Uganda

I recently wrote a post (at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/10/africa-and-australia.html) on the relationship between Africa and Australia. In that, I wrote "many white Australians are sadly clueless about Africa". I've been fortunate to know a little more than most, partly because of work there, but also because of my interest in human rights.

As I wrote in my previous post, progressive Australians may know and admire Nelson Mandela's legacy, and some may have seen the film "A United Kingdom", about Seretse Khama, first President of Botswana (who helped transform that nation's economy and society, demonstrating what - depending on how much damage had been done by colonialism * - was possible in Africa) and his British-born wife Ruth Williams Khama.

I have now had the opportunity, through social media (thank you M), to learn a bit more about Uganda, and in particular Buganda, and would like to share some information as a result.

Before I do that, I'd like to write a little bit about people.

In the West, there is a lot of racist bias in reporting. I do what I can to overcome that by posting news from Africa, India (do you know that India was one of - if not the - first nations to ban slavery [and take actions against smog], more than 2,000 years ago? Or that India's Hansa Mehta was responsible for changing "all men are created equal" [Eleanor Roosevelt’s preferred phrase] to "all human beings are created equal"), and other places (such as Lebanon, home to Charles Malik, who, with Eleanor Roosevelt and China's PC Chang, formed the intellectual powerhouse behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR]. Incidentally, did you know that UNESCO did a global survey which found philosophical support for everything included in the UDHR?) that aren't reported on much.

However, I think there is also a human problem here that Samantha Power explored in her book "A Problem from Hell" (Pub. Harper, 2010, ISBN 978-0007172993, Amazon): limited imagination, leading to a limited understanding that there are real human beings on the other side of news headlines and statistics.

In my case, I can still remember the nightmares I had when, as a child, I first came across the brutality that humans can inflict on each other in war (in a TV documentary about the Indian Mutiny). I've also been on the receiving end of discrimination and bullying, and one of the many effects of that include a certain amount of empathy for other people who are suffering (and a channelling of anger into passion to change things for the better).

(I also nearly died, mostly by accidents, half a dozen times before I was 28: each of those left me shaking in my [metaphorical ** ] boots, but also gave me a determination to do what I could to make the world a better place.)

I've also had a little amount of travel overseas for work, and have had colleagues from overseas (and a Finnish friend at Uni, who taught me the worst swear word in the language - which was surprisingly useful on construction sites in early 1980s Queensland), which includes:

• a trip to Hà Nôi, Viêt Nám in the mid-90s, where I befriended the woman, Thûyen, who cleaned my mini-hotel's rooms (later, after I was invited to her one room home for tea, she wanted to me to take her daughter back to Australia to get her an education - which was not possible for many reasons [such as me living on a boat that was smaller than Thûyen's home, and commuting two hours each way to work at that time]).
  There was still lots of war damage from what we term the Vietnam War, but the Vietnamese people term "the American War" (they had an excellent - very powerful, very striking - museum on the series of wars they had fought for independence). There were also veterans of that war (one without legs) begging in the streets to earn a living - and one woman begging for money outside a chemist to get medicine for her ill child (at times like that, I wish I was rich enough to make a difference). A few years after that trip, I saw a photo of a street taken during the war, and one of victims shown looked exactly like my friend Thûyen - it wasn't her, of course, it had been taken decades before, and Thûyen was still alive (we kept writing for some time), but the impact was visceral.
  The work was unusually slow (I was commissioning a wastewater treatment plant, but they had no flow so I couldn't do anything for quite a while), so I got to do some tourist activities (most work trips I don't), and the local motorbike taxis learned to look out for the crazy western lady who liked to go places in the afternoon *** . One of the things that impressed me was seeing the names of graduates carved on turtles centuries before, at what was possibly one of the world's first Universities (it dates back to 1070 CE).
  And the Aussie expats (Australian citizens - all ethnicities) I was working with didn't even know how to spell Viêt Nám properly . . . although they were good with the language, and many of the customs; 
• I had two trips to China in the mid and late 90s, one to commission a water treatment plant (the groundwater that the city had been using had natural fluoride that was high enough to cause problems, and an AusAID project was building a water treatment plant for the Huang He, or Yellow River), the other a wastewater project.
  The Chinese engineers I was working with were very well taught, and just needed a little practical experience to become very good engineers. I know there have been problems with theft of intellectual property (IP) (which the USA also  did in the late 1700s), but I'm not surprised at China's technical development since then - and China has had a millennia long history of both technological developments and very competitive business practices.
  There was a little tension when some undercover cops tried to catch us out about dissidents ("do you know X?"), but mostly I was struck by how similar the Chinese workers I interacted with were to Aussies (Australian citizens - all ethnicities) - several of whom I knew later would have loved to sit down and have a game of cards and a drink with them.
  I also made friends with my translator from the first trip, and we kept corresponding until she had to move to take care of her father after he had a quadruple bypass (largely because of smoking too much - I have a few stories about that, such as a conference 2 m above the floor on a 450 mm dia. pipe around a malfunctioning valve, where it felt like the cigarette smoke from half a dozen smokers [yes, the pipe was very crowded] was going to knock me out - they kindly put the cigarettes out when they noticed I was having problems); 
• in 2005, I had a trip to Bangkok, the "Venice of the East", to commission part of a wastewater treatment plant that had been built as a multi-storey building so it could fit into the limited space that was available. (It was fascinating to read letters to the editor in the paper advocating for better manners in politics - which was a hot topic, as this was during the lead up to the 2006 coup.)
  We had a draughtsperson, Ab, from Thailand at the company I worked at in the '80s, who got me interested in bonsai (sadly, I lost all my trees when I moved on to a small boat in the 1990s [the air was too salty]) and aided my practice of Buddhism. He had been having too much of a - to use a euphemism - "good lifestyle" and didn't want to follow the tradition of the eldest son becoming a monk for a month when he turns 21, and tried to negotiate, with an opening gambit of one week and no haircut, but had to settle for three weeks - with a shaved head.
  He got so much out of it he stayed for six months, including three months in the jungle, and had some great, pragmatic teaching on Buddhism (I should point out that I am no longer Buddhist); and 
• a trip in around 2012 to the land of Chinggis Khaan (who, whilst great at home, was devastating to other nations) - Mongolia, spending a little over a week in the truly, utterly magnificent Gobi Desert (a Czech expat who had lived in that country since the 1980s had some great stories). I would love to have seen the dinosaur fossils in the museum in Ulaanbaatar, or visit the nearby Bogd Khan national park (the oldest in the world) but I didn't have time (most work trips involve 15 hour days, and maybe 3 days off in six weeks).
  I was there to do an audit of several treatment plants for several reasons, one being that warning signs had been posted only in English, not Mongolian, with fatal results.
  I also found out that Ulaanbaatar has two severe problems:
  (a) in winter, when the poorer people living on the outskirts of town run out of coal, they burn shredded tires - and the air pollution is terrible (something I've been reminded of, with our current bushfire crisis);
  (b) in spring, the snow melt causes floods that kill several people every year - it's problem like the monsoons in South and East Asia (and flooding in Jakarta that recently killed dozens of people) that doesn't get much, if any coverage in our media.
  I tried to get some interest in a couple of options which might alleviate those problems, without success (what I've found on the internet while preparing this post suggests that others are working on possible solutions), but stayed in touch with our office's admin manager for a few years.

On top of those experiences, I have always been a voracious reader, and am very mindful of the Emily Dickinson  poem "There is no Frigate Like a Book".

Now, as I wrote, one photo I saw in a book struck home because it had a victim who looked like a friend of mine. Photos tend to humanise situations and problems (when I was getting into community activism in the 1990s, some of the best advice we ever had was to humanise what we were working on), and give events a real, human impact.

I wish we all had enough imagination/empathy to not need photos or detailed human stories before we act, but we seemingly do.

There is also the situation of human development needs - poverty, hunger, and thirst. The 40 Hour Famine was intended to, as much as raise funds, give people a sense of what it might be like to not have enough food - to give people an experience, in the hope it will lead to empathy.

The world has enough resources, in my opinion, to meet all the human development needs (the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are, I consider, an excellent statement of what is needed - and I have personal experience of how the previous Millennium Development Goals [MDG] could be a benefit, having helped [albeit from Australia} with a few MDG projects in Tanzania and Kenya) of the planet - and to meet the climate crisis (see also here and here). What we lack is the political will (especially to overcome the short-sighted  interpretations of "national interest" that afflict so many Western nations' foreign policies of late), and that is changing - and, in my nation, will change even more quickly, in the case of the climate crisis, as a result of the current bushfire crisis.

Now, having got all that out of my system (and it went quite a bit longer than I had planned), I'd like to go back to Uganda, and Buganda. The following is a brief summary: if you follow the links, you'll be able to find out quite a bit more, of course. When I've had some time to think a bit further on this, I may tidy the wording up (I'm tired, and a little smoke affected at the moment).

To begin with, Buganda is a significant part of Uganda - according to Wikipedia, a "a subnational kingdom within Uganda", home to the Baganda people, and with a long history. It is located in Uganda's central region, and tension between Buganda and other areas of Uganda has been an aspect of politics in Uganda (none of Uganda's leaders have come from Buganda - see here, here, and here).

Politically, according to this, Uganda has undergone some change since independence, and is now a republic, headed by a President, with a multi-party National Assembly elected by citizens over 18, and an independent judiciary. Uganda is classified as a "hybrid democracy" by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which means it is a nation "with regular electoral frauds, preventing them from being fair and free democracy".

Other significant issues include various conflicts (including the 1978-79 war to overthrow Idi Amin, the 1981-85 "bush war", and the "LRA" rebellion in the north), and the issue of corruption, which is connected intrinsically with the classification as a hybrid democracy.

Measures have been taken to address corruption (for example, see here, and also this story about a man who became a lawyer to win back his land), but the problem  persists.

Uganda's economy  has  grown, and started to move away from agriculture since Amin's overthrow, but problems remain - 20% of the population lives below the poverty line, energy demands are not met, and unemployment is high. The World Bank rates employment opportunities as critical to economic growth. 

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has prepared a strategy plan for Uganda over the period 2017-21, stressing the need for more investment to develop infrastructure and "human capital" - that is, people. (The AfDB also has a good Eastern Africa Regional Integration Strategy Paper.) 

Lloyds Bank reports that Uganda already receives a significant amount of foreign investment, but identifies obstacles to be addressed to improve that. An oil discovery in western Uganda is expected to lead to more investment, although I suspect a significant part of that will be sold overseas to raise cash, leaving Uganda potentially still with an energy shortage.

So what can the rest of the world do to help Uganda? Well, I haven't read, researched, been taught, nor thought anywhere near enough to be an expert, but my first suggestions would be along the lines of:

• nations, organisations and individuals outside Africa should get involved only through, or with/to the approval of, the AfDB or African Union - who for their part need to address blocks to investment, etc; 
• provide grants or low-interest loans for investment - not only in physical infrastructure like roads and rail (Uganda's location is one of its assets), but also:
   - in ITC, which is a growing and major part of the economy (and opens to door for more global engagement), and has been shown to have major potential to improve opportunities for people,
   - renewables to meet internal energy demands, and
   - subsidise education, so Uganda's greatest resource, the Ugandan people, can be properly used for the benefit of themselves, as well as the nation; and 
• address - together with the AfDB or African Union - the insidious evil of corruption.As far as Mr Musaveni goes, I think it is time The Elders, that group started by Nelson Mandela (who now have a much better website), were asked to have a talk to him.

The world is connected. We've known that for quite some time now - centuries, actually (or more - global trade [of ideas as well as economic goods] has existed in some form or other for millennia, and good and bad interactions [invasions, wars, etc, balanced by trade and sharing, and aid] between nations have been made more apparent since the 1600s), although the extent of the connection has increased in recent decades (hence the devastating global impacts of World Wars 1 and 2, the influenza pandemic after World War 1 [which actually killed more people than that war], the Great Depression between the two World Wars, the Global Financial Crisis, and everything related to the Internet). For those who need a justification for involvement, the benefits will flow round to all, just as problems not addressed will ultimately affect all as well.

I've now got a personal connection with Uganda (and other African nations, actually, through work), so, once we're through the current bushfire crisis, it will be time to start writing to a few MPs. Of course, me writing letters on my own won't be enough, so I'd like to request that others think about a polite letter to their MPs (if nothing else, send them the link to this article, and ask for their suggestions).

And may all those working for change within Uganda remember to keep themselves as safe as is possible (I have a personal interest in that now), and to be as thoughtful and clear about what they are seeking to accomplish, and how, as is possible - and remember that the audience is global today, so it is important not to drag yourselves down to others standards by retaliating to wrongdoing, but to be persistent in your quest for change (all of which has been brilliantly demonstrated recently in Sudan). If you can, maybe read Paul K Chappell's books, watch this and this video, and remember Gandhi's question:

Do you fight to change things, or to punish?

That isn't easy: the changes I fight for in my nation have killed around half a dozen people I knew personally, as well as others, and harmed yet more, including me, so that comment is made from experience. Equally from experience: it is still important to try. 

The means do shape the end, and how a nation is changed will shape what form the nation takes after that. After the change, it will be important to be aware of the harm caused to people by long term wrongs - and trauma can be passed on through generations, as shown by the inter-generational trauma caused to Indigenous people in my nation and other colonial nations, and then to address that as experts advise. I think this is something that my nation's governments, state and federal, are failing at.

I'd like to end with a positive link, one that hopefully helps show the potential that the world is robbing itself of if no investment is made in Uganda:

• https://answersafrica.com/facts-about-uganda.html.

(As a female civil engineer, I was particularly intrigued by fact no. 18, but no. 3 impresses me, and I've received evidence of no. 1, through a very generous offer of hospitality if I can get to Uganda.)


Notes
  * David Van Reybrouck's "Congo - the Epic History of a People" (pub. Fourth Estate [HarperCollins], London, 2015, first pub. 2014, Amsterdam; ISBN 9780007562923; Amazon) gives a very strong insight into the damage that has been done in the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo - both during colonialism, where human rights abuses were horrendous, and afterwards, by corruption and the wrong leaders gaining power.
 **  In Queensland in those days, we often didn't wear footwear of any sort. In fact, we would show off in front of the tourists by walking barefoot across bitumen in summer. 
 *** I got to know the city fairly well, and on the one occasion my "taxi" got lost, ducked into a shop where no-one spoke English, with my negligible Vietnamese, but we scribbled a few diagrams and worked out how to get where I needed to go. I had something similar on my first work trip to China, where a mechanic who didn't speak English and I scribbled a few diagrams and worked something out in  about ten minutes, but it took half an hour to translate, and another hour to convince the engineers that it was possible.