It is time for fevered speculation of who is in, who hoped to be in but had his or her name deleted by evil people at the last minute, and who is out outright.
Who knows, by the time you read this piece, our newly minted President may have named new ministers to work toward turning Uganda into a lower middle income country by 20-20-something.
President Yoweri Museveni says his latest five-year term is for service delivery.
So, all previous terms were about what, you wonder? Public sector corruption? Incompetence? Sounds like service delivery was never the point, which could explain why our public healthcare system and UPE are falling apart, to take just two examples.
The Cabinet will be named on the back of the release of a mind-boggling report on a now-ordinary matter: grand theft of public money, this time from the Uganda National Roads Authority.
Stealing public money has become so normalised, so casual, over the last several decades it is like waking up and expecting the tropical sun to rise and set.
“Your Excellency, I would not like to continue with this depressing litany of leadership failures, operational miscues, supervisory lapses, shocking negligence, mediocre performance, blatant fraud and managerial incompetence, which together, add up to what looks like a comedy of errors,” said Justice Catherine Bamugemereire as she handed Mr Museveni her 1,300-page tome of a report on the rot in the national roads agency.
I think she miss-spoke. Comedy of errors should have read: theft of biblical proportions.
In her plaintive speech, Justice Bamugemereire touched on one of the most bizarre things in the Museveni bureaucracy. “There were strong indications that the supervisory relationship had been inverted or reversed — with UNRA being led rather than leading the contractor and consultants.”
Inversion of relationships can be said of just about every state entity that controls a bit of cash in Uganda today. And theft is the reason. The even bigger reason is that Mr Museveni has allowed all this stuff to grow and bloom on his watch. We can mention cases of grand theft going back decades, but let’s stick to more recent ones: Global Fund, Gavi, CHOGM, blah, blah.
Each succeeding case simply emboldens the crooks and criminals because impunity is the thing.
As Justice Bamugemereire handed over her report, Mr Museveni ordered the Inspectorate of Government and the police to investigate further.
Ah, well. We are on familiar path, a path leading nowhere. There was no sense of outrage in Mr President’s manner, outrage that says even me, Ssabalwanyi, I can’t believe Shs9 trillion gave me 1,500km of road instead of 5,000km. The President came off as one presiding at yet another borehole launch event.
Which begs for a different kind of inquiry. The usual run-of-the-mill inquiries are dead ends under the present government.
Uganda needs an inquiry that probes into the possibility that powerful elements in the government are actually running a mega slush fund (“a reserve of money used for illicit purposes, especially political bribery”) and have been doing so for decades. In short, we may be having a well-established practice where major public projects are deliberately messed with so as to generate money for political work.
We are seeing the results of a long and extended focus on staying in power and not efficient service delivery. If what we have on our hands is not a slush fund enterprise, it is the fact that negligence at the highest levels has allowed the mafia to capture state entities such as UNRA — yes the mafia go where the state is putting big monies, they follow the money.
There is no mystery at all as to what is happening in Uganda. The kind of corruption we are seeing could not only threaten state security, but also take over the state in its entirety. We could end up with a situation where politicians serve corruption, not fight it. If they dare fight it, they lose their power. So, out of self-interest, corruption needs to be checked (somewhat).
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