Ugandans’ creative ways of spreading wealth

By GRACE NAKATO

I am sure people were surprised that many of us this side of the EAC are not living below the poverty line, even after they witnessed our president dish out about Sh8.3 million in cold hard cash, instead of a cheque that is likely to bounce. We have fewer poor people because when we eat, we eat creatively and at all levels.

Take the case of Kyambogo University, which has lost about Sh11.7B in a school fees scam dating back almost a decade. The students had their own side business of forging documents such as receipts and examination cards, thus enabling their colleagues to live on campus illegally and even sit for examinations.

FAKE RECEIPTS

There is even a cook who was found with about Sh4 million in his bank account, yet his pay slip indicates he earns about Sh16,000 a month. One of the detectives on the case said their preliminary investigations had shown this suspect was sometimes assigned the role of office attendant, and he had been issuing fake cash receipts to students and pocketing the cash.

Police also suspect that tuition fees for students could have been siphoned through a fraudulent bank account in the scam, allegedly involving some university officials. To keep the country solvent, our politicians do not give out freebies to the ‘haves’; these are a special reserve for voters. You may have heard of one MP who has been arrested in India for attempting to extort about Sh1.6B from some Indian firm seeking mining rights in Uganda. The MP was the bouncer to the businessman who had come to collect his cash from the Indian defaulters, only for them to run to the police and cry wolf! Diplomatic immunity is yet to come to the rescue, and parliament is debating the matter and seeking to save face.

SHOWBIZ

To ‘live above the poverty line’ may, sometimes, call for outrageous expenditure. Ask singer Redsan and any other person who attended the Badilisha Concert the other week. Chameleon, a Ugandan musician of international repute, set a new standard in showbiz. Forget the helicopters that are now the most common means of transport; he made history in Uganda by appearing on stage in a Nasa procured space suit.

ASPHYXIATED

He figured earth has plenty of oxygen and did not order the oxygen tank to go with it; so he had to take the helmet off after waving to the crowd to avoid suffocation. He, however, forgot that lack of gravity on the moon means that the suits are weighted down.

Prancing around on stage in a 20kg piece of clothing was not easy, and the space suit soon turned into a broiler suit. Luckily, he is thin or he would have been sweltering just from walking to the microphone. Maybe ganja has affected his brain, because he almost asphyxiated when he forgot the instructions on how to remove it, when he couldn’t take the heat any more.

Lastly, to ensure the country remains solvent, the government seeks to reduce the number of people consuming resources by passing a law limiting number of children per family to four. How to enforce this in a society where even some women have more than one husband, will be interesting to watch.