It has taken me ages to figure out the simple culture of kickbacks. For the benefit of those who may be as slow as me, I shall explain. Let’s say there is a 100 shillings contract for the repair of Bugolobi road. In order to get that contract, I must promise to pay the tender board 30 shillings. So now there is only 70 shillings left to fix the road with. However, I am a businesswoman, and I intended to make at least 40 shillings off that contract. So now I am left with 30 shillings to get materials, fix the road and pay the workers. Is it any wonder the road is never fixed?

Kickbacks are happening in different shapes and forms and affect the entire country and our economy. And the great thing about them is that they compromise people at all levels, thus ensuring that no one will open their big mouth to point the finger at anyone in particular. If you refuse to join the system, you do not get the contracts – it is as simple as that. They also ensure that we do shoddy work so that when it rains, Bugolobi road needs fixing again and we’ll offer another 100 shilling contract.

Everyone pretends that they don’t know kickbacks are happening because they think it is a win-win situation for all. Wrong! Uganda suffers. I know ‘Uganda’ is a vague concept compared with putting food on your table and 900 million shillings under the bed, but the fact is that this is where we are living. In the famous words of one insane but patriotic Ugandan: “You cannot keep milking the cow without feeding it.”

These half baked buildings and perpetually broken roads and fake drugs and empty health centres – all these things that we are doing to Uganda, we are actually doing to our children. We are leaving them a broken down corrupt legacy. We may think that by driving them to school in air-conditioned turbo charged intercoolers, we are giving them the best life has to offer. No. We are setting them up to think like thieves and act like beggars. If there is no contract for them to continue this kickback culture with, what are they supposed to do?

I have begged my countrymen before and I beg them again: If you must steal – if that is the only way to make ends meet – then at least do so in moderation. You can steal and still do your duty. Make 5 shillings off each 100 shilling contract and do a good and lasting job. There will always be more work and you will not be killing our country and our children’s future. We need to take control of our stealing and spending habits, and then maybe there will be life after donor funding.

Published on Sunday June 6, 2010

One of the most interesting moments of last week for me was the front page picture on The New Vision of the 25^th. Yes, the one where an MP dished out a firm forehand to a beggar woman. I must say bravo to Kennedy Oryema for an excellent shot; it was a refreshing change from stage managed politician handshakes.

For the record, violence is never the solution. If everyone who was wronged resorted to violence the world would have ended long ago. But that does not change the fact that I felt the MPs anger and frustration. Look beyond the slap and see the healthy thick arms and the fat cheeks on that beggar. Then look at the emaciated child in her lap. If you do not feel anger then you need a slap too.

I hate able bodied beggars. Why should anyone with two arms and legs and a brain and a home be on the streets trying to guilt us into financing their lazy lifestyle? And if these women are making babies to assist in the begging process, then it follows that they have men and families too. We all have problems, but what gives these people the right to bring theirs to the street?

Perhaps it was depressingly fitting to see that story on the front page in the leading daily on Africa Day – the day when we supposedly celebrate our Africanness. Last year around this time I was whining about how we Africans do not want to take responsibility for ourselves; how we want to forever be helped, aided and assisted. I ended on the optimistic note that now was a great time to be an African, because we had a unique opportunity to learn from other people’s mistakes and chart our own course.

I had my optimism slapped thoroughly when the next Africa Day dawned brightly with this – healthy, able bodied women carrying an innocent starving child to the city to beg. I don’t know who deserved the slap more – the childless one who can walk around with a starved baby, or the mother of the child who handed him over for this nasty business.

Karamoja has an entire ministry dedicated to it, but even in Jinja, there is a village of them – women scavenging in our backyards and garbage skips while their children beg and camp on the streets. And the authorities let the village grow, sending them the message that it is okay to do what they are doing. We need to stop using ‘backwardness’ as an excuse to cultivate stupidity and laziness. A lack of technology should not automatically mean a lack of common sense, dignity and human compassion. We were proud hardworking human beings before ‘civilisation’. We cannot allow ourselves to degenerate into idiocy now.

Published on Sunday May 30, 2010

I used to have an account with the Post Bank a long time ago. It was my first ever account and was usually always empty because I thought of it as a temporary holding pen for my spending money. I abandoned it after my university allowances stopped coming through. Recently, I found the little pass book and decided to go and find out if I could resume using the account.

I took my old book and my hopes to my nearest Post Bank and the woman at the customer help desk told me the account was dormant and I would have to begin the process to open a new one – complete with passport photos, letter from my employer and note from my LC. I asked why the old one could not simply be reactivated since I had been through the process before and the information was right there on her computer screen. I got a blank stare and a standard useless answer: You just have to open a new one. I hate it when I ask a logical question and get an illogical ‘that is just how we do it’ answer, but that is the kind of customer service I have come to expect.

Does anyone actually train people specifically in customer service? Or do we just trust that the companies which hire customer service people are able to give them sufficient instruction to make them useful? The goal of customer service is to get me to keep spending money on a product or service, yet most companies treat the department like a very distant relative. Unless you know how to work the CHOGM procurement circuit, money is hard to come by. You work and you plan to make every penny count. That is why I write often and with feeling when it comes to things that make me spend my money. If I am going to hand even a shilling over to you, the least you can do is be useful and act like you appreciate it.

Customer care agents often have inadequate information, never have any real power and rarely show initiative with cases they are not immediately able to handle. They also appear to have no supervisors they can consult in the event that they cannot handle your problem. It is not good enough to tell me you don’t know what the problem is with your network but if I wait it will come back eventually. It is not good enough to give some pretty young thing a desk and a phone and a list of 10 answers and then unleash her on an unsuspecting public. If you are going to do customer care, then do it properly or not at all.

Published on Sunday May 23, 2008

People say love makes the world go round. The more cynical beings think it is money. Or perhaps money makes love go round, which in turn makes the world go round. We’re not going to figure that out today, but we can have fun trying.

I’d like to think that the glue that holds love, money, diamonds, Hummers or whatever it is people want together is compromise. I want to add my own little submission to the list of things that make the world go round. Compromise is a basic negotiation process in which you agree to give up a little bit of something you want in order to get something else you want more. You will not get exactly what you really want, but you meet somewhere in the middle.

I am a firm believer in something my Dad told me a while ago: choose what kind of life you want to live and then stick with it at all costs. I’m great at sticking to my guns, but when it comes to relationships, I am an equally firm believer in compromise. If you make a decision to be with somebody and join your life to theirs, you have to be willing to compromise now and again to make things work. However close you are to someone, you are never going to want exactly the same thing all the time.

I know you must be wondering what is with the wedding day sermon, but this weekend I am stuck between friends who are getting married and friends who have been married for only a little while but are beginning to feel the bumps of life. I care about my friends and I want them to be happy. Being happy is a very vague state; some of us are ‘happy’ behind the wheel of a fast car. Others are ‘happy’ in a bank vault, or only after a considerable amount of lager. I would like to think, though, that if you choose to dedicate your life to one person, then your ‘happiness’ is in large part wrapped up in that person.

I know I am happy eating a carrot on a bench as long as he is holding my hand. Compared to that, my love for fast cars pales into nothing. Someone understands me almost all the time, and that is way more important than how many times I do the dishes or he forgets to put the toilet seat down. Life is full of chores and boring routine and we have to do what we need to do to get through the routine bits. When you have people in your life who make routine days seem extra special, it is worth the minor inconvenience to just try and meet them halfway. So if I have any advice for my friends, it is this: do not ever compromise your basic integrity, but by all means, don’t fight those tiny unnecessary battles.

Published on Sunday May 16, 2010

I love being Ugandan. I love living in this country, the weather, eating fresh fruit and having a village to call my own. Sometimes, however, I wish I wasn’t a statistic in a third world country. On some days, like yesterday, I wish I were the absolute monarch of a little island somewhere with huge oil and gold and diamond deposits. Then I could sit on my little throne and deal with the rest of the world on my terms.

Yesterday I spent three and a half hours baking one of my parents in the car and wondering whether my other parent had fainted from hunger inside the American embassy. You see, because I am a third world statistic in an impoverished, badly governed state, it therefore follows that when me or one of my own attempts to leave this country and enter another statistically fantastic one, we get treated like cow poo – to put it politely.  I have had much practice in cutting off my nose to spite my face; therefore I shall pen this rant and watch the bridges burn.

I have a high tolerance for nonsense because I am generally a timid person and I am easily frightened by threats of violence. I do not, however, take kindly to people giving my parents a hard time because as their last born it is my exclusive right. So when an embassy makes me go through the farce of making an appointment with them a month early, then shifts the appointment by 5 hours, and then makes my 80 year old father pay them to sit in their fortress for 3 and a half hours doing nothing I am more than a little bit angry.

It doesn’t help that the embassy does not allow you to bring in either food or telephone. So he had to sit in there on his 9am breakfast and finally got a snack at 5pm when they deigned to release him. I tried calling the embassy to enquire about how much longer it would take and whether my dad was alright and I was informed that no one knew the mysteries of the workings of the great embassy. In fact, it could be 4 hours or longer, and no, they would not check on my father for me. The operator’s tone seemed to imply that I should feel blessed and honoured that we even were granted access. If I could have reached through the phone and smacked the smugness out of her tone I would have.

I could argue that not all of us are impoverished desperate semi-literates looking to wipe bottoms and sweep streets in the Promised Land. Even if we were, everyone deserves to be treated with human dignity and consideration. However, they are just going to keep on doing what they do because Yes, They Can.  I am a statistic and my dear old dad just wants to visit his grandkids and take a much needed break. So all I can do is misuse my little space to rant and then go back to the embassy today to line up yet again and pick up the visa. This is officially the most powerless I have felt in ages.

Published on Sunday May 9, 2010

It is only in my current old age that I have realised the importance of goal setting. We all think we set goals, but most of the time we are just going along and doing what we are expected to do at the appropriate time.

I have been learning to put time and emotion into my goal-setting. It helps to sit and write down what is in your mind, making it detailed and concrete. Every time you look at your written goals you will find that you have thought of some modification to make the goals better, clearer or more achievable. Once again, I lament the brain space I spent cramming outdated maps of the German Rhine-Ruhr regions – if someone had taught me goal setting back then I’d be a superstar now.

Often, the quote in my (nice, but out of stock) ABB diary will correspond with what I am doing on a particular day, and today the quote was:  ‘First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do’ by Epictetus. Setting goals is all well and good, but you also have to plot a course of action and follow it.

Even if there is no immediate way for you to attain your goal, you can begin by turning yourself into the kind of person you need to be to achieve your goals. For instance, I have absolutely no money to do what it is I want to do, but the Angela I see achieving those goals is a much fitter and more disciplined person. So while I await bonna bagagawale, I am working on becoming fitter and more disciplined. Every little step you take towards reaching your goal counts, and the more tiny successes you chalk up, the better you’ll feel about yourself.

Earlier in the month, I read a very basic quote by Jim Rohn: ‘The few who do are the enemy of the many who only watch’. Of course we all like to think we are ‘doers’, but are we? A lot of the time we are working in ‘filler’ positions doing things we don’t like and envying those who have the courage to actually ‘do’.  A great number of us are actually, without knowing it, watchers of progress and not participators.

The immediate problem with being a watcher is that you focus so much on the successes of others and not on your own goals that you start to fool yourself into thinking that the ‘doers’ are somehow responsible for your own personal failure. And what follows next? A trip to the witchdoctor to find out the divine reason why X is succeeding and I am not. And that, for me, has been the hardest thing to learn about goal setting: taking personal responsibility for where I am now.

Published on Sunday May 2, 2010

Last week a young man turned up at my gate with a sob story about how he was stranded and wanted to work any odd jobs around the house to make money to go back to Mbale. I put him in the taxi park and gave the fare money to the conductor with instructions to ‘eat’ the money should the young man not be going to Mbale.

For hours afterwards I was haunted by images of the young man laughing at how stupid and gullible I was, but what can you do? These days so many people do not want to work at an honest living, and it is likely that I was conned. However, there is also a chance he actually needed to get home and it would have been sad if I had turned him away.

The number of scams and scam artists out there is appalling. It all makes you just want to stop helping people at all. However, it is not just the people pretending to be in need that you have to be careful of – it is also the people pretending to help. The stealing goes both ways now, and it is easy to focus on the beggars instead of questioning the people who come out as helpers.

I have recently become aware of one case, where a woman in need has been very badly used by so-called Good Samaritans. Her story came out in the press, and people flocked to assist her. One organisation wanted her to go to the papers with every donation she got from them, so that it might seem to the public that this organisation was very active in helping the poor. When she failed to get any press interested in pursuing that nonsense, the organisation dumped her.

Some foreigners took photographs of her and published a little pamphlet claiming they were catering for her every need. Then they gave her fake phone numbers, left the country and were never heard from again. Other people have genuinely wanted to help, but have been cleverly waylaid and sidetracked by self appointed ‘brokers’ on the woman’s behalf. Frustrated, a lot of genuine helpers have abandoned their initial good intentions, assuming that the woman herself is a scam artist.

As human beings, we cannot make a decision to simply stop helping, because our compassion is the stuff that makes miracles happen. Your kindness can change lives and bring hope, so you must always strive to have an open heart and follow that instinct to give. However, as much as possible, put some safety measures in place. You may get scammed once or twice, but it is a small price to pay for being able to make the difference in someone’s life.

Published on Sunday April 25, 2010

Some nights, like this one, I cannot seem to fall asleep. I stay awake listening to the sounds of the night and the longer I stay awake, the more tired my mind gets and the scarier and louder the sounds become. A cockroach walking across a piece of paper becomes a creature scratching at my door. A twig falling from a tree becomes someone sneaking across the compound. It is scary at night, but funny in the morning.

When I am awake late I usually start to worry about life. In that time between getting into bed and actually falling asleep, I start asking myself questions. For instance, what business do I have bringing children into a world where my contemporaries and I are killing the environment – and we know we are killing it? Is that being irresponsible, or being amazingly optimistic and hopeful? We all know something vague about global warming and desertification and all that, but it seems in our immediate quest for a new N-series Nokia we would rather that information remain vague. So we live our lives and make our babies and leave them with huge college funds and a colossal environmental mess. The environment is everybody’s problem but nobody’s responsibility.

Then I ask myself questions about politics, which I hate.  Is politics ever meant to make sense? Can you ever really be sure that things are being decided and done for your good? Are we teaching the next generation to let go gracefully, serve selflessly and look to the greater good? Will our fate as a country become a case study for how things can go right, or will we be just another African republic making the same old African mistakes?

I wonder about death, and whether it is the end or the beginning we would like it to be. I wonder which of my sins is bigger – questioning where my tithe goes or my inability to let go of my dislike for certain people. What, in the end, will I get fried in hell for? For that matter, does celibacy really equal purity? In my experience, sometimes what goes on in the mind can be way more destructive than 5 minutes of carnal activity.

I can chase my brain round in circles for a long, fruitless time, but at the end of the day I am never closer to any answers. I worry myself, get tired and admit that I still do not know. I have to remind myself that my goal is to get through the night and then focus on getting through tomorrow when it finally comes. The only thing I have control over is whether I am doing the best I can.

Published on Sunday April 18, 2010

Hello, my name is Angela, it is 2010 and I am a stay-at-home mum. There, I said it. I have had this discussion in various forms, and the overriding message I get is that staying home to look after children is not ambitious enough for the 21^st Century.

We are modern women; go getters and goal oriented. I know the thrill of climbing the corporate ladder and I loved the sense of achievement and how it made other people perceive me. Career is no fun if you cannot flaunt it.

I did the corporate mum thing for a while until one day I heard my son call his nanny ‘Mama Boy’. It dawned on me that my son’s speech and mannerisms were modelled on the person he spent the day (and much of the night, because I used to live in the office) with. He did not speak, eat or behave like me. He did not even like to hang around me – he preferred the kitchen and the company and values of those therein. I cannot blame him – I got home tired and irritable from traffic and corporate boot licking and was out the door by 6:30am each morning.

Thankfully, the pressure and politics of work exceeded my limits and I quit. I did not do it entirely for my son, but he was part of the decision. It is only in retrospect that I realise he is the main reason I am content with my choice.

I have been told I am wasting my emancipation; did all the generations of women fight for my liberation so I could return to the kitchen and wipe bottoms? I’d like to think they fought so I could have options, the option to stay home inclusive. I have been told I am wasting my talents… perhaps I am. I could be working in some company pursuing someone else’s dream and making them money. These days that doesn’t seem as important.

I am not entirely idle; Sofa Inc does a bit, mostly from the comfort of home. My circumstances are very fortunate and my creativity and time are mine to use as I see fit. It is not as convenient for every mother to just quit her job and I do not wish to offend or guilt anyone into thinking they have to.

What I do ask, however, is that people stop trying to make me and women like me feel guilty for not being trail blazing corporate queens. To anyone who has considered staying home for her babies I would like to say: it is hard work and nothing to be ashamed of.  It is also something you will never ever regret. You can always bounce back and blaze a trail, but you cannot rewind a single day of your baby’s life.

Published on Sunday April 11th, 2010

Last week my four year old conquered the alphabet and numbers one to 20. While I am sure four year olds across the universe are doing pretty much the same thing, I still find him absolutely awesome.  Last week I also watched my cousin bury his three year old son and almost lose his one year old daughter on the same day. It was my first experience with the absolute circus involved in trying to get blood for transfusion. I have heard about how difficult it can be but I never realised just what a farce the whole system is.

This little girl was on the point of heart failure but there was no blood in the children’s hospital. No one knew when it was expected – someone said something vague about it depending on the Post Bus schedule. In the main hospital, there was blood, but not of the right type.

What hurt me was the fact that the baby and I were of the same blood type, and I would have gladly given her my blood. But the regulations prohibit that on the grounds that we may give our dying loved ones AIDS. An HIV test is a matter of minutes, but still, the regulations argue that I might have got infected the night before. Well, given a choice between watching my relative die now from lack of blood or die later from the vague possibility that I caught AIDS last night, I think the choice for many families would be obvious.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I think having only one blood bank for an entire country falls firmly under ‘desperate times’. The amount of logistics and inconvenience involved in having one bank supplying the nation could go into setting up emergency screening and on spot donation for those who need it. I think the lives we would save that way would far outnumber the lives we would later lose as a result of well meaning people infecting their loved ones with HIV. When you’re on the battlefield with a shattered leg, the risk of death from gangrene far outweighs the risk of infection from amputating with a handsaw. The majority of our hospitals are a daily battlefield and we should rise to the occasion, quit the ‘best practice’ bullshit and establish stop-gap measures that really save lives.  I’m no medical expert – just a concerned parent whose child could be next.

Thankfully, we found some blood and got back in time for it to make a difference. A father did not have to watch a second child die within 24 hours.  I’d just like to say to the heroes who give their blood all over the country: thank you and bless you.

Published on Sunday April 4th, 2010