Sunday, July 21, 2013
I did not know how jealously Ugandans guarded their status as
one of the most corrupt countries on earth. After Transparency
International (authors of Global Corruption Barometer 2013) ranked
Uganda 17th, I do.
Last week, I listened to a local radio station as
caller after caller protested. They insisted we had to be in the top 10,
and ahead of Nigeria, even insinuating that someone at Transparency
International may have been bribed to rig the exercise and make Uganda
appear less corrupt.
Naturally, Uganda’s top guns are protesting in the
other direction; like Police Chief Gen Kale Kayihura, whose
organisation has been ranked the most corrupt in Uganda. He says, how?
Eh, how? You know his voice, and his works, without which Uganda would
be a very boring place.
As for the rivalry, I see nothing between Uganda
and Nigeria; they are so close. Two examples; one from Uganda’s great
Temple of Justice; the other from Nigeria’s wacky football pitches:
Several
months back, many of Uganda’s MPs wanted the Prime Minister and two
other ministers to stand aside while a parliamentary committee
investigated bribery allegations in the oil industry.
The Prime Minister resisted. A private citizen
who happened to be a lawyer from the Prime Minister’s political base
intervened through a court action and won. The trio did not have to
stand aside. It all took a few weeks. For his trouble, the “private
citizen” earned just under Shs13 billion; enough to pay the basic
salaries of all Uganda’s 40 or 50 judges for six years!
Then, two weeks ago, in response to the weird
mathematics determining promotion or relegation in Nigeria’s soccer
league arrangements, one team whipped another by 67 goals to nil. In
another 99-minute match, one team annihilated the enemy by 79 goals to
nil!
It is against such tales that some of Uganda’s
military commanders in Somalia were reported to have sold off supplies
meant for soldiers under their command (see Sunday Monitor, July 14),
removing another layer from the long-standing myth that the UPDF is
generally not corrupt. But since it was not your grand-mom who looted
the DR Congo, or bought those junk choppers, or was inventing ghost
soldiers, and man eateth where he worketh, the commanders were spot on.
Moreover, they could have been reasoning quite soundly.
Take
the stolen apples: Everybody knows that apples are European fruits.
Our thing is bananas. Even a mischievous football fan who wants to make
fun of an African player throws a banana on the pitch, not an apple.
So, a smart commander would figure out that most of his men were
unlikely to be habitual apple eaters.
Even for those who had acquired the taste, their
little income made the pricey fruit at best an occasional luxury. Four
apples given to each soldier every two weeks was, therefore, already to
spoil them; a daily apple would verge on command level irresponsibility.
Stolen milk: It is the Bahima of Ankole and the
Karimojong who are obsessed with cows and milk. A roll-call of the
contingent in Somalia shows such regional balance that one sachet of
milk (instead of two) per day should be sufficient for most of the
soldiers.
Stolen fuel: What is one lousy trucked tanker when powerful Ugandans are eyeing billions of barrels in Bunyoro’s oil wells?
Stolen
blankets: Soldiers are trained to be hardy. Are there winter conditions
in Somalia that really call for a blanket? One could go on and on.
More seriously, of course, it was always a
delusion to imagine that the UPDF could be isolated from the national
pandemic of corruption.
Alan Tacca is a novelist and socio-political
commentator. [email protected]