply sorry at the sickness in the family.
I almost said the sickness is akin to cannibalism and incest. But in a country that treats theft of children's vaccines and sick people's medicines casually, incest and cannibalism are light matters really.
Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com
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