Activist Bishop Zac David Niringiye has decried the fear, apathy and slumber, which he says have eaten into the energy that is needed to move Uganda forward.
“It is amazing how people fear one another in this country. Then there is a lot of apathy, people have lost hope. When you tell them to do something, they say, ‘kyaba too much’. Then the other factor is slumber. People are working hard to sleep; not to work,” said Bishop Niringiye.
The solution the prelate suggested to cure the above ills is that the Ugandan youth, who constitute 80% of the country’s 34m-strong population, need to regain the lost hope. Niringiye was recently speaking at a public debate organised by Panos Eastern Africa at Imperial Royale hotel.
The other panelists who weighed in on the debate about, ‘Uganda at 50: A nation in flux?’ included former Ethics and Integrity minister, Dr Miria Matembe, FDC Vice President Proscovia Salaamu Musumba and presidential private secretary on Political Affairs, David Mafabi. On her part, Matembe warned of a tribal bombshell waiting to explode in the next 50 years. Describing her former party NRM as “worse than colonialists”, Matembe said that President Museveni’s government would have given Ugandans a better 50th anniversary but it “lost its vision” because of “its vampire-like politicians”.
Matembe added that the vampire-like mentality has turned the populace into beggars carrying bowls to a cocoon of a few individuals who have accumulated wealth primitively and are managing the country’s resource envelope as “a personal entity”. In the end, according to Matembe, people are looking at citizens from a certain region with envy and are waiting to revenge once the regime changes.
“I have never seen such robbery, moral decadence and the crave for materialism before—a situation where people are deliberately impoverished and reduced to beggars,” she said, adding, “How can someone manage a country like a personal property? I hear [President Museveni] saying ‘my oil’, ‘I hunted my animal’. That is trash. Let him go and hang.”
Museveni was at one time quoted in the press to have said that he hunted his animal and when it was time to eat, some people (opposition) tried to grab it. Niringiye described such mannerisms as Musevenism, before adding that it comes when a person overstays in power. Of Uganda’s post-independence 50 years, Museveni’s NRM has taken 25 years in power. Musumba says it is because of this longevity that NRM should take the largest blame for the malaise that has dogged Uganda.
“Uganda today is a country that is stuck. We have a population that is lost and not found. We have nothing in common except poverty, disease, ignorance and hopelessness,” she said.
Musumba also said that the other thing that Uganda has managed to achieve in the last 50 years is the “western Uganda threat” that has come up because of the “guns, money and oil” in the hands of people from the western part of the country.
However, Mafabi advised his fellow panelists to focus their debate on what makes one a Ugandan. He also urged them to provide solutions on how to consolidate the gains achieved under NRM rule.
“We need to get out of short-termism because our problem is structural. I am fighting against temporary solutions and look at trans-regime solutions. We must develop a generation that discovers its transformation,” Mafabi said.
dtlumu@observer.ug
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