Oh, come on, Mbabazi; stop it already!

I can’t believe it the roads are this bad. I can’t believe it Ugandans live in hovels. Oh, my Gawwwddd! After 30 years in power, we could have done better. Now, vote me. I am metamorphosing, shedding my skin of blind and incompetent government for something new and shiny and marvellous.

Vote change. Remember, it’s Mr Museveni who had ultimate power as President, not me even as super minister and as prime minister.

With his unending crocodile tears, Independent presidential candidate Amama Mbabazi is embarrassing himself. He is weakening his campaign message.

There is nothing new about the utter and complete shambles that delivery of government services is. It is something the media, their weaknesses notwithstanding, have been reporting routinely for decades.

The response of people in the government and the ruling NRM party, including Mr Mbabazi when he occupied the top perches, has been to ignore the stories or to trash them as blinded partisan rubbish.

If only someone in the government paid attention, bothered to do some basic checking to establish the truth and improve things. That rarely happens because we have a most non-responsive government. Why? Because the same President and the same party will keep power regardless.

Elections change nothing at the top. So we have had a government that will do what it feels like doing and if that aligns with what the people want, lucky are the people.

Mr Mbabazi has been a central part of this set up. He knows about the shacks that serve as people’s homes and classrooms. He can’t pretend otherwise. Better to apologise to Ugandans and keep pushing the message that a lot has been done and a lot more needs to be done, including a peaceful change in occupancy at State House, and he is the man to deliver the goods having found new lenses with which to see the country. Intellectual honesty counts for something even in politics.

It is unlikely Mr Mbabazi, while in government, would have defended the nurses of Abim Hospital. The CAO (read cow) wants to punish the nurses for allowing Dr Kizza Besigye, an Opposition presidential candidate, with news cameras in toe, into the hospital, exposing all the glorious decay.

Because a vast majority of RDCs and CAOs and district health officers are busy feeling important, pulling rank on hapless underlings instead of doing what Tanzanian president Magufuli would do, we have a country that is incapable of eradicating stupid diseases like cholera.
If only minions like Abim CAO Moses Kaziba Nandhala focused a little on serving Ugandans and not serving President Museveni, focused on being accountable to the taxpayer and not to some fat cat in the government, we would all be proud of Abim Hospital and much else beside. They get exposed and turn shame into misguided power.

Mr Mbabazi knows all about this stuff, the stuff of corruption and impunity, the stuff of incompetence and zero sanction, the stuff of power and blind arrogance. Which makes his dissembling nauseating in the extreme. As some Ugandans say, he should stop it already.

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It is seven years today that this column first appeared (in Saturday Monitor) and only today will I apologise for a cliché: how time flies! That first column was about a Zimbabwean lawyer I had met in Johannesburg. Part of the column read: First, however, a word about Dambudzo. He is not your run-of-the-mill lawyer.

Earlier this decade, as Mr Mugabe was beginning to run crazy, Dambudzo stepped forward to defend media houses and journalists under siege. That took courage and conviction. Those were the days when newspaper offices such as those belonging to the Daily News were being fire-bombed and outspoken lawyers like Beatrice Mtetwa were being severely harassed.

Dambudzo, who once headed Zimbabwe’s bar association, was actually clobbered alongside Ms Mtetwa only last year by Mr Mugabe’s police for daring participate in a public demonstration in defence of the rule of law.

As we talked, or rather as I listened to him, Dambudzo did not say much. “These days every time you have a chance to leave Zimbabwe, you grab at it,” he said very early on in our chat.