There is this energetic young lady called Raziah Athman who has been going around coaxing Ugandans to start reading. She uses her meagre resources (her daytime job is television journalism) to acquire books, then donate them to reading clubs she herself has started.

Recently, she invited me to join the board of the movement she has launched called Uganda Reading, and I kind of absentmindedly accepted. But now I want to pour all my remaining energies into Raziah’s movement because it is clear the reading situation in the country has become critical.

Last week, former minister of finance Syda Bbumba shocked the parliamentary committee that is probing the bonus reward that was given to government officials who did some office support work for a foreign legal team that represented Uganda in a tax dispute case in the UK. The former minister, who now sits on the back bench in parliament, said that she had signed the crucial oil exploitation agreement that gives oil companies huge tax exemptions without reading it.

The startled committee members asked the former minister to explain how, when she was representing the interests of the state and of the population in such a crucial and weighty matter, she chose to sign the binding document without reading its contents. The lady confidently explained that since the lawyers who had drafted it must have read it, she saw no reason why she should read it, so she “just” signed.

“Just” is a word Ugandan teenagers like to use to answer why they did something they shouldn’t have done.

Ugandans seem to simply stop reading once they leave school, to the extent that they even refuse to read documents relating to their work. So we shouldn’t even have laughed at a former military regime vice president who later told a human-rights commission of inquiry that he had never read the Constitution, although he had taken oath to defend it.

Why should a military man read a constitution when a finance minister cannot read a crucial agreement that led to the immediate loss of $200 million to the poor republic that had entrusted her with the high office of the country’s chief treasurer?

It is not only ministers and vice presidents who refuse to read in Uganda. Almost all Ugandans who go to banks to seek loans don’t read the loan agreements. Nor do Ugandans who go to loan sharks to borrow money. That is why the Uganda Prisons Services are congested with civil prisoners jailed for failure to pay loan sharks.

In fact, when we visited Luzira Prisons with Raziah recently to launch a reading club there, we asked to meet some formerly senior persons who are in there for failure to pay debts. The friendly prison authorities did not recognise some of the names.

If you really knew that the seemingly small 10 per cent interest is monthly and compounded on the cumulative balance rather than the annual principal, maybe you wouldn’t take that loan from the shark. But if people are not able to read a two-page agreement before they sign away their family house, what then can they read?

Joachim Buwembo is a social and political commentator based in Kampala. E-mail: [email protected]