Stop educating our MPs

At the start of nearly each successive week, though at times in shorter spans, the Ugandan reading public is accosted by a screaming headline in the mainline dailies bemoaning, or rather mocking and happily scoffing at the ejection of yet another latterly elected ‘‘people’s representative’’ in the Ugandan House of Commons (or would it be better named The Common House?), our national parliament – on the perceivably ignominious grounds of insufficient school certification.

Due diligence, (but mostly conformity to the uncanny and unconscionable tenets of supposedly good reportage), behooves me to avail a statistical account of this ‘‘educational death toll’’ – but owing to the frequency of these bootings, the figure is likely to have burgeoned overly by press-time, enough to cast my paltry count in unfavorable light.

For that, I’ll save you the misinformation, and myself the bother. (Of course, we all know the numbers are sufficiently high to trigger collective worry and justify nationwide apprehension.)

What started off as a comical spectacle, in which arguably the most eloquent and fluent of the newly elected legislators, Sematimba Peter, doubly earned the dubious honor of being least academically qualified – has in the past month or so morphed into a poly-tentacled bogeyman looming dark and large over the institutional probity of the nation’s Exam Board, Higher Education Council, and Electoral Commission(s) – as parliamentarian after another gets denuded, shamed and jettisoned from their berth.

Looking more closely at the profiles of the ‘honored persons’ caught in this net – one can’t help noting that they all belong to the same political party, namely – that ruling, and are mostly drawn from the central and more ‘urbanized’ province of the country.

Would it be too pedantic, or imply reading too much into the matter, to infer a correlation amongst those variables?

Is it perhaps the standard and officially sanctioned ‘political culture’ of a certain political party in our fatherland to fabricate its legislators’ documentation and cut corners?

Does this minor, yet fraudulent phenomenon reflect a more pervasive mindset and praxis in the higher echelons and apparatchik of said party – or is it merely a reflection of the weak internal framework and operational structure of its politburo – which, still, would reveal a chronic defect in the organization, likely to manifest in their exercise of state power?

Regarding the urbanity of the incidents, which included election malpractice in addition to credential forgery – would we be within our thinking rights to surmise that towns and their attendant suburbia have ways of corrupting the moral tunic of society, over and above their already known sundry evils?

Should we therefore, in our national development efforts, be advocating more, or diminished urbanization?

But then – that is all mere conjecture, a prudent fellow would set little or no store by it.

What I’d wish to argue against today is the sheer glee with which the Ugandan people, especially the elite, seem to have welcomed the expulsion of otherwise popular legislators from parliament, merely on the grounds of pieces of paper.

Because yes – with the galloping levels of graduate unemployment, coupled with woefully antiquated learning curricula; that is all school certificates and college transcripts seem to amount to in our blighted republic today – very many fancily embossed and stenciled scraps of processed wood pulp.

And while we, who have had the sugared misfortune of being subjected to a schooling tailored for native-clerks in the colonial order (still very much alive and well in this day), may well be proud of our finely calibrated enculturation into the ways and manners of our European overlords – it is grossly unjust to foist ourselves and our skewed standards of merit onto the majority of our unschooled countrymen.

The yardstick of a school certificate, at whatever level of attainment it may be set, is nothing more than an affront on the inherent dignity of our people, many of whom are still luckily uncontaminated by the school-bred, Eurocentric ideas of alleged socio-economic development and political organization that have been the greatest bane to African life for the past century.

The snobbery and supercilious posturing of Uganda’s (and Africa’s elite) should be put to a stop as soon as yesterday.

Why should a Ugandan need to speak a colonial language, or have attended a colonial school system to qualify for leadership in their nation?

Why continue to pass and enforce legislation that blatantly disenfranchises huge swathes of our people, simply to protect the ‘feudal’ interests of a so-called educated elite whose only claim to ascendancy is the epithet of conducting alien syllables through their nostrils?

Does one need a school certificate to gain eligibility to pay tax, vote, go to war in the country’s defense, or parent a child?

And because one would be hard-pressed to think of greater civic duties than these – why then should national leadership be ring fenced to a minority?

The rustication of our people’s elected representatives from parliament is both an ignoble shame and a detestable tyranny of Uganda’s minority elite over the majority of our unschooled masses, who are nonetheless wise and intuitively perspicacious – by all indicators cognitively able to be successful fathers, mothers, soldiers, MPs and even presidents.

Why should our people be castigated for throwing their moral and electoral weight behind someone who, like them, is unadulterated by British colonialism?

The argument for a unifying language, in the form of English, is also a flimsy alibi which – if it were a cripple’s crutch – ought to be callously kicked from under us so we may deservedly grovel in the dirt, learn to crawl, or grow wings – whatever our fate may be.

This should be our chance to adopt Swahili, embark upon the unprecedentedly ambitious project of molding an indigenous national tongue from the closely related dialects that people our country, or simply allow parliament to conduct business in native dialects and enlist translators onto its staff-roll.

(To be sure, we may need more numbers than the UN general assembly.)

With that in place, we may then organically devise less sheepish criteria for adjudging leadership credentials.

Less goosey than merely one’s ability to speak a foreign tongue, often learnt not out of cultural choice or linguistic curiosity, but economic necessity and political expediency – or breaking our heads to establish the authenticity of paper slips which come a dime a dozen at that famous boulevard in Kampala named after Egypt’s Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser.