Why Africa’s youth should rob graves

By a fortuitous but nonetheless rewarding providential whim , I sat in on a very intimate script-reading  at the Uganda National Centre for Culture (National Theatre), during the just concluded but very illustrious week-long  Kampala Theatre Festival, 2015.

The reading was of a play, authored by a very genial Ugandan playwright named Kaya Kagimu Mukasa (http://kampalainternationaltheatrefestival.com/kaya-kagimu-mukasa); who roundly succeeded in riveting the attention of the mostly non-Ugandan audience, for close to two hours, in which five young performers admirably vocalized her script – whose characters were remarkably brought to life by the readers’ masterful intoning and consummate dramatic poise.

This play – curiously but almost tritely titled The Grave Robbers, was in my view, the playwright’s attempt at addressing the disturbing question of economic inequality plaguing the country; which she sought to couch in ‘ethnic’ terms, or blame on the incumbent government’s sponsorship, or at least countenancing of entrenched nepotism.

In a peek – the narrative follows the journey of two young men, recently graduated, who grapple with the acute burden of unemployment in the Ugandan economy, blaming their failure to secure jobs on their ethnic extraction i.e. that they are from the wrong enclave of the state.

Their perennial joblessness leads them to moral dejection, alcohol dependency, debt accumulation and rejection by fiancés, friends and family alike.

They  are eventually compelled to partner in the illicit business of grave snatching; so they found the notorious Grave Robber Services – a ‘company’ whose core occupation involves breaking into crypts and divesting corpses of clothes and caskets, which are later sold for a fee.

The two ‘business partners’ profit from the trade for a while – managing to pay off previously accumulated debts and win back the erstwhile-lost affections of wives and relations; before they make the ‘tactical blunder’ of raiding the grave of a former government bigwig, who the playwright blandly, (she surely could’ve been more creative), refers to as ‘‘Big Loud Boss’’.

Well – this blunder eventually sets the police on their trail, forcing them to flee the country and abandon their (literally) overnight-accumulated wealth.

As they escape, the two fugitives confide in a priest who promises them safe passage, but prevails upon them to hold a press conference and defend themselves, by explaining to the nation that their crimes were inspired by a desperation stemming from a lack of jobs – which befell them because they were from the ‘wrong corner of the country’.

I’m sure many Ugandans are familiar and actually strongly concur with this narrative, because this is a charge we have all leveled at Yoweri Museveni’s government at one point or the other – that of locking significant portions of the country’s citizenry out of social, economic and political opportunity on the basis of ethnicity.

Indeed – at the end of the reading, the audience heartily applauded the cast; which I’m sure was partly on account of their admirable theatrical skill, but majorly owing to the resonance of the ‘moral’ in the play.

The commentary from the audience, that followed, vindicated this – with Miss Kaya receiving praise for her bravery and intrepid stance in writing about these ‘painful but grave’ matters afflicting our beloved country.

While I unquestionably agree with the general view that our government and society is nepotistic and deeply sectarian – I think that most of us are reacting the wrong way towards it; by succumbing to a reactionary ethnicity; and are thus not offering meaningful solutions.

A clear example of this failure of solutions is how the playwright above portrays the problem.

In a nutshell, her play explains it this way – 

That ‘tribalism’ is responsible for lack of opportunity in Uganda.

And this is what most of us think – yet nothing could be more wrong!

Firstly – there is the immediate and elementary mistake of ‘localizing’ our situation, and losing sight of the broader scheme of things.

Unemployment, as a social phenomenon, is global. Even the most industrialized economies struggle with an element of joblessness – but of course it’s more pronounced in the third world.

Indeed, just like unemployment, most other human problems – disease, crime, mortality, illiteracy - are more pronounced in Africa, Latin America and South East Asia than in the developed world.

This means that not only is Uganda not isolated in its unemployment crisis, but also that unemployment as a phenomenon is not isolated from other failings of society.

This is how I’d propose we look at it, if we hope to find sustainable solutions for it:

Unemployment, like disease and crime, is a function of social poverty – which poverty is a function of what has been termed International Capitalism.

In short, we have to understand that it is poverty that causes unemployment - and not unemployment that causes poverty.

Similarly – it is not ‘tribalism’ that causes unemployment, but unemployment that facilitates tribalism.

To illustrate this point further, let me offer a quote;

‘’In the case of tribalism, traditional treatments have failed to grasp it fully, because they regard it merely as consciousness and fail to situate it in material conditions. They miss the obvious and important fact that tribalism mainly flourishes because it is ‘useful’, especially in the economic sense. It provides ‘access’ to important people for villagers and the unemployed seeking jobs in the city; it fills to a considerable extent the gap left by the lack of a social security system in Africa …’’

Claude Ake – A Political Economy of Africa (1981)

While I do not in any way wish to downplay the real and harrowing experiences of fellow young Ugandans who have been denied a job, or healthcare or any other government and private service because they carry the ‘‘wrong’’ surname – I seriously want to discredit the popular and misleading theory that Museveni’s government is deliberately orchestrating some form of systematic ethnic discrimination against and amongst Ugandans.

For this theory to hold water;  from the deductive correlation we’ve drawn above on unemployment and general social poverty - it would have to be true that Museveni is actually deliberately keeping the country poor, so that ethnicism, corruption, disease and the other adverse direct consequences of poverty can take a stranglehold of the country.

This is just not true. No credible argument can support it; yet a number of countrymen with whom I’ve discoursed seem to nurse the thought very religiously.

While I am intractably opposed to Museveni’s despotism, greed and outright incompetence – I refuse to concede that the man is a cold-blooded sadist.

By and large, even his most rabid critics must admit that he does harbor a modicum of good intentions, but lacks the will and moral authority to effect them.

Like most Third World leaders, Museveni’s failures are largely failures of omission, and not necessarily of commission.

A logical assessment of the matter would help matters here;

As we know – Museveni is power-hungry, and interested in ruling the country till he drops dead. But actually, it would be in interests, especially the selfish ones like tenure longevity, to ensure that the Ugandan economy prospers.

For if the economy prospers, then he has all the more reason to demand an extension of his term – since he’ll consider himself qualified to rule, owing to past successes.

This is just in the same way that a man courting a woman cumulatively wins her heart by undertaking feat upon feat, until he has a sizable precedent on which to eventually convince her that he’s worth her lifelong love, or at least one extra ‘night’ (ekisanja)!

So then - you should ask the question, why doesn't Museveni preside over a progressive economy if that would 'logically' be in his selfish interests?

It could be, like some folks have concluded, that the fellow is a masochist who enjoys the suffering of Ugandans.

But a more reasonable theory is that Museveni, like all other Third-World presidents - are basically 'hostages' of the International Capitalist system they affiliated themselves to initially.
Our strongmen don't really call the shots - but are being played like puppets on a string show.

They fell for the cheap promises of soft loans and grants from the IMF and World Bank in their earlier years, and are now so deeply entangled in the intricate labyrinth of MNC monopoly that an attempt to sever ties with the system would result in either their deposition or assassination, or both.

Any attempt to expel foreign investors from their states, stop plunder of the countries' natural resources, or hedge their fledgling economies against merciless exposure to global competition through protectionist policies - will only earn them the same fate as Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, Robert Mugabe or Muamar Gaddafi - dead and gone, or dying and soon gone.

At the end of the day, this is what we can reasonably conclude;

Museveni has essentially failed to be a good President – but not quite succeeded at being an evil president.

This brings me back to the issue of youth unemployment we were discussing.

Unemployment – as we have seen, is not just a Ugandan problem, but an African problem, and to an extent a global problem.

The reason for this is that the world is now run (or overrun!) by International Capitalism – which essentially thrives on, and makes its profit off crisis.

Essentially, if you have more crises in the world – more unemployment, more wars, more disease, and more death – then you have more opportunities for business!

It means you can make more medicines, start more factories and manufacture more weapons. This is why the Pharmaceutical and Arms industries are so powerful.

In short, International Capitalism thrives on crisis – which is why it has a vested interest in keeping people sick and jobless, through encouraging poor dieting, manufacturing pathogens and killing family subsistence economic models in most traditional societies around the world, from ancient Europe to Africa.

If there was no unemployment in Uganda for instance, do you think foreign investors would come here?

No! There would be no cheap labor to exploit, and thus no profit for them to make.

Unemployment and other social crises are therefore necessities for this system to work well; they are the life-blood that courses through its vessels.

The Musevenis of this world therefore are just pawns in a bigger game.

This is why most African states are ‘unified in suffering’, despite varying ‘democratic’ conditions; e.g. the Uganda peasant whose country has had one dictator for thirty years and the Ghanaian peasant whose country changes presidents every five years, tend to be equally neglected and depived.

Africa’s strongmen are just ‘‘fore-men’’ in a global political-economic ‘company’ that seeks to make the entire world a sweatshop of slaves running after money - where we have no time to raise our children, dream, meditate on thought, look at the stars or pursue transcendent culture.

While our leaders cannot be fully exonerated of their complicity in this crime – having assigned themselves the role of ‘middlemen’ who permit the exploitation of their people and countries by big Multi-Nationals and foreign business interests, in exchange for petty commissions hidden in Swiss Banks which they hope to enjoy once overthrown, we must not take our eyes off the bigger picture.

Ethnicity is therefore not the cause of unemployment, like that playwright and many who think like her propose; but is simply used as an ‘illusion’ to hide the actual cause.

 For that matter, ethnicity, religion or any other superficial tags are not the cause of any of our social problems – they are simply symptoms of the actual problem, namely – poverty deliberately orchestrated by International Capitalism.

KFC, Shell, Mukwano, pwc, Standard Chartered – are just some of the names of the chief exploiters of the human population, both in the developed and developing world, by the way.

These firms represent not just an economic system, but a life system – one bent on hooking us to the money economy and debt slavery; and keeping us perpetually focused on the red herrings of race, tribe, religion, profession, language etc, etc.

So - perhaps Africa’s youth should rob more graves!