{UAH} Pojim/WBK/Gook: I told you so......Vote for me, I’ll give you candy: How to ensure cradle-to-grave corruption - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/How-to-ensure-cradle-to-grave-corruption-/-/434750/2645410/-/dlgcnc/-/index.html

Vote for me, I'll give you candy: How to ensure cradle-to-grave corruption - Comment

The philosopher kings of corruption in Uganda know the rule of "catch them young" and started planting their seeds many years ago where it mattered most — in the schools.

Whatever corrupt acts make us gasp at government and national level have already been rehearsed in the schools by the school directors, headteachers, simple teachers and worst of all, the children, our future leaders.

It starts with establishing the school. The founder directors of a private school bribe people in the Education ministry to be licensed to operate when they do not have even the minimum requirements in place.

If it is a public or community school that starts its operations under the trees, the corruption starts with the grants for constructing the school buildings. The tenders go to the builders who will part with the biggest percentage to the councillors and naturally they will do a shoddy job.

Shoddy construction reached even the country's pinnacle of excellence when Makerere University civil engineers some years back built a "concrete" perimeter fence without putting cement in the sand for joining the bricks and it collapsed when the first drizzle came a few days later. Village schools have since been trying to emulate university construction standards.

Once the kids are enrolled in the schools, the practical training in corruption begins. Because ours is an election-addicted country, the children start practising election rigging, vote theft and voter bribery early. In village schools, candidates for prefects' posts buy pancakes for the voters. In urban schools, voter bribes take the form of cash and even adult drinks.

But the campaigns to beat in our secondary schools are those for heading the so-called social clubs — which organise dances once or twice a year with schools of the opposite sex. These campaigns cost more than those for head prefect.

In the big schools last year, a winner for chairperson of the dancing club would spend up to $10,000 — happily provided by the doting parents. Half of the expense is transparent: The candidate pledges to inject that amount into the first dance he organises with the sister school, and he does.

The ultimate school corruption however revolves around public examinations, the gullible public's yardstick for judging the quality of a school's education. Some schools do not register their weak students under the school's official centre, so that only the sure high performers appear on the school's official results. The poor weak ones are registered under some Centre B.  Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) therefore declares "truthfully" that ninety-something per cent of the school's candidates passed in Division One.

The other schools that have many failures in their official results just run to the local media to announce their own version of the results. There are over two hundred active private FM radio station all over the country and what they inform citizens out there in the regions, UNEB is not aware of.

So if you had 40 candidates and 30 of them failed, the local station announces that 30 passed in Division One and the remaining ten in Division Two. The village parents rush to bring more kids to your school, who start learning how to bribe voters with pancakes to be elected class monitors.

So now you know where our corrupt public servants come from.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com

Vote for me, I'll give you candy: How to ensure cradle-to-grave corruption - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/How-to-ensure-cradle-to-grave-corruption-/-/434750/2645410/-/dlgcnc/-/index.html

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