I have been known to inflate my titles with radical ideas, but one thing I scoff at is the idea of clickbait. Yes, just like all my previous blog posts, this is not intended to set a mousetrap for you. Stick around for the next five minutes and I’ll show you why plumbers are best suited for the state house.
Human beings learnt to fly. David Blaine encased himself in ice for three days straight. Telecommunication turned from fiction to fact. Holy rice sold out at a price of $15 per kilo. By leaps and bounds, the human race keeps proving to itself that the impossible is infact possible. Perhaps these two words should be scraped entirely from the English language. Give a plumber three months and he’ll turn Uganda into a middle income economy!’ Sounds like a pretty possible statement to me.
Over the years, Uganda’s greatly mismanaged economy has culminated in 21.4% of it’s people carrying the poverty line. The lack of priorities among the leaders has seen resources enter into over bulging bellies rather than back into the soils. Brand new cars have also been proven more effective than vaccines in fighting against Covid-19. These leaders would rather be on the executive board than on the drawing board. Outcries are slapped with more taxes, the theory being if you slap crying babies they tend to keep quiet.
The good news is this is easily overturned. If we are to continue with our theory that everything is possible, then Uganda can indeed completely turn around in just three months. Not by mere belief in ourselves, which would be ridiculous, but by a concrete detailed plan that fully maps out the course for the nation. Enough of the chit chat, here’s a summary plan of how a plumber would achieve just that.
Month I: Detect and Clog Leakages
It is no secret that the water well, our government, from which all who sing it’s anthem are supposed to drink, has developed quite a number of leakages. The result is that the water available for everyone else is much less. Corruption scandals have blessed news agencies countrywide with ‘juicy’ stories all year round (the Daily Monitor editor probably squealing in delight somewhere). Citing these scandals is even unnecessary as it’s widely accepted that these illegal transactions do occur often.
So how can this be done?
Here’s where a concept I like to call friction comes in. In any money flow or mechanical system, there is always that dissipative action that tends to reduce the money or energy respectively. That’s how banks make money and trade brokers earn a living, through friction!
In the case of the government, there’s good friction and bad friction. Good friction is where civil servants, MPs and ministers earn salary from. Like a sponge wears soap, bad friction is responsible for billions of shillings lost every year. I’m talking about theft, which they tend to sugar-coat with the word corruption. That’s why the suit-and-tie bureaucrats found guilty of corruption can afford to go to court in expensive suits and then get sentenced to special self contained prisons. Perhaps the same privilege should be passed on to side mirror thieves🤷.
Once all pathways for financial leakage are blocked, more money will be freed up for everyone else. That means uprooting the corrupt and introducing comprehensive accountability schemes where not even one thousand Uganda Shillings can escape.
Can it be done in one month?
Borrowing our introductory hypothesis, the better question is will it be done in one month? The reason why any doubts exist about the timeframe is because we have gotten so accustomed to the modus operandi in Uganda, where bureaucracy and incompetence always lengthen proceedings unreasonably. People in offices prefer to be recognised than to be useful. Short answer is, absolutely yes!
Month II: Filter and Scrape scum
Just like weeds thrive next to the manure pit, people have naturally found a way to dip their pots straight into the well. The slow steady flow from designated channels fills the pot slowly and thus many jump straight into the well regardless of whether they step on people’s heads to reach there. Once they start fetching, their friends also shout, ” Fetch mine also!” If you’ve eaten millet bread (kalo) with such people, they usually start from the middle despite having large index fingers. You can imagine the size of the bread they ingest in a single dose.
The immense number of civil servants, members of parliament and cabinet ministers is detrimental to the nation. The norm is: a job that can be done by one person is split to form ten posts, all with heavy titles and mouthwatering pay but minimal work and blood pressure medication for some.
It is not only salaries and wages that these people consume. Some grow suckers that also connect straight to the main source. If you’ve planted a forest in a swamp, you can liken what happens to the water level to what happens to the economy. In brief, reduce the number of people employed directly to the government.
Month III: Open up the Taps
This includes everything from building industries, constructing infrastructure, boosting the agriculture, tourism, intensifying mining, decentralizing the cities, rural electrification, revamping the education sector, tipping the trade scales, to mention but a few.
In a nutshell, only time will tell if we get the plumber we so deeply desire to change how things work around here. So…No! I didn’t mean actual certified plumbers, but who knows, maybe they actually make better leaders than soldiers and musicians. For who can put a boundary to possibility?
What would you do if you were given three months as president🤔?
PS: This article is not meant to delve deeper into specific ways many of these things should be done but only to pitch forth an idea.
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