Why Kampala should annex Uganda
Kampala grows on top of the land it occupies like a bad rash—something akin to a tragic case of drug-resistant scabies, or adolescent acne that’s made the untimely (and certainly inconvenient) choice of descending on a middle-aged man.
The city is essentially seventy-three square miles of unplanned (some have even said unplannable) urban and shanty sprawl basking under our equatorial swelter like the discarded skin of some moulted reptile, or the incurable gangrene of the luckless lepers whose sore-like presence at every street corner with their outstretched hands and importunate lips is hard to miss, even harder to change.
Only yesterday (as indeed on most days)—alongside thirteen other equally suffocated and cramped passengers, I was being herded home through Kampala’s evening static (traffic?) by the irritable duo of a foul-breathed takisi (taxi?) operator and his shirtless colleague who sat uneasily in the driving seat jostling the gear-lever in fitful routines of near violence—when a familiar voice came on the radio.
‘‘Kampala should not attempt to annex the rest of Uganda. Uganda cannot become a colony of Kampala.’’
The statement succeeded in freezing all human activity in the takisi for a few countable breaths, as we all blinked more than twice to ensure we’d heard right. The sheer absurdity of what had been said registered slowly, and each one turning to their neighbor for some assurance found was greeted by the same blank stare—so that the collective uncertainty on whether to laugh or scoff was only curtailed by our desire to listen for further detail:
‘‘I, Namboozo Betty, MP of the great Mukono Municipality, shall oppose all attempts by Kamya (Betty) and her friend Musisi (Jenny) to conquer us and make us part of that confused city … KCCA should leave Mukono and Wakiso alone.’’
In contrast with the calculated shock delivered through her opening statement, Honorable Namboozo—we later learnt, to our private dismay of course—was simply engaging in hyperbolic political gimmickry and making a boulder out of the proverbial mote.
In contrast with the calculated shock delivered through her opening statement, Honorable Namboozo—we later learnt, to our private dismay of course—was simply engaging in hyperbolic political gimmickry and making a boulder out of the proverbial mote.
The non-drama of the scenario lay in the fact that the City’s superintending council—The Kampala Capital City Authority—had amended its governing law, the KCCA Act, to allow for the inclusion of certain major environs and suburbs (i.e. Mukono and Wakiso) in its planning jurisdiction for the next financial year, under the broad tag of Kampala Metropolitan [or Greater Kampala].
In KCCA’s opinion—theoretically at least—Mukono, Wakiso and their ilk stand to benefit a colossal lot from this new development, given that KCCA collects revenues twenty times greater than the next best-performing Urban Council in the country—Mbarara in this case (for well-known reasons, but the discussion of which is politically indelicate)—and contributes (a contested) 60% or two-thirds of the country’s overall GDP.
So, while other areas contemplated the bleakness of coming financial years with little cause for hope, here was Mukono’s foremost legislator committing Uganda’s foremost fiscal sacrilege—namely, throwing a royal gift back into the Kabaka’s patronizing face.
In olden times, the most lenient punishment for this felony would be a quick and clean decapitation at the hands of the Kabaka’s headsman—while less forgiving treatments could cause the skin to crawl even through mere description, so I shall fight my better urges and desist from explicating on them here.
But where am I going with all this? (Take heart, I was just wondering the same thing myself.) The point being—and one which government economists have grown grey hair attempting to change—is that ours is quintessentially the infamous ‘one-city’ economy.
Take this little seven-hilled enclave out of the macroeconomic picture and Uganda’s lifeline is in real jeopardy.
In fact, a (hypothetical) rebel group could be allowed to overrun the rest of the country while the incumbents cling onto Kampala—and still the incumbents would have the better deal of it.
Well, given a choice, I reckon I’d stick it out on the incumbent end of things myself; and barricade or bombard as they might, the rebels would only eventually succeed in dislodging me as part of a crowd of corpses destined for a swift mass burial before the international media lenses got around to taking so many inconvenient pictures.
But we are talking about Kampala—as is, not as might be (or very likely shall be) given the present trend of (mis)governance.
Kampala as is, makes for a rather veritable paradise—I mean, the place has its wounds and scabs and scars, but who and where doesn’t?
Whether it is the lazy weather that hardly lifts a finger around the year, shifting on its cloudy mattress ever so unoften to punctuate the perennial balmy shine with a heavy shower or bright blaze—or the young population athrob with so much unrealized potential —there is a great deal to celebrate about our swarming hive of a city.
It’s difficult to tell if the weather’s apathy is a rub-off from the citizens’ general attitude to cerebral undertakings, or the reverse. Is it the weather that makes us who live at or near the equator so sloppy at many of modern-life’s pressing exigencies? Or is our incompetence so bone-deep that we somehow, at a point in history, infected the weather with our ineptitude?
It’s a conundrum much like that faced by the young bird and its eggshell, regarding who came first—only that in our case it’s often a reptile egg being spoken off. Very likely a monitor lizard’s.
Sometimes it helps not to blame the weather for everything—as is often our wont around the middle latitudes. A people can actually go a long way when they learn to blame themselves for most things, including the weather. And by blame in this case—I’m not calling for a rise in the superstitious scapegoating and resignation we’re so famous for: Why did it rain today? Because we’re an adulterous nation—let’s tear our hair out from the roots and don rags.
The blame-acceptance and responsibility-taking I’m advocating would go something like this: Why the paralysis to economic activity whenever (much-needed, anyway) rain falls on our cities? Because we’re unable to plan for and get the better of something we know must (and should) happen every year. Shame on us. Let’s do better people. And right away!
But from whatever angle one looks at the thing, Kampala remains the over-stuffed, plumped and pampered favorite child in a family where her siblings are near starvation; yet this doesn’t stop we—the microbes that subsist on her copious gut—from taking some sort of fierce pride in our host’s capacity to endure our exactions, even returning the favor whenever she gets the chance, dutifully paying us back in our own bloody coin via fatal flashfloods in Bwaise or the rising female carnage in her less policed quarters such as Nansana.
In such times, it’s often hard to tell victim from perpetrator.
And while we’d prefer to have multiple hosts to ably take-on our burgeoning numbers—and as it were, spread our risk, being the consummate gamblers life and survival demand that we be—the single host whose windpipe is being crushed beneath our increasing weight loves us to death, and quite literally.
We have rather run out of Impala—the loping, swift footed antelope after whose once-populous ancestors the one hill that founded the city was named [Refer to Akasozi K’Empala (the hill of the impalas) in our native Ganda dialect] — but we have a crop of youth and youngsters just as swift of mind and agile of foot; riding bodabodas, joining politics, inventing apps, chasing traditional careers, and yes—picking pockets.
In fact, I can quite confidently say Kampala boats the best pick-pockets of any metropolis in the world, past or present. In all truth—the Artful Dodger and Dickensian London have nothing on us. On any day, shiny or wet, downtown Kampala’s razor-sharp urchins and Kawempe’s Kasolo-Boys would divest one’s pockets (or house) of their silken handkerchief, i-pad or strongbox quicker than any country gentleman, let alone city tycoon, could recover in time to sound the alarm. If it were a race, Fagin’s gang would be left eating (or at best choking on) raptorial dust.
It is Achille Mbembe—that stellar Postcolonial theorist and black intellectual from the Cameroons—who has written to say that the problem with African economies is not our lack of integration into the global economy per se; it is rather the selective integration in which only the continent’s metropolitan areas (the Capital or Major cities) are wedded to worldwide commerce while the rest of an African country’s territory remains a 19th-Century backwater.
In his editorial introduction to Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism—A Journal of African Studies (Special Issue), Mbembe goes further and accuses African capital cities of being ‘‘extractive and parasitic enclave economies— ring-fenced zones of material and technological prosperity in whose favor the rest of the country becomes chronically leached and ultimately sapped of its human and mineral capital’’.
I suppose those who have (jokingly or otherwise) referred to Uganda as a one-city economy—in this case Kampala’s—have quite the point. Arguably, the standard of living of your top-level Kampala (or Lagos, or Banjul, or ...) elite closely rivals that of the economic aristocrat in Kuala Lumpur or Monte Carlo; while their provincial countrymen (usually their own blood relatives) wallow in absolute abjection. Africa’s capitals do indeed bring to life, conveniently turned on its head of course, MLK’s proverbial isle-of-abundance-in-a-sea-of-poverty metaphor.
Kampala is a city in which we’ve been robbed and beaten and abused by thugs and politicians alike—and yet those of us who have survived both types of criminals (thus far at least) have every reason to celebrate these seven hills that have trapped us, and the city we love, or hate, to call home.
If it came to a vote, I’d certainly cast my ballot in favor of the move to make the rest of Uganda part of Kampala Metropolitan—Arua, Kisoro and Busia alike. That way, perhaps we may eventually cure those villagers in surrounding ‘‘countries’’ like Mukono and Gulu of their numerous viral strains of pre-modernity and jigger-induced underdevelopment.
We should once and for all abandon the farce of claiming that what we have is a country, when all we (or rather, they) possess is a city. I could go as far as saying we have two countries in one—a hale and plump-cheeked coterie who daily breakfast on American cereal and Canadian corn, ringed-in by sharpened stakes of inequality and privilege, to keep out the concave-stomached rabble of envious ‘mealtime spectators’ whose uncomplimentary ranks the rest of us comprise.
It's time we shrugged off all pretensions to nationhood—and learnt to trim our coat of our vain ambitions to match the drab cloth of our reality.
We should once and for all abandon the farce of claiming that what we have is a country, when all we (or rather, they) possess is a city. I could go as far as saying we have two countries in one—a hale and plump-cheeked coterie who daily breakfast on American cereal and Canadian corn, ringed-in by sharpened stakes of inequality and privilege, to keep out the concave-stomached rabble of envious ‘mealtime spectators’ whose uncomplimentary ranks the rest of us comprise.
It's time we shrugged off all pretensions to nationhood—and learnt to trim our coat of our vain ambitions to match the drab cloth of our reality.
What keeps sub-Saharan Africa so wretched you ask? I say it’s because everything is so predictable—the sun rises when it should every morning, and the rains come on time every year. For those few exceptions when things fall out of order—our politicians don't plan for irrigation schemes, they organize national days of prayer and fasting.
One of these days, we need a real fast in Africa—one inspired by actual drought and famine—not these wishy-washy displays of elitist privilege Islamic and Judeo-Christian elites parade before us as Lent or Ramadan every year. Then we’ll see if anyone can really go forty days.
In the meantime, let’s make a Kampalan Passport* to keep the chaff and riffraff out—and as the good book so wisely instructs its credulous readership, separate the sheep from the goats.
PS:
*It may indeed be argued that such a ‘‘passport’’ exists already—in practice if not in print—judging by the way social and state institutions treat persons adjudged to belong on either side of our country’s widening chasm of privilege. Public hospital queues are skipped with impunity, lost National ID cards are replaced more easily for some, and justice is served with a side-order for those who merit it, while eaten half-cooked and unseasoned by others.
Alas—in Uganda, even the shepherds of God’s own flock have learnt to graze certain lambs ahead of others.
*It may indeed be argued that such a ‘‘passport’’ exists already—in practice if not in print—judging by the way social and state institutions treat persons adjudged to belong on either side of our country’s widening chasm of privilege. Public hospital queues are skipped with impunity, lost National ID cards are replaced more easily for some, and justice is served with a side-order for those who merit it, while eaten half-cooked and unseasoned by others.
Alas—in Uganda, even the shepherds of God’s own flock have learnt to graze certain lambs ahead of others.
+ This essay was first published by the Lantern Meet of Poets at: https://lanternmeet.wordpress.com/2018/03/31/why-kampala-should-annex-uganda/
©Surumani_Manzi
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