Denise Grady explains how a woman who caught the Marburg virus in Uganda has become a medical celebrity. And Uganda tourism takes another blow. Damn.
“Michelle Barnes never imagined that her vacation to Uganda would make her a medical celebrity.
Ms. Barnes, 44, became ill in January 2008, a few days after returning home to Golden, Colo. At first, she seemed to have a typical case of traveler’s diarrhea, but she soon worsened. She broke out in a rash and developed abdominal pain, terrible fatigue, weakness and confusion. Blood tests found her white-cell count low and her liver and kidneys beginning to fail. She was hospitalized, still deteriorating. Her blood was taking too long to clot, and her pancreas and her muscles were inflamed…”
Not to mention, while demonstrating much concern for the doctors and staff in the US, there is zero discussion of the spread of the virus in Uganda from what I can tell.
In yesterday’s Sunday Monitor Angelo Izama wrote of widespread concern regarding the potential for electoral violence leading up to the 2011 Uganda national elections. He writes:
“In several interviews including with donor sources Sunday Monitor has confirmed that there are serious concerns about the militarisation of Ugandan society ahead of the next elections. In particular, are the military training course tailored for village level officials allied to the NRM and the issuing of military fatigues and guns to them.”
But exposing the campaign of militarisation of NRM supporters, or “election watchers”, clearly touched a raw nerve in Museveni who immediately phoned the Monitor protesting the article and spoke out publicly in Gulu, saying:
“These people of Monitor, I am going to deal with them if they don’t change their ways,” Mr Museveni later said yesterday afternoon in Gulu while officiating at the consecration of Rt. Rev. Johnson Gakumba as the seventh bishop of the Northern Uganda Anglican Diocese. “They want to scare away investors by such reporting,” Mr Museveni said.
Militarisation of the public + media crackdown = bumpy road ahead. Still, it’s not too late to prevent election violence. And it begins with exposing raw nerves.
Ugh. Bukenya’s son is lost to yet another fatal car crash, Gen. Kazini is allegedly killed by his mistress (“reckless living” according to M7), another bus overturns killing seven people (including two who could not even be identified), a Uganda-bound plane crashes into the Kigali airport, all amongst a number of more personal losses. I am sad, but mostly angry. Almost all of the deaths and tragedies I have witnessed in the past few weeks were far from inevitable. Rosebell started a conversation that mirrors my frustration and anger. The deaths of Uganda’s elite are no less tragic than the deaths of those who perish on a bus, or plane, or languish in the country’s understaffed and undersupplied clinics and hospitals, but I wouldn’t mind so much who got more news coverage if only something was done to prevent these needless deaths in the future! Arg! How long must we mourn and suffer and cry out before something gets done? What would it take to get a high quality hospital so that we don’t have to fly abroad when we need serious medical attention? What would it take to properly police roads and public transportation? The buses will not stop overturning and cars will not stop crashing on their own. It is only people who can prevent these tragedies. They need not happen. This is madness.
I love knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but as I embark on this five-year journey otherwise known as grad school, one thing I don’t want to do is get stuck inside, both literally and figuratively. Literally, I don’t want to see the sky for only 20 minutes a day on the walk to and from the car, and figuratively (and more importantly), I don’t want to get stuck in a world where only other academics or econ-y types find my work interesting/palatable/intelligible. This has been on my mind a lot recently as I have been trying to home in on a specific research question for my first major research project/paper (which I will hereafter refer to as a field paper). I can think of lots of research questions, but certainly not all of equal pertinence to the lives of ordinary people. Which got me thinking, what would be of most pertinence? I am not a doctor, I am not a teacher (yet, anyway), I am not a civil engineer…there are many things I can’t do to improve people’s lives. So what can I do? Well, hopefully (and this is the goal anyway, I think), I will be able to provide some small insight or suggestion to help solve problems people care about. So what do people care about?
Since Uganda is mostly on my mind, I remembered a recent Afrobarometer survey asked exactly this question. Ok, not exactly. The exact question was, “What are the most important problems facing this country that the government should address?” The answers? (according to % of people who listed this concern first)
Poverty/Destitution: 43%
Unemployment: 28%
Health: 27%
Food shortage: 20%
Infrastructure/Roads: 20%
Seems pretty obvious in retrospect. But what wasn’t in the top 5? Democracy/Political Rights (3%), Orphans (2%), Political Instability/Ethnic Tensions (2%), International War (0%), AIDS (5%), and Inequality (2%), among others. Less obvious now, right? This is not to say that no one cares about these things, just that they are not the most important things for most people. Of course these things are also related to the above “most important problems”, and it could be that democracy (or something else) will solve all of these problems (I am skeptical though). Still, I think it’s always good to keep in mind what people are struggling with on a daily basis even while trying to figure out what’s up with democratic peace (for example).
Now, back to that field paper…
So I fell off the bloggingwagon in a major way. Apologies. But 7 weeks into grad school and back in California (for a while anyway) I think I can credibly commit to staying on-board. There’s lots to catch up on, but instead I think I’ll just pick up where we left off and fill in the gaps as we go along.
One of the most interesting things I have read so far? “Tax Me If You Can: Ethnic Geography, Democracy and the Taxation of Agriculture in Africa,” in APSR by Kimuli Kasara, Stanford Political Science PhD graduate who is now teaching at Columbia. Basically she finds that cash crop farmers who are the same ethnicity as the head of state face higher taxes than farmers of a different ethnicity. This goes against the classical ethnically-based patronage argument. A more thorough understanding of how exactly patronage works is clearly in order.
Ok, back to nuclear weapons reading.
PS This post is dedicated to Anna. She knows why.
Dr. Olara Otunnu, former UN Under-Secretary General and Special Representative for
Children and Armed Conflict, will be on his way back to his native Uganda soon. This is causing quite a stir in political circles, especially with talk of Dr. Otunnu, a northerner with longstanding ties to UPC, making a bid for the presidency in the 2011 elections. Below is an interview with Dr. Otunnu by Angelo Izama from yesterday’s Sunday Monitor:
Are you planning to come back?
It is indeed my intention to come home sometime soon.
What has motivated you to return?
Uganda is my home. One does not need any special motivation to return to one’s home. I will come back as a citizen, a son of the soil returning home. I must stress that my homecoming will bear no political labels or affiliation. It will be a completely non-partisan event, simply a much-longed-for homecoming. read more…
Below is the last column Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem wrote for the Daily Monitor, which he had written last week before a car accident took his life on May 25, 2009.
Govts discourage enterprise and penalise those fighting poverty
The irony of Africa being a very rich continent but Africans being some of the poorest peoples in the world is no longer lost to anyone. While we can argue about the historical, structural, attitudinal, personal and institutional causes of this state of affairs, the fact remains that majority of our peoples remain in need amidst plenty.
Decades of aid, humanitarian intervention, prayers, activism, development plans, action plans, government declarations and so many other initiatives have not produced fundamental change for the poorest and weakest sections of our societies. Yet Africans remain one of the most optimistic peoples, perpetually believing that tomorrow will be better. It is always a miracle how majority of the poor, whether in our urban slums or impoverished rural areas, survive.
Our cities’ overburdened road infrastructures have spurned entrepreneurship in the form of shops on roads and legs meandering between armies of pedestrians and impatient vehicle drivers frustrated at the gridlock traffic. Similarly informal settlements have developed, several times the size of our capital cities with little or no infrastructures. Some of them like Kibera Slum in Nairobi are even becoming ‘famous’ globally for poverty tourism. Unfortunately, it is not the impoverished peoples in these settlements who are even the beneficiaries of their own poverty.
The majority of Africans continue to survive not because of government but in spite of governments. They eke out a living to keep body and soul together, provide for their families, doing all kinds of dirty work with little pay or selling anything that is buyable; hawking all kinds of household wares, fruits, vegetables and myriad of consumer items.
The concept of informal settlements in Africa is not just about where people live but extends to informal markets in all kinds of goods and services.
As the son of a hardworking woman who was a ‘petty trader’, I confess to a bias in favour of these small entrepreneurs who do not depend on any connections with government officials, politicians and big business influence. You go to many neighbourhoods rich or poor and you will find these largely female entrepreneurs, selling food to those working on construction sites, cheap vegetables to other poor members of the society from their baskets, trays or single tables at the corners of roads and streets.
So living in Kenya, a settler, apartheid type state in all but name, I find myself in solidarity with ‘Mama Mboga’. These are women who sell vegetables from their trays, or traditional load carriers tied to their heads, carried on their backs.
From Mama Mboga selling daily perishable vegetables, the ambition is to own a kiosk where you can have storage for more goods , stock more, put a fridge and freezer that can preserve perishable items. When Mama Mboga becomes a kiosk owner, it is a personal triumph of hope over adversity- a long journey from grinding poverty to bearable survival and foundations for permanent exit from poverty. The bigger the kiosk and the better stocked it is, the further away the owner is from poverty. Government policy is threatening the survival of the Mama Mbogas across this continent. In the name of ridding cities of illegal constructions, returning to the original city plans and ‘beautifying’ our cities, city councils and central governments are creating more poverty. Of what use is a ‘beautiful city’ inhabited by people who have lost their livelihoods? Would they appreciate the beauty?
The Mama Mbogas are on the street and in kiosks because they cannot afford the malls and most of their clientele cannot afford the price in the malls.
Our elite are embarrassed by the mass poverty that surrounds us but they are unwilling to provide leadership and appropriate policies to take our peoples to prosperity. Instead they engage in avoidance and denial mechanisms to pretend to visitors that ‘everything is okay’.
That’s why they rid our capitals of beggars, hawkers, and other undesirables before any major ‘international’ conference, but out of sight is not out of mind for the Mama/Baba Mbogas in our midst. You can pull down their kiosks and destroy their tables but they will come back with new tables, under umbrellas and their clientele will know where to find them. By no means are there clients all wretched of the earth. I still call my favourite Mama Mboga, Mama Sarah, or her husband , Martin, to send me top up cards from wherever Nairobi City Council have forced them to.
First of all, Happy Africa Day (yes, it is today, however underpublicised it may be). It was a good day for Afrobarometer to launch their Round 4 Results for surveys they have been conducting in 19 countries across the continent. I attended the Kampala release event today at the Serena Hotel, where Robert Sentamu of Wilksen Agencies delivered a presentation of the main findings, covering such topics as: democracy and regime consolidation, poverty reduction, globalization and cosmopolitanism, and the emergence of democratic citizens. Afrobarometer is a fantastic resource for scholars, journalists, civil society, political parties, and anyone else interested in public opinion, advocacy, policymaking, etc.
My one qualm with the findings of this release is that they paint a rather biased view of democracy and related issues in Africa. Why? Because Afrobarometer does not carry out surveys in countries where they have reason to suspect citizens will give “politically correct” answers for fear of repercussions by the state (i.e. Rwanda). This obviously leads to selection bias — the countries where citizens are/feel “more free” to say what they really think are also probably more likely to be more democratic. Excluding those countries where citizens are not free probably paints an overly optimistic picture of democracy in Africa as a whole. Nevertheless, the findings of the release are very useful (particularly for each individual country) and quite intriguing.
So what are the key findings?
On Democracy:
The 20 African countries included in the Afrobarometer include many of the most politically liberal countries on the continent, including 7 countries ranked by Freedom House in 2008 as “Free.” However, when we assess the quality of these regimes based on popular attitudes and perceptions, we do not find any consolidated democracies among them (although Botswana comes close). In fact, we find some consolidating as autocracies, but most countries are best understood as unconsolidated, hybrid regimes. They exhibit some key elements of democracy, such as regular elections and protection of core individual freedoms. But either the popular demand for democracy, or the perceived supply of democracy, or, in most cases, both, fall short of the standards of full democracy. But the trajectories of individual countries are extremely diverse, with some exhibiting sharp declines away from democratic consolidation, while others are steadily advancing.
On Poverty
Even with the significant growth that sub-Saharan Africa has experienced over the past decade, as of 2008 lived poverty (or the extent to which people regularly go without basic necessities) is still extensive. It has declined in nine of the Afrobarometer countries for which we have over-time data during this period, but it has increased in another six. Cross-national differences in economic growth help explain differing country trajectories in lived poverty. But a more complete picture must also take political freedom into consideration. Lived poverty is strongly related to country-level measures of political freedom, and changes in poverty are related to changes in freedom. This finding supports Sen’s (1999) argument about the crucial importance of freedom for development. Using our alternative measures of both development and democracy, we corroborate the findings of others that there is a “democracy advantage” for well being and prosperity.
See more findings and related articles/papers from the Afrobarometer website here.
Following the main presentation, Managing Editor of the Daily Monitor, Daniel Kalinaki, made a thoughtful and eloquent presentation on the Ugandan context (excerpt follows):
As we head towards the next election in 2011, we find ourselves at a crossroads. We can choose to continue the personality-driven winner-takes-it-all political model where we have an election and petition every five years and then let our MPs and other politicians sleep on the job as long as they wake up and vote for their parties. Alternatively, we can choose a bi-partisan approach that puts Uganda first, that allows free and open debate about our burning priorities and how to achieve them, and which puts power back in the hands of the people.
Asking the politicians to decide which model to adopt is, like an African saying goes, asking the monkey to decide whether the forest should be cut down. It is up to the people to demand this right to be heard and served. The Afrobarometer survey and others like it help provide a reality check for our countries and provide useful information that can be used by the media, civil society, and progressive political groups to empower the public.
At the end of the day, however, the responsibility falls on every individual to inform themselves and others, in order to build political awareness and a critical mass of interested and involved publics who can mobilise, organise, demand and receive what is fairly due to them.
You can read the complete version on Kalinaki’s own blog.
Look out in the daily papers for more articles on the Afrobarometer surveys in the coming days…
Road carnage claimed yet another victim today — this time a renowned Pan-Africanist, Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, who was rushing to Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi when he was killed in an automobile accident. Alex de Waal has an excellent in memoriam post in honor of Dr. Tajudeen:
Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, the most irrepressible Pan Africanist of his generation, died in Nairobi on 24 May 2009. His friends and colleagues are stunned at the loss of a man who was so full of life and humour, such a determined Afro-optimist, and such a devoted father to his children, Aisha and Aida. Africa is impoverished by his untimely death…
Tajudeen never allowed his critical sense degenerate into cynicism or disillusion. His confidence in Africa and Africans to resolve their problems, whatever the setbacks, was always undimmed. His untimely death leaves a vacuum of human energy and hope that will be difficult to fill.
Read on…
New Vision and Daily Monitor have also published articles and tributes in Tuesday’s papers.
Okello Oculi says Dr. Tajudeen was a true son of the continent in his tribute.
May he rest in peace. And may we find some way to prevent more of the many unnecessary and devastating deaths that occur on our roads every single day.
So my parents visit in one week and, as luck would have it, the first NYT Uganda travel article in four years (I think the last was in 2005?) was published Sunday. What timing! (and good looking out Mom!) Unfortunately the whole thing was about rafting, which my beloved mother and father are not particularly keen to do. Not to mention, rafting was the only activity of consequence in Uganda, Gettleman? I think we deserve better than that (ok, fine, you mention other activities in the fifth paragraph but that hardly counts). At least the commentary is pretty amusing.
My favorite line? “The whole experience was like riding a bouncy castle through a tsunami.” Hahaha. Not inaccurate at all.
