This week President Yoweri Museveni responded to critics to his easter messages on a number of subjects, not least of all corruption.
The President pointed out that there are institutions
mandated to fight corruption and he as the president would be overstepping his
mandate to start hunting down the corrupt. He nevertheless pointed out that he
set up institutions to fight corruption though complained that some had been
infiltrated by the very corrupt they were meant to be fighting.
"The argument that corruption should be fought based on evidence is hard to fault and it is as it should be. The seduction of public lynchings and arbitrary arrests and jailings should not be encouraged. Such methods may win a few cheap points with the people but will eventually lead down the dangerous path to destruction and chaos...
What about if the government was to give all the corrupt
amnesty? That they come forward confess their sins, refund our monies and we
live happily ever after.
This would be useful in helping us start from a clean slate
and secondly serve as the basis for a determined attack on the corrupt. The
deal would be you come forward or we come after you hammer and tongs.
And this would not be very difficult. Random lifestyle
audits will easily uncover the corrupt. Our public officials have become so emboldened
they are not afraid to live in palatial mansions, by their cars from the showroom
rather than the bond, send their children to study abroad and holiday in exotic
locations, right before our eyes.
I remember almost two decades ago during the Uganda Revenue
Authority (URA) probe, officials uncovered living a life way beyond their known
incomes resorted to blaming “relatives abroad” for their massive wealth.
An amnesty for the corrupt is not unusual. During the early
2000s government passed a law granting Amnesty to people fighting against the
government. The condition was that you would publicly renounce your insurgency
against the government, get a certificate, on condition that were you to
backslide your amnesty would be revoked and the full force of the law would be
brought to bear on you.
This was offered to people who had committed despicable crimes
-- rape, maiming and mass killings, why can’t the same be offered to our
corrupt?
Of course, the practicality of publicly confessing your corrupt ways could be a challenge, your children’s classmates will not let them forget...
But assuming we could go past this stage, what would a
corruption free Uganda look like?
For starters many public servants would have to cut back on
their budgets. They would have to look for cheaper houses to rent, mothball or
sell altogether, their monster private four-wheel drive cars, suspend weekly
visits to the farm and much more of their ostentatious living.
This will have repercussions not only for the redeemed
public servants but for their wider social networks.
The story is told of the minister who used to customarily
ferry people to the village every weekend he was travelling. When he lost his position,
he started going to the village on random days of the week to dodge his
constituents’ demand for lifts.
Kampala at night, may not be as happy as it is now. Many
years ago I met a big night club owner at Kigali airport. We were both
returning home. I suggested to him that Kigali would do with good nightclub
like has in Kampala. With a wave of his hand he dismissed my suggestion, “There
are no corrupt in Kigali, who do you think come to my place?”
Which makes you realise that the biggest beneficiaries of
corruption in our government are among us in Kampala and not in the rural areas.
So, a halt to corruption would be good for rural Uganda.
Schools would be built and resourced, health centers the same, feeder roads
would be opened up and maintained, essentially rural Uganda and the more marginalized
urban dweller would be have access to the tools that would help him climb out
of despondency and poverty.
"There would be much gnashing of teeth in the hills of Kampala as our public servants take a marked cut in their lifestyles and maybe because they would have to rely on public services, would ensure they worked well – after all they cannot afford treatment in Nairobi or Delhi or Johannesburg....
It would be interesting to see how long our public servants
would continue with this class suicide before they fought to return to business
as usual.
That is the challenge with fighting corruption in this
country, it is now baked into our DNA to the point that the enforcers of the
law are themselves part of the racket. As if we don’t know that.
