Joachim Buwembo
16 November 2009
opinion
Nairobi — Welcome to Uganda, country of ghosts. If you are entering from the east, you will pass through the ghost towns of Tororo and Jinja, once prosperous centres of economic activity until the ghosts moved in.
Life in superstitious societies can be as interesting as it is irritating.
Even in this digital era, the fear of ghosts in our not-so-scientifically oriented society is so deep rooted that it is even reflected in government reports and speeches by top leaders.
If a project, be it individual, communal or even national in which a lot of resources have been invested fails to take off or falls short of expectations, we are quick to blame some ghosts for being at work.
So if a woman for whom many cows were paid and in whom many sleepless hours were invested by the husband fails to conceive, some ghosts sent by a jealous neighbour are blamed.
And when the national army fails to defeat some rag tag rebel group for two years, some ghost soldiers in its ranks are blamed.
If the army fails to uproot the troublesome rebel group for two decades, then maybe an entire ghost battalion or two have been at work.
When we launch an ambitious programme to give free education to all school age children and the products are half cooked, then there must have been some ghost pupils causing confusion in the project.
If year in year out the quality of the universal education remains low, then we swear some ghost teachers have also entered the mix.
If the problem persists, then there must be entire ghost schools across the countryside.
When the ghosts are not satisfied with chewing up resources in specific sectors like education and defence, they come out onto the streets and start disrupting public order.
So when crime seems to be getting out of hand, we learn that there are ghosts that have penetrated the police force.
Then comes the big one: Democracy and elections.
Botched elections have been at the root of instability, having driven the country to a prolonged civil war in the 1980s.
A lot of effort was later put into setting up an elaborate electoral system complete with a much-touted electronic voters register.
With a computerised register, the electoral system should be of 100 per cent integrity.
So when the supreme court consecutively keeps pronouncing the polling process a flop, it can only be ghosts that are letting us down.
First it was the political opposition to allege ghost voters, in their millions, on the register.
Later the government side also started seeing the ghosts, at least a million.
And the opposition has also seen 5,000 ghost polling stations.
And so on and so forth in our spooky land.
With no scientific solution in sight for all these problems, the time may not be far off when we shall start hearing of ghost judges defeating justice in the courts, ghost priests defeating the churches' spiritual and moral missions, ghost Members of Parliament messing up the law making process.
And God forbid, may there not emerge ghost bank customers to start chewing up whichever deposits we make.
I think the time has come for the country to recruit a team of ghost-busters.
But oh nooo, it will also be infiltrated by ghost ghost-busters!
Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for Development Journalism.
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