Being a civil servant is not for the feint hearted and a politician more so. This impression was cemented last week, when we learnt that government has been overrun by wolves, is being patrolled by sharks and that the mafia are running around with unfettered abandon...
During the launch of his latest book “A tale of two wolves
in Sheep’s clothing”, gender ministry permanent secretary Pius Bigirimana
alluded to people in government intent on frustrating the fight against
corruption and not averse to throwing the champions of the anti-corruption
fight to the wolves.
Bigirimana, formerly a PS in the Office of the Prime
Minister where billions of shillings went missing during his tenure there, has
protested his innocence on the matter. He is in fact feted as the whistle
blower who triggered off the investigation which has come to be personified by
former principal accountant in the same ministry Godfrey Kazinda, whose case(s)
are winding their way through our courts.
The irony seems to have been lost on Bigirimana though, that
it may not be safe to recommend his son for a job in the government.
We had had no time to recover from these jaw dropping
revelations than state minister for works John Byabagambi told parliament that his
decision to cancel a tender awarded to a Chinese firm to build a standard gauge
railway from Malaba-Kampala was in the best interest of the country. That his
action forestalled a dubious plan to steal money from government, before
revealing that being in government was not unlike swimming in shark infested
waters.
And while we were still catching our breath Byabagambi’s senior
minister, Abraham Byandala, distanced himself from stories that he had a hand
in the botched Mukono-Katosi road tender. He claimed that the stories were
being fuelled by his rivals in government who were envious of him and wanted
his job. He however might have thought references to wild animals were becoming
a well-worn cliché and called his conniving colleagues, Mafia.
And a few days later President Yoweri Museveni weighed in on
the subject and reported that government is full of extortionists, who held
back the crucial fertiliser plant in Tororo.
What is going on?
The picture being painted of our government by members of
government is one of cut throat rivalry between the ministers and unashamed
competition for public resources.
"Clearly the general public serve only as a stepping stone for the honourable ladies and gentleman to rise to the high table where they can set upon public funds with animalistic alacrity and to hell with rest of us.
It does not take a rocket scientist to tell that the
government is now being held hostage by thieving technocrats, opportunistic
politicians, slimy conmen and gluttonous businessmen and it does not take a
biblical prophet to see that this progression cannot end well.
Air supply; the practice of winning tenders to supply
government with goods and services but not delivering and still getting paid.
In those days one of the biggest scams, was not supplying
reams of papers. A cursory look through the press 30 years later shows that our
tricksters are now way past stealing stationary, they are now gobbling roads,
factories and machinery.
How did we come to this?
It’s no secret that when the NRM marched on Kampala in 1986,
whereas they may have been a formidable fighting force they were very thin on
the ground politically. They built up their political base in two ways, they
coopted politicians of different shades into their ranks and two, they left the
civil service largely intact. It seems in order to keep these
Johnny-come-latelies onside, the NRM, looked the other way as they gorged
themselves on public funds.
If the calculation was that these officials would be reined
in when they had “eaten” enough somebody seemed to have forgotten the deadline.
So not only have they become more insatiable, they have
grown in sophistication, become emboldened by the tacit approval of their
primitive accumulation and spawned a new generation – or two of ever more eager
“eaters”.
But the chicken are coming home to roost.
There are huge demands on public finances now, the donors
are pulling back their support and there is only so much the good people at the
Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) can wring out of the tax payer.
"Expect that some hard decisions are going to have to be taken in coming days, months and years to feed a few officials to the baying public. Unfortunately there might not be much science to the coming purges and good men may give way before or with the crooks....
However there is still room for optimism despite this bleak
picture.
Notice that all the revelations have employed predators –
wolves, sharks and even the Mafia, as a metaphor for the corrupt, suggesting
this “animal” being hunted down may still be swift and nimble needing
specialised skills to run it down.
"The time to be really afraid is when the metaphors shift to scavengers – vultures, hyenas and marabou storks, you will know the “animal” is a carcass and we maybe best advised to head for the hills to avoid the stench...
