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Kayiira Murder Report: Lessons for Uganda
The year was 2007 and it all started well at least on the political front. The Democratic Party then flexed her muscles and forced the government to wake from its complacency and stupid slumber and come out after 20 years to release the Kayiira murder report which it has kept under the carpet all along. I am not interested in the whole debacle whether the report is true, real, genuine or authentic. But I am interested in what transpired from the report and what the whole story taught us as Ugandans.
1. That once the people stand resolute on a certain question incessantly, they can force the government to wake up from its political siesta and take action. Ugandans are too gentle compared to other East Africans that’s why we are constantly abused by the political elite and they go away scot-free. The Democratic Party has paved for us the way and opened our eyes. If Ugandans can stand together and make enough noise without fearing any manner of intimidation the government can accomplish something. There are a lot of things that call for urgent action from government and we cannot have the courage to note them down since the list would be endless. With pressure from D.P, the government which that was complacent for 20 years, managed to contact the Metropolitan Police in the U.K in a record time, produce the “certified copy” of the report to the press and table the same before Cabinet for further discussion. But all such action and speed has been prompted by the pressure and firmness from the Democratic Party. This is a great lesson for us fellow Ugandans. Since President Museveni alleged that his Cabinet Ministers are a sleeping lot, it seems, they need a lot of noise to wake them up and act. The President expressed what Uganda actually is, that is, a disorderly society. Uganda as a developing country has not yet built up viable social institutions which would guarantee equal opportunity to the individual citizens and the proper and harmonious functioning of the state. This brings us to the idea of a well-ordered society, which is a society effectively regulated by a public conception of justice, as a companion idea used to specify the central organising idea of society as a fair system of cooperation. However Uganda as a political society is deficient in the structures which ought to exist in a well ordered society. This creates a sort of social discord because the following three elements which operate in a well ordered society are lacking or partly deficient. First, and implied by the idea of a public conception of justice, it is a society in which everyone accepts, and knows that everyone else accepts, the very same political conception of justice. Second, and implied by the idea of effective regulation by a public conception of justice, society’s basic structure, that is, its main political and social institutions and the way they hang together as one system of cooperation, is publicly known, or with good reason believed, to satisfy those principles of justice. Third and also implied by the idea of effective regulation, citizens have a normally effective sense of justice, that is, one that enables them to understand and apply the publicly recognised principles of justice, and for the most part to act accordingly as their position in society, with its duties and obligations requires. In a well-ordered society, then, the public conception of justice provides a mutually recognised point of view from which citizens can adjudicate their claims of political right on their political institutions or against one another. Subsequent to the above, and an analysis of the existing context in contemporary Ugandan society, it is quite obvious that the country is not nearer the concept of the basic structure of society, which “is the way in which the main political and social institutions of society fit together into one system of social cooperation, and the way they assign basic rights and duties and regulate the division of advantages that arises from social cooperation over time.” I would consider that failure to measure to such a standard would place Uganda in what Rawls considers as the “burdened societies”. He portrays such societies that, “while they are not expansive or aggressive, lack the political and cultural traditions, the human capital and know-how, and, often, the material and technological resources needed to be well-ordered.” This understanding would illustrate the kind of problems which would reign in a society and the position of the individual person in the whole setting. It seems the Ugandan government can only act as long as there is pressure born upon it. Similar to the above Kayiira report, Uganda ratified the International Labour Organisation-C26 Minimum Wage- Fixing Machinery Convention in 1963, to fix minimum wages, but more than 40 years after the ratification, Uganda still lacks a clear minimum wage-fixing mechanism. Under this convention, each member of the International Labour Organisation that ratifies the convention is supposed to create or maintain machinery whereby minimum rates of wages can be fixed for workers employed in certain of the trades or parts of trades in which no arrangements exist for the effective regulations of wages by collective agreement. The Ugandan government had to make an international commitment to pass labour laws before the end of April 2006. This development had been born by pressure from the United States Congress, failure of which Uganda risks being removed from the list of beneficiaries of the US’s African Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA). The bills under consideration are: Employment bill, Occupational Safety and Health Bill, Labour Union bill, and Labour Dispute bill. This is prompted by the fact that labour laws which were enacted before the 1995 Constitution are obsolete with some provisions contradicting the constitution. My foremost conclusion on this point is that our government can only act as long as there some pressure from outside. Wake up Ugandans and make noise!! Bravo and thumbs up, Democratic Party!!
2. That no wrong-doing will ever be hidden from the memory of Ugandans however long it takes to uncover the truth. Memory is one of the greatest tools we humans possess. Memory is the retention of, and ability to recall, information, personal experiences, and procedures, skills and habits. There is no universally agreed upon model of the mind/brain and no universally agreed upon model of how memory works. Nevertheless, a good model for how memory works must be consistent with the subjective nature of consciousness and with what is known from scientific studies. Subjectivity in remembering involves at least three important factors:
(a) Memories are constructions made in accordance with present needs, desires, influences, etc.
(b) Memories are often accompanied by feelings and emotions
(c) Memory usually involves awareness of the memory
One of the most popular models of memory sees memory as a present act of consciousness, reconstructive of the past, stimulated by an analogue of an engram called the "retrieval cue." The engram is the neural network representing fragments of past experiences which have been encoded. The evidence is strong that there are distinct types and elements of memory which involve different parts of the brain, e.g., the hippocampus and ongoing incidents of day-to-day living (short-term or working memory); the amygdala and emotional memories. Memories might better be thought of as a collage or a jigsaw puzzle than as "tape recordings," "pictures" or "video clips" stored as wholes. On this model, perceptual or conscious experience does not record all sense data experienced. Most sense data is not stored at all. What is stored are bits and fragments of experience which are encoded in engrams. Exactly how they are encoded is not our concern but what is important is that people store their daily experiences and they come to form their imagination. Parliament has, in the past, passed touchy bills and it is alleged that there is a plan to table other contentious bills which are anti-life like abortion. Ugandans are carefully watching what is going on and will one day demand an explanation, since they keep all such issues alive in their memory.
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
St. Mbaaga’s Major Seminary Ggaba
P. O Box 4165 Kampala
UGANDA (East Africa)
Homepage: http://ugandapeople.com
