Progress

The big question in Uganda these days is 

The national presidential elections were supposed to take place last Wednesday the 7th March but as there was a problem with the ballot papers, the whole thing was postponed until Monday 12th. This has only given the various candidates the time they need to get up to more nonsense. There are daily threats by different parties to pull out of the race unless certain conditions are met. Five of the six main candidadates threatened to pull out yesterday unless the electoral process was demilitarized. Many of them are concerned about the fact that the army that Museveni controls is controlling security for the elections.

The police are making their own preparations though. On Wednesday I saw a group of about thirty policemen practicing their baton charges. They were on the local football pitch wearing full anti-riot regalia, with helmets, shields and batons. I can't decide whether this is comforting or not.

The pictures above show my friend Mathias demonstrating the greetings of supporters of the two main candidates. The one on the left is for Besigye and the one on the right is for Museveni. For information on these characters see my Temperature Increases page. As you travel throughout the country people constantly greet you with one of these two signs. On Monday I was in Kiwoko working at the hospital. Apparently Museveni was meant to be visiting the town so all the way home people were lining the roads cheering and giving me the thumbs up. I found this all a bit disturbing until I later learnt what the sign meant!

Who knows how the elections will go. Last I heard there are 2.5 million ghost voters registered! This is in a country with a population of 22 million where less than half of that number are not eligible to vote.

There has been some progress on the computer front. As I mentioned before, I have some computers 'winging' their way from Ireland. They arrived in Jinga in the east of Uganda over two weeks ago. A certain Rev Remmie Mufumba is dealing with the authorities on matters of import duty and so on. He rang me to come immediately to Jinga to collect them as he understandably didn't want them to be on his property for too long in case they got stolen. Despite expecting the computers to be released from customs within a couple of hours, two weeks have passed and they are still there. 

There is something wrong anyway with the whole notion of charging tax for equipment that is going to be used for a country's development. Mathias (above) had to pay over $2,000 tax on some drill parts that he needed a couple of years ago. Miraculously, and that's the only word that describes it, all the computer equipment, plus the scanner and laser printer have been collectively valued by the authorities at less than £400! This means the tax should be less than £200 rather than the possible thousands of pounds that I feared. 

Another friend Andrew who lived in Kenya for three years knows of incidents where aid had to be returned to the donor country because the donor society couldn't afford to pay the tax that was being asked. On one occasion, an incubator that was being sent from Australia for the government hospital in Nairobi could not be delivered because the tax the authorities were asking for was so high. Here you have thousands of pounds worth of aid, being shipped (also at a huge cost) to a government body, but another government body prevents that aid from arriving at its destination. It is madness, but this sort of nonsense occurrence is typical of Africa. These are the frustrations that make it hard to work here. 

Once the elections are over though I hope to receive the call that the computers have cleared, and then I can get down to the business of teaching some practical computer skills.