Uganda: Is it time to import a Cuban President?

The country’s (presumably) thinking public has been in flames since talk began doing the rounds last week that our terminally-ill government in Kampala was putting final touches to an arrangement with Havana to import medical specialists from the latter’s shores.

Whether these doctors are being brought to tend to the citizens’ health complaints—or to do an autopsy on the Museveni regime after its self-anticipated and imminent political demise—is certainly up for debate.

Can doctors of medicine—be they Cuban, Martian or otherwise—really cure a political malaise? 

If this happens, Uganda will be one of the few places (if not the only one) in this century (if not ever), where the miracle of resurrection will have actually occurred.

That is yet to be seen.

Anyhow, since the public conversation took wing in Uganda’s ever-shrinking airspace of opinion—government ministers, ruling party officials, State House functionaries and other regime lackeys and apologists have fallen over themselves—and characteristically contradicted each other—in botched attempts to explain away and diffuse the possible tinderbox the matter is likely to become.

The Uganda Medical Association—whose recent wave of industrial action successfully paralyzed health services nationwide and depicted a thitherto invulnerable regime at its most hapless (yet)—declared its official opposition to the ‘unilateral move by government to indirectly lay-off Uganda doctors’.

Its unyielding and unwearying Chairperson, Dr Ekwaro Obuku—an inconveniently (for the regime) vocal and literally hard-headed fellow fresh from the confinement of a hospital bed where he’d been kindly dispatched by ‘unknown’ assailants who came perilously close to thumping his brains out earlier this year—announced that the Medical Association would ‘withdraw cooperation’ from the Cubans and see how well they fared in the rough and tumble of Ugandan working conditions.

The Director of the government Media Centre, Ofwono Opondo—whose unfluctuating role as regime mouthpiece has over the years been as unsuccessful as it is unpopular—replied by reminding us how Cubans, their doctors firstmost, ‘are tough people who were raised on a life of scouting. They can sleep in tents and thrive in the rural wilderness where Ugandan doctors cannot last a day without soft beds, electricity, and running water.’

The way Mr Opondo smacked his lips, chuckling with a smugness that readily invited a rearrangement of his not-too-comely face, made one wonder if he took a certain diabolical pride in his country’s lack of basic utilities.

But then, this is the official attitude of the regime, emulated from none other than the ‘revolutionary son’ himself, a President who on previous campaign trails has gone on record as boasting that his loyal constituency are the ‘peasants and poor farmers of Ugandan villages. These are the ones who appreciate what the NRM has done.’

Funny thing, isn’t it?—when a government and its President begin measuring their success by the opinions (and support) of those of their citizens who have the least or own nothing at all, often thanks to the former.

Anyway, the President—in further stoking the flames of the doctors’ outrage—went on to say that these ‘unpatriotic and selfish doctors who deny health to Ugandans by striking like children’ will be dealt with once and for all using the NRM’s much-vaunted ‘revolutionary’ methods.

But even a rampaging beast—in this case a Ugandan leopard—knows not to confront head-on a panicked herd of wildebeest lest he be trampled underfoot in the ensuing stampede.

In fact, the usually ‘steadfast’ General Museveni balked from his habitual didactic tone this time, when pressed by journalists over the issue, to reply elusively that he ‘hadn’t committed himself on the idea. Cabinet is still discussing it … it is still merely a proposal.’

By ‘cabinet discussing it’, one can infer from the man’s well-known methods that he meant to say he was yet to ‘direct Cabinet to rubber stamp my decision’. And by ‘still merely a proposal’—we can also deduce that it his own proposal that was yet to be ‘discussed’.

It is not until a clumsy minister, perhaps forgetting himself in a moment of heedless abandon—‘‘told off’’ a pestering reporter that ‘the decision to bring the Cubans is a done deal … and nothing you people say can change it’—that the President was forced to backtrack on his inebriated incertitude and regain assured sobriety. 

Our Hatted Leopard was thus compelled to own up to the idea—‘... errrr, yes ... I ‘‘think’’ I have already decided that ‘‘we’’ are bringing the Cubans ...’—which turned out to be not just a ‘proposal’ in any case, but a full-blown and already signed MoU between the two governments.

All the public debate—a supposed indication of democracy—was, or is—no different from the usual hullabaloo we raise—and, it turns out, just so much hot air.

It is not the first time a desperate African government—sore beset by the weeds of its own incompetence—is turning to Asia or the Caribbean to ask for help in this kind of thing. Nor will it be the last.

It was Kenya’s turn last year, when a doctors’ and nurses’ withdrawal of tools prompted the Uhuru government to request India for replacements. India, in its ‘wish not to anger the aggrieved people of Kenya’—turned down the request.

Of course India did what it did out of self-interest. Had they attempted to abet Uhuru Kenyatta in his blatant disregard for his peoples’ concerns—the price would have been paid in blood by the millions of Indians who have lived for decades, as petty traders and mid-level professionals in Kenya.

The combined forces of Kenya’s military police and army wouldn’t have been enough to defend those Indians, whose grandfathers were brought as shamba-boys and palanquin hammock-bearers by the British, from the enraged African mobs which specialize in enacting bureaucratic disagreements out on the street—`a la South African Xenophobia, or Uganda’s 2007 Mabira riots.

The number of East Africa’s Indians continues to grow each year, and the money they milk out of our economies and remit to their mother country—in just one year—is far above anything Uhuru, Pombe or Kaguta can pay their doctors over a decade; however inflated the salaries by our local standards, as is the case with the six odd million (according to some sources) promised to the Cubans.

Cuba on the other hand—while, like India or China, it has a huge population of unemployed professionals it seeks to get rid of through foreign ‘missions’—doesn’t have any significant settler populations anywhere around the world whose lives it must perforce worry about jeopardizing through unpopular intergovernmental bilateral memoranda.

Cuba itself is a settler country to begin with, peopled mostly by the descendants of exported African slaves and their white Spanish masters—the latter of whom the ‘revolutionary’ ruling classes of the country are comprised, and the former abounding amongst the ‘liberated’ peasantry.

China—with a surging economic imperialism driven by chronic raw material-anaemia and bursting at the seams with a restless, disposable population— will soon have its hands tied just as tightly as India’s, and is fast following in the latter’s footsteps as ‘China Towns’ and ‘China Districts’ begin sprouting and taking shape across the African hinterland.

The Europeans, Japanese and Americans need their professionals: their populations are small and ageing fast—and anyhow, their citizens were not raised as scouts who comfortably share sleeping caves with mambas and subsist on overnight-filtered urine in place of drinking water.

Returning to the Uganda-Cuba fiasco—one of the things (perhaps the only good outcome) this incident has availed us, as do all public controversies, is the rich picking of ridiculous statements and plainly inane remarks from our nation’s politicians.

The most spectacular one of course—outstanding for its author’s seniority, if not his unequaled lack of solutions—was Museveni’s declaration at the Labor Day fete in Sembabule that ‘… had I not been restrained, I would have gone back to the bush to fight against these unpatriotic doctors who were striking. But someone calmed me down and reminded me that we can import Cubans to avert the crisis.’

In Museveni’s own assessment therefore, the only remedy left to Uganda’s galactic problems—short of hefting our little sacks and trekking ‘bush-ward’—is to import Cubans.

Uganda’s doctors are being shoved aside by their own government for alleged lack of professionalism, and for being ‘unpatriotic’—whatever that means.

Their sin was the unforgivable one—according to the NRM scripture—of complaining a mite too loudly during their mutilation and dismemberment.

‘Look how silent the UPDF is!’ quipped Museveni, oblivious to all mounting folly—‘… those soldiers maintain Uganda’s peace for almost no pay, but have you ever seen them go on strike? Even me, I earn only 3 million shillings … but I still serve the country.’

Well—now that the President of our great republic has begun making obscure remarks to the diminutiveness of his monthly stipend, isn’t the next logical step going to be the tabling before Parliament of a Presidential Salary Increment Bill?

Ah, perhaps a three-decade riddle has finally been unraveled for the emaciated Ugandan masses who’ve been wondering why their country seems irredeemably grounded in the mire of stagnation.

Our President has been on strike these past thirty years my friends—little wonder that hardly any work has been done in presiding over the country in that while!

If I were the people of Uganda—I’d do what any good and reasonable African government does in the face of gross incompetence, unpatriotic obstinacy and refusal to work under prevailing conditions by (any of) its public servants—I would import a Cuban President.

Into the bargain, I’d also throw a few square miles of fertile Cuban land, so many liters of life-giving Cuban water, some grams of edifying Cuban oxygen, the stones that pebble the country’s landscape—and a little of everything that goes into the boiling cauldron of making a country, as Trump once lied, great again.

And while at it—perhaps we may also consider importing a Cuban God sometime to come.

The stark inability of ours—Jesus, Allah, Lub`a`al`e or whatever other name we give him—to deliver on the millions of desperation-laden prayers and tear-drenched entreaties addressed to him by Ugandan supplicants leaves tons to be desired.

After-all, to paraphrase Achebe—a blatant frog-eater must distinguish himself by the succulence of his quarry.

© Surumani Manzi