Elderly man walking on the streetsI’ll say one more time, Uganda is presently a country of the walking dead. The people you find in the streets of Kampala walking or driving in their third-hand Japanese imports are but mere apparitions. It is just bodies walking. No souls. It is not just the boda-boda riders. Everyone is boiling inside. A small argument or altercation quickly escalates into mob action. The picture I am describing might not necessarily apply to Kampala’s big thieves and politicians. These are people with dead souls. They cannot only eat an entire hospital, but can build graves without corpses. The ordinary Ugandan is on the edge. I am not talking about the countryside where “poverty stinks,” according to, ironically, bwana Museveni. Because they are still able to access food from tilling the land – despite landgrabbers and aggressive cash-croppers – the rural folks could be used to extended periods without cash (although this is actually a terrible thing to assume). But for the more urbanised populations, who earn their livelihoods through trade or rent of labour, the pain is unbearable. True, there are some flashy chaps with a bit of disposable cash, who appear to be doing just fine: Magendo dealers (in gold, timber, stones); connectednon-taxpaying “businesspeople,” and tenderpreneurs who are guaranteed of public tenders even when they don’t apply. These are actually too many to count, and together they cost Uganda a humble estimate of Shs 9 – 11 trillion annually. (Before Ministers Balaam Barugahara and Justine Nameere, Daily Monitor, The Observer and later the civil society organisation, AGORA endlessly exposed these thieves, ironically, to the chagrin of government). But I tell you, dear Uganda, everybody else is just keeping up appearances – including these flashy people. Even the so-called big companies: We all saw them in 2021 lining up for public bailouts. The list had 65 big names. We recently saw another big one, Fresh Cuts, get an arguably deserved tax forgiveness. It is “deserved” because the entire country actually needs one such tax waiver. One could say these big ones are still reeling from the ruins of the Covid-19 pandemic. But who isn’t? What happens to us with neither big names nor Godfathers? Many from amongst us have actually drowned. If Covid-19 had left some life in us, taxes sucked it out. EKIRI KU GROUND If you are in a circle of 10 friends, and called any of them for a quick loan of just Shs 100,000, you will be lucky if two of them offered to send you half the amount. This is not me being in the wrong circle of friends, but Uganda’s economy is an equal-opportunity oppressor. (I will concede, that my circle of mostly “reforming Marxists” has to comfort themselves with life on the edge, and there aren’t many Fredrick Engles). One has to fully embrace the “morality” of capitalism – cheating, deceiving, inflating, aggressions, selfishness – to thrive in Museveni’s Uganda. Too bad for me, I have no neoliberals around me. People in urban centres, assumed (wrongly or correctly) to have some meaningful income, receive a daily average of three to five calls from friends and kindred asking for bailouts. The callers are often asking for food, transport to return home or a quick medical bill. With no breakthrough from friends, Mobile Money quick loans have become the go-to option. Then the poverty Olympics begin: for anyone sending money, you have to ask the recipient, “to which number should I send?” Or the recipient quickly alerts the sender about an alternative debt-free number. No one can tell the thoroughness of prevailing laws or regulations with which telecoms are giving loans to Ugandans. Telecoms have so seamlessly replaced banks in this function – and they are making a killing. But one thing is true: the interest rates are exorbitant – way worse than banks. In fact, not too long ago, because of the explosion in telecoms loans, MTN and Airtel are retrospectively considering applying for banking licenses. That telecom-provided small and instant loans have become too common tells you a lot about our condition of endless crisis, and no end in sight. Many are just not calling friends and relatives anymore – who, too, are in the same boat. They are calling the machine, which doesn’t lend them out of empathy, but which has seen an opportunity to extend its extractive mandibles. In fact, the machine nowadays offers to “help with credit” to save you from the embarrassment of not being able to complete a transaction. The irony is not missed when these children of IMF, World Bank structural adjustment programmes (who brought about our collective ruin in the first place), are the ones turning around to fix our cash crises. Talk about bombs and food aid coming from the same place. Yes, on the ruins of Uganda Telecom stands these foreign telecom companies. Ironically, sometime in 2002, even President Museveni was complaining to Prime Minister Apolo Nsimbambi (RIP) about the monopoly of contracts he had signed in a supposedly free market space. On this, add the mindboggling levels of taxation in the country where, as journalist Dicta Asiimwe told me one time: “Ugandans are punished for just spending their money.” It is so painful that from the same amount of money where a PAYE deduction is made, the government continues to deduct more every time one makes a transaction – and worse when this transaction is a Mobile Money transaction. It so feels like a conspiracy. At the end of the day, the money circulating in the entire country has not necessarily dwindled – in fact, it has gone up – but humongous amounts are extracted and held up in the pockets of a few (telecoms, banks, moneylenders, URA, among others). The average person is left ‘grassing’. yusufkajura@gmail.com The author is a political theorist based at Makerere UniversityThe post Ugandans are terrifyingly broke, ku ground kikambwe appeared first on The Observer Media Ltd.