When you wake up and the major headline in a newspaper is 'No hope' you are tempted to blame someone. Prof. Tarsis Kabwegyere thinks it's okay to blame the government if we are looking for something to blame over the Bududa disaster. And he is spot on, who else can we blame?

I have watched Prof. Kabwegyere deal with disasters in a more or less very disastrous fashion. I know many people have asked about how prepared we are for such occurrences. That should not be a question for a country with a ministry in charge of disaster management and which claims to be anchored on good governance principles. Unfortunately, that is a valid question because of how the government responds to disasters in this country.

We know three villages of Kubehwo, Namakansa and Nametsi in Bukalasi sub-county suffered greatly on Monday night with hundreds of residents feared dead. In the mean time, we are only speaking in terms of hundreds of people missing and about a hundred dead. With no knowledge of the magnitude of the disaster, it is not surprising that scenes of tired, unprepared and poorly equipped men (and maybe women) were the ones on rescue mission.

When no one knows the number of those affected, not even an estimate, how can we effectively marshal for help both locally and internationally? Just how many is hundreds? Is it one hundred or eight hundred? If indeed three villages have been buried, how can no fairly accurate estimate be available? The government spent a lot of money in the Community Information System (CIS) project just recently as a rural development strategy. Was Bududa covered by this project or not? Even if it wasn't, surely we have a National Bureau of Statistics in this country, not to mention statistician in every district.

I would have expected that the government comes up with, say, Shs5 billion to kick-start the processes of resettlement and emergency rather than leave it to good Samaritans and charity organisations. The kind of money that the government availed was so embarrassing to say the least given that only MTN and Tullow Oil contributed the same amount. Is anybody ashamed or should we be afraid?

It appears the government has taken this private sector thing too far. In fact, it is abdicating its role in economic development. Disasters world over are not handled in a laissez-faire fashion. Every time disasters occur, good Samaritans swing in action as the Red Cross did which is commendable, but does that lesson the responsibility of the government? I know by now I have an email from my Rotary Club asking for donations, and one at my work place while everywhere I turn there is someone begging for help in the name of Bududa.

Good Samaritans and whoever collects help in the name of the poor, or suffering people are never accountable to the people despite their good intentions. But the government is; which is why it must be seen to be in charge and not depend on calling for external help to avail the needed resources. We cannot afford to be complacent and leave things 'To Whom It May Concern'.

Rebuking people who have lost everything for livelihood including their shelter, resilience and family as well as telling them to leave without showing them where to go is actually a major disaster in itself. I am reminded of the words of Arthur Koestler, the author of Darkness at Noon, 'show us not the end without the means'. May this disaster help the government speed up the national data bank and identification and enforce policies better.

Ms Maractho is a development economist and lecturer at Uganda Christian University Mukono