Every one watching the local Television
stations will bear with me that every one has been notified about 9th
October 2012. The city (Kampala) has been repainted with the national
colours. Waking up one of the mornings, I found every media house
talking about 'Ug @ 50' which amplified my thinking about the whole
saga.
True, Uganda as a nation, the national
flag, the national anthem and the national court of arms and a few
Ugandans are making 50 years come 09th October 2012.
however, one wonders whether we are really 50 years of age.
With over 7.5million people below the
poverty line, it keeps me wondering what we have been doing for the
last 50 years. Have we been walking ahead, backwards, or standing?
Many people and many more are going to bed (if they have one) with
out a meal. This is worsened by the increasing diseases. There are
many diseases that kill people and yet these diseases could have been
dealt with. In this current time and age, why should some one die of
Malaria? Why should some one have polio? At 50 years these are some
of the things we should be reading about in the historical books.
With a nearly one out of every five
children in a country not educated, it is truly alarming if you are
still celebrating 50 years of independence. This figure is even worse
when it gets to girls in rural areas who have to leave school for
early marriages and because the parents cannot afford the very little
asked at school.
Uganda is among the countries with
alarming rates of child mortality. The life-expectancy at birth is
particularly low. It still goes with out saying the life-expectancy
of the country is below 60 years. Life is not a guarantee in Uganda,
yet we are independent.
With the national Unemployment standing
at 80% and under employment at 17%, I still wonder whether
independence was to benefit us or to hurt us. It is a level in time
where we should be comparing parameters back in time and smile but
the reverse is true for the employment sector. With the increasing
graduations in the different tertiary institutions, this percentage
can only grow.
A country that boosts of an
agricultural economy, to find people dying of hunger is a laughable
issue. You would expect a lot many problems in undeveloped nations
that are agricultural but not hunger. Here you are, you are too lucky
a person that U will find both in Uganda that plans to celebrate a
golden independence jubilee.
Some of the good infrastructure we are
proud of were developed in the per-colonial times with little or no
development added to them. The country boost of the worst
infrastructure with the few developments done by funders like World
bank and the European Union, etc. With over 70% of the population not
on the national power grid, and less than 10% of the road network
tarmacked, I don't see whether we are 50 years of age.
Right now, we are talking about the
information age, where the Internet is the major driver of every
thing, including development. Many countries even the ones we think
we are older than are far better than us when it comes to this. If
you took a look at the population, very few people can surf around
the Internet, leave alone use it for their work. With the poor
infrastructure, and poor governance, no one ever expects to see an
Internet penetration close to 100% even by Ug@1000,
in the next
50 years.
Independence is the ability of a person
or state to stand with out interference of support from any one. The
support can be financial, in-kind support, or political. Now that we
are still making deficit budgets with financial donations still
showing up on our budgets, are we independent yet?
The 1962 function has been defined as a
process in which the white man handed over the colonial powers to
other black colonial masters. Uganda transferred it's colonial
masters from white to black. The bad story is that the blacks who
took over this power where inhuman, never cared and worse than then
whites.
The major reasons all these problems
have been hitting on the same nation is because of poor governance
and corruption. Uganda is among the very few countries that condone
the worst act of corruption. No wonder the country has no functional
water system, railway system, health system, Road system and every
thing is rub by propaganda. Uganda is also infected with a problem of
leaders who don't know how to set priorities. How can a third world
country equip it's self with the state of art military machinery as
if it were a world super power preparing for war, or a security
company ready to be hired for war and the benefits could help the
citizens?
Someone has ever asked me why Kenya,
Singapore and the likes are too far developed yet we are more endowed
as far as resources are concerned and we were even better than then
in terms of development way back in 1962? What went wrong? Who cursed
us?
If it came to enlisting the status of
Uganda, I don't think I cannot stop but that's not what brought me
today. What I wanted us to look at today is,; As we celebrate 50
years of independence, we need to establish what has been reached at,
and what has been missed. For what has been reached at, we need to
find strategies of how to consolidate on them and use them to find
what has eluded us.
So my Question still stands; with all
the unreached population, with public services, should we go ahead
and spend that so many million dollars on one day of Golden
celebrations?
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