Brilliant article by Daily Monitor writer Muniiki K. Mulera on some quintessential Ugandan paradoxes.
“A government happily spends tens of millions of dollars to host an international conference like the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm) while 92% of its capital city’s residents have no toilet facilities.
The same government, on a pre-Chogm spending-spree, imports luxury cars and all manner of gadgets, then begs the international community to help it cope with floods that have further impoverished its poor citizens.
The state, already spending more money on running the presidential palaces and the presidency than it spends on its national health services, pours $100 million into renovating and expanding the old colonial governor’s residence, cynically known as the State House.
Meanwhile school children study in condemned buildings, millions lack life-saving anti-malaria bed-nets, patients seek treatment in severely under-equipped hospitals, police and military personnel live in shacks, cultural activities are starved of cash, and the country’s oldest and largest university is on the brink of bankruptcy.
A president spends $40 million on acquiring a personal plane while his people, over 75% of whom live in serious poverty, have no agricultural inputs to assist their peasant efforts.
The whole thing stinks, just like the outdated toilet facilities at King’s College Budo.”
JOURNALISTA. 