[Ugnet] Charity Begins At Home, Mr. Kutesa

What are we to make of the government of an impoverished African country donating a few hundred thousand dollars to the relief and rebuilding efforts in the hurricane-devastated communities in the United States Gulf coast?

If that government is anything like our Ugandan outfit, before we read too much magnanimity into the gesture, we would be better served by listening very carefully at the diplomatic niceties accompanying the gift.

That and the government's record in responding to disasters closer to home are key to discerning the real purpose of the donation.

In case you missed the news, Washington File, the official wire service of the United States Department of State, reported on September 8 that Sam Kutesa, our very own foreign minister, added our hard-earned US$200,000 to the contributions of a few other distinguished African countries to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.

Kutesa expressed our collective sympathy at the deaths and suffering of the people affected. Uganda was in a way reciprocating Uncle Sam's generosity to the world including Uganda, Kutesa said.

All very nice words. If I'd had a hand in drafting Kutesa's statement, I would have advised, "enough said, sir." But our foreign minister also sounded off on how in Africa much of human tragedy is man-made rather than natural.

He mentioned the "human tragedies of Idi Amin and Milton Obote", which he said led to the deaths of more than 800,000 Ugandans.

At this point, I would have strongly urged Kutesa to name more names and tragedies, both in Uganda and abroad to avoid the appearance of exploiting disasters to curry favor with the United States government, reminiscent of the manner in which our country joined the much-derided U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" against Iraq.

The fact is most Ugandans, like the Bush administration, are aware that one of the biggest tragedies in Uganda's history is still going on.

Idi Amin and Milton Obote presided over governments on whose watch many Ugandans perished 20 and more years ago.

Yoweri Museveni instead rules the roost in an era when 1,000 Ugandans a week die in so-called protected villages.

Four UN agencies -- World Health organization, United Nations Children's Fund, World Food Program, and United Nations Population Fund, Britain's Department for International Development, and the International Rescue Committee recently published the numbers in a health and mortality survey carried out in the districts of Gulu, Kitgum, and Pader, whose residents mostly live in what are in effect deadly concentration camps.

No amount of howling and scowling by a chorus of cabinet ministers has moved the report's publishers to change the estimated death rates that are a result of our government's miserably failed counter-insurgency strategy.

Instead of accepting that consigning starving Ugandans to disease-ridden and poorly defended camps is akin to delivering a death sentence that keeps on killing, our government's best response to the report is that it is exaggerated. So, what's the correct number? One hundred or 500 a week?

You'd think that this deeply offensive and shameful reaction is coming from a bunch of primary school children at a debating contest where the position of losers and winners has no immediate real life consequences.

No one in the UN or human rights community is calling it genocide yet, which would require evidence of expressed intent on the part of Ugandan government officials. But the effects are clearly genocidal because parents and children from a single ethnic group, the Luo (most of them Acholi), are being decimated.

Let us remember that the United Nations and the so-called international community are latecomers in condemning the criminal negligence in northern Uganda. But they have been so shocked at the level of deaths, deprivation, and suffering among the nearly 2 million IDPs that they have used terms such as "one of the world's worst humanitarian emergencies" or worse to describe the situation.

Roughly a decade ago, the United States Agency for International Development contracted a consultant to study the war against the Lords Resistance Army, which even then had already taken a heavy toll.

The resulting USAID report moved not a single soul in the Ugandan government to correct course. John Nagenda, President Museveni's adviser on the media, went so far as to say that the report belonged to the trash can. I wonder if somewhere deep in the labyrinths of U.S. government, there is someone who sees the irony of the representative of one disaster incompetent administration making a token gesture of help to another seasoned in the dark art of serial cock-ups.

Much like two lost village drunks trying to steady and guide each other on a narrow potholed path after a tropical rainstorm.

[Ugnet] Charity Begins At Home, Mr. Kutesa

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