Corruption: The road ahead is long and arduous

COMMENT | Olivia Nalubwama | On Sunday, August 18, residents of Lwengo district gathered for a thanksgiving service.

The Nile Post, an online news website, reported that the residents of Lwengo were particularly jubilant that Sunday. They were thankful for the release of their Member of Parliament (MP), Cissy Namujju, who had been on remand for 55 days facing corruption charges.

Perhaps having heard the tales of torture faced by those in state detention facilities, they worried for Namujju. Would she return to them with all her body parts intact?

Thankfully, accompanying the article was a picture of MP Namujju, resplendent and sombre in a glittery white busuuti. The priest, Rev Fr. Nsamba Gonzaga, imaginably caught up in the rapture of thanksgiving, urged his congregants to reflect upon Namujju’s courage. Rev Fr. Gonzaga declared: “The courage shown by Namujju in the face of adversity can be likened to the perseverance of Jesus Christ during his crucifixion.”

Dear reader, stay lucid – MP Namujju and her co-accused are facing corruption charges. Oddly, there is no record of any congregation member standing up to protest the glorification of corruption and thereby urging Namujju to take up her cross. Similarly, there is no record of the priest lambasting the evil of corruption. Why would they?

According to the Nile Post, residents sang Namujju’s praises, noting that she has funded many projects in the area. One resident pronounced: “To us, she is a hero!”

On June 22, Speaker Anita Among, speaking at a public rally in Lwengo, brought her mobilisation skills to Namujju’s defence. She rallied the crowd to look kindly upon the troubles of their MP, stating, “I went and met Cissy Namujju; she is in good spirits, and she is going to be with you. She is going to be your woman MP forever. The president has heard your cries, where you said that when your child misbehaves, you beat and say go back and do something good. And you are better off having a child even if she goes and eats something as long as she brings back home.”

In Ugandan parlance, a phrase usually playfully captures the serious undercurrents of the day beneath our parte-after-parte vibes. Lately, it is this mocking phrase, ‘In Uganda, you are serious alone.’

The speaker’s comments endorsing corruption attracted massive public outrage; one might imagine that a government dedicated to slaying the corruption leviathan would be incensed by the speaker’s comments. Instead, more photos of the non-socially distanced affectionate relationship the speaker enjoys with President Yoweri Museveni, dot the media.

The people’s fight against corruption has multiple conflicting personalities – we abhor corruption if it is corruption by ‘the other’ not ‘our person.’ This is how the tweeting First Son from his privileged perch of impunity, where the rules do not apply to him, entered the chat on August 16.

Another MP in jail on corruption charges is Michael Mawanda. The First Son, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba (MK), tweeted questioning why his friend, Mawanda, was in jail while Daddy President lets bigger thieves frolic freely. Within minutes of that tweet, the hashtag Mawanda, powered by the rabid might of the MK bot army, was trending.

The bot army promoted Mawanda from charges of corruption to a political prisoner facing trumped-up corruption charges because he supports MK. This is how the Patriotic League of Uganda, MK’s synthetic people power movement, fights corruption. By fighting the corruption of ‘the other’, those against the halo of their supreme leader MK. In one tweet, MK tells us he is neither interested in fighting his corruption nor that of his friends.

The Basel Institute of Governance, in a comparative study of corruption and social norms in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, found evidence that social norms and shared beliefs drive corruption. The study, undertaken between January 2016 and August 2017, demonstrated that Uganda and Tanzania had much higher levels of petty corruption, as people are swayed by social pressure to help relatives, share contacts or reciprocate favours received from their networks.

Thus, many people perceive corruption as normal, viewing it as a ‘necessary evil’ or simply ‘the way things are done.’ Musician Bebe Cool demonstrated this when he inelegantly defended Speaker Among against corruption allegations via his social media handle on August 19.

Commenting on the development initiatives undertaken by the speaker in her home district of Bukedea, Bebe Cool crooned: “This lady has been in parliament for less than three years, yet she’s already built a school, stadium, and sports arena — all on her own, without government support. So, where does the corruption issue arise? If Anita Among is imprisoned for alleged corruption, what happens to the thousands of people benefiting directly from her initiatives? How about the millions in Eastern Uganda who are reaping the benefits of her work? Is she truly corrupt, or is this backlash because she signed the anti-gay bill?”

Bebe Cool’s logic is incorruptible – if you can look past his unwitting expose on the social network of corruption. When MPs become messianic heroes, singlehandedly delivering schools, sports facilities, and hospitals to their constituents, without transparency about the funding of these initiatives (besides, funding has been a bad word lately), and friends facing corruption charges become prisoners of conscience, we are in seriously deep Kiteezi garbage. So deep, we have become accustomed to the filth.

Corruption in Uganda today is intractable and insidious entanglement. The celebrated founder of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, who set the gold standard on unapologetically fighting corruption, warned, “Once a political system has been corrupted right from the top, from the very top to the lowest ranks of bureaucracy, the problem is almost impossible to solve without a revolution. The cleansing and disinfecting has to start from the top and go downwards in a thorough and systematic way.”

Dear reader, if we return to the homely church where MP Namujju’s 55 days in jail over corruption charges are comparable to the suffering of The Christ, then we ought to open the Bible.

Besides, political thanksgiving events in these parts are incomplete without a hefty dose of biblical scriptures. Matthew 5:30 is clinically brutal, “And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”

Thus, your word for the day: amputation.

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Olivia Nalubwama is a “tayaad Muzukulu, tired of mediocrity and impunity” smugmountain@gmail.com

THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE OBSERVER