In the course of writing this week’s column, three major events altered what ideally should have been my thought process; the first – on a sad note, my best friend lost their grandfather and all through the week, from the vigil, to the burial in Bugiri, a lot of thoughts crossed my mind.
The second, again sadly, was the blatant display of impunity by the state minister for ICT – Aidah Nantaba and the third, this time on a happy note, a 3-hour documentary I watched on the BBC about the troubles facing the European union.
There was potentially no way to sum all these up into one column so I’ll write it along and share my week’s thoughts.
On the passing on of my friend’s Grandfather;
At the memorial service, I learned that he had served a diligent civil service life. He had dedicated his efforts to leading a clan in Busoga and raising his children to become some of the strongest backbones in our civil service. A life lived as well as his, brought me to many questions; how could a man, then in the 1930’s imagine there could be a life beyond the confines of his village? How could he – a P.6 dropout [which was a huge academic milestone of his time] – devote his life to taking his children through the rigours of school and later urge them into public service?
My answer would later come in one of the eulogies delivered at his funeral. That there exists a bigger goal in some citizens lives than just enrichment in wealth.
Which brings me to the second part;
Aidah Nantaba.
My God!
The contrast between the first part of this story and the second is that Nantaba is a third generation civil servant. She joined the political service 8 years ago and enjoyed quick meteoric rise taking on to a state ministerial job in 2012 where some of her fond acts were telephoning the president to complain about a land grab. In 2016, despite having quit the ruling party, she returned to cabinet as a state minister for ICT. Besides scandalous headlines, Nantaba fetches little accord to her name.
How this relates to the first story though is what I am interested in. On our drive to the burial in Bugiri district, we passed through the freshly tarmacked road that connects Kayunga district to Jinja and the Capital city.
It is Kayunga that Nantaba represents in parliament. The district enjoys being home to the second biggest electricity dam – Isimba and enjoys good road network between it and the capital city where 65% of the GDP is manufactured. However, only 7.9% of the students in the district passed with a first grade in the recently released PLE results. The first grades at UCE dropped from 276 to a mere 188.
The district didn’t file it’s annual performance results to the Local Government performance survey, didn’t account for the use of funds in the past financial year and hasn’t done for two years in a row. All the filed quarter reports for the previous financial year were filed out of time and with clerical and glaring errors that they were not considered by the assessment.
The district also has no structural plan neither does it have a vision and mission for the kind of budgets they ask for. For the 18.3 billion shillings the district uses for its budget, only 1% is raised through local taxes.
Which brought me to wonder, what truly was there to hold in a ministry for Aidah Nantaba? What truly is there to show for her years of leadership of the district – at least in parliament?
Instead of ordering her guards to shoot innocent Ugandans, ministers like Nantaba should ground themselves in the districts they represent and actually deliver real leadership.
Now, finally, the BBC documentary on the European Union.
My sense from watching the documentary was that every nation in the European Union was striving towards a grand norm, a cathedral piece of what their country should look like and that every leadership, despite using different methods always strove to achieve their end of building that cathedral.
It’s a three-part documentary that interviews heads of state of each different European Union state on what their take was on two key issues that affected the EU – Greece’s bailout and immigration.
It seems to me, that with generations down the civil service line, Uganda needs to align itself with what our cathedral project should be and strive towards achieving it.
