{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Finally this document gets its due respect:: The Common Man’s Charter, 2016
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The Common Man's Charter, 2016
Posted Sunday, July 19 2015 at 01:00
In Summary
I don't know if we are intelligent enough to see just how dismal things really are. If we are, we need to sit down, swallow our pride, and seriously start thinking about sub-contracting the Chinese not simply to work on selected roads and bridges, but to come in and renovate town by town across the country.
In 1969, president Milton Obote came up with a concept paper on Uganda's future development that he titled the "Common Man's Charter".
Its socialist tone and themes emphasised government policies and budgeting that put the needs of the ordinary citizen at the centre.
Whether or not this was mere populist posturing of the time, in the 1960s, when following independence socialism was a favourite theme, might not matter for now.
What clearly matters today and matters urgently, is that Uganda is returned to the drawing board. Something has gone seriously wrong over the last 25 years of our experimentation with all-out capitalism and a market economy.
It is surprising that the UPC party that conceived the "Common Man's Charter" has failed in general elections since 1996 to sound out this message again.
If we had known what we now know, we would have taken a much more cautious approach to the privatisation of the economy that started 25 years ago in 1990.
We have been left with a shell of a country that very few people really believe in. The vast majority without the means suffer under terrible conditions in the country. Even those with the means take their children or sick family members to schools and hospitals outside the country.
Runaway capitalism in the absence of a structured governance system has wrecked tremendous damage on Uganda. It has had an effect on public morality, with regular reports of university girls engaging in prostitution, with everyone in public office seeing to be a thief, and the few who try to live a moral, upright life are driven close to a nervous breakdown by the sheer stress of it all.
Uganda is a broken, demoralised, abused country.
Any presidential candidate for 2016, as well as the many positions for parliamentary and local council seats, must address this.
It comes as a surprise to the average citizen when anything works. Photographs showing parts of their country that are still green or beautiful, are met with exclamations of "This doesn't look like Uganda!"
The police is unable to investigate or handle most cases except high profile matters of direct interest to the State or State House.
For the thousands of cases involving ordinary people reporting burglaries, thefts of computers, phones, water meters, motorcycles and so on, it is a long, frustrating process at police posts and police stations.
Prominent Sheikhs are gunned down but rather than let investigations, if any, proceed with the technical detail, the most the Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura, can do is act the populist, declaring that the ADF rebels are behind the murders.
For murders of ordinary people, police patrol trucks arrive at the scene when citizens report the matter, mainly to take the bodies to the Mulago Hospital and other mortuaries and that is the end of the matter, forever.
If we had known all this, we would have thought differently when welcoming our liberators in 1986. Never has a government run by so many people with bachelors' and PhD degrees proved so inept at the most basic of things.
The whole society has totally lost any sense of right and wrong, what is appropriate and what is not. Most young people have no sense of proper procedure.
As I wrote last Sunday, this country is now beyond what any political leader of current presidential aspirant can do to reverse the rot and decline, at least not by the programmes and campaign manifestos they have declared.
I don't know if we are intelligent enough to see just how dismal things really are. If we are, we need to sit down, swallow our pride, and seriously start thinking about sub-contracting the Chinese not simply to work on selected roads and bridges, but to come in and renovate town by town across the country.
Right now the Kampala-Entebbe expressway, the main road leading into Jinja Town, Republic Street in Mbale and other roads are being worked on by the Chinese. It has dawned on us that we are not right now in a position to do certain things by ourselves.
We need something akin to the 1948 Marshall Plan devised by the United States to help revive the economies of Western Europe devastated by the Second World War.
It can no longer be politics and development plans, piecemeal, as usual. As I have stated in recent weeks, I will do so again: none of the presidential aspirants so far for 2016 have expressed the urgency of what faces Uganda.
Jimmy Akena, Yoweri Museveni, Kizza Besigye, Amama Mbabazi, Venansius Baryamureeba, Mugisha Muntu, none has addressed the existential crisis facing Uganda and none probably will.
It is unlikely, even, that such an effort can come from Uganda itself and might require massive help from outside, the reconstruction of the country as though it had just come out of a war.
Short of that, we are certain to go through a period of excitement and suspense during the election campaign, celebrate or complain after the official results are announced, and after a brief aftermath, return to the same or nearly the same Uganda it presently is.
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