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‘Give our dollars back, you bad, bad hyena!’ ‘Yes, master, gimme till June’

Saturday November 24 2012

Like many other people who are not experts in international politics and finance, I used to think that the expression, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too,” was just that — an expression. Now I know better.

Recent developments between Uganda and its donors have disabused me of my naivety and now I know you can have your cake, eat it up and then recall it — it is that simple.

What happens is that rich countries have made some individual and some collective commitments to donate a percentage of their budgets to helping poor countries in the form of aid. It helps the donor to do good and also look good.

Remember we keep blaming them for pre-Independence phenomena like the slave trade and colonialism, which our own chiefs facilitated.

Now the donors have learnt that as sure as night follows day, money given to an African government will be stolen. It is like throwing a chunk of meat in a hyena’s cage and telling it to keep it safely for its children to eat next week.

Entrusting money to our leaders and top bureaucrats is simply mental cruelty.

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Actually, when a certain tranche of cash amounting to about 10 million dollars arrived in our government coffers a couple of years back, the bureaucrats and their political masters partied until the money was finished.

The accounting officer who “managed” the money told parliament that they thought the money had fallen from heaven and so they spent it on luxury cars and depositing it into personal accounts.

Anyway, what do the donors who gave us the money now do? They demand that their cash be refunded. And because our leaders do not give a damn about tomorrow, they immediately agree to refund the money — out of our taxes.

It is that simple. They are praised for giving aid but at the same time, they get their money back because the African government returns the exact amount that they received. Can you beat that?

Back in the African country, the opposition, the media and civil society are meanwhile praising the donor for embarrassing the government by demanding a refund.

The refund is put in the next or even in the same financial year’s budget, financed by the taxpayer. Meanwhile the politicians and the bureaucrats who stole the money are happily enjoying their loot. 

Case closed – until the next donor disbursement gets stolen and the innocent taxpayer refunds it to the donor.

Three years ago, the British authorities arrested a Ugandan official with a bag of money from an illegal kickback in London.

They decided to give what they thought would be a permanent lesson to the Uganda government — by arranging a big ceremony at which they handed over the recovered money in Kampala, complete with a dummy check for the media cameras.

You think we mended our ways? You must be joking! We have continued “showing our touch” to the UK, leaving London little option but to cut all aid to Uganda!

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism. E-mail: [email protected]

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