By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Uganda has been independent for 57 years, and so last time a government could conceivably take official positions that were against the citizens/natives was like 58 years ago. For then it was a foreign, occupation government.

But today there are more elderly polio-crippled people than middle aged or younger persons, for even the colonial state also meant well for the natives by immunising them; it is those whose parents defied mass vaccination that had to live with such disability for the rest of their lives, if they didn't die in infancy.

After Uganda finally got a largely popular revolutionary government following the 1981-86 internal war, response to immunisation calls became so enthusiastic that often, a vaccination exercise scored over 100 per cent of the target.

These 100 per cent plus vaccination responses in the late 1980s and all the 1990s were being attributed to an enthusiastic citizenry who even used to invite their neighbours from especially Kenya and Congo to come and take advantage of the fruits of Yoweri Museveni’s administration.

To many, therefore, last week’s controversy of some Ugandan parents refusing to allow their children to be immunised against measles and rubella was baffling. For Ugandans surely love their children. They work for their children, fight for their children and even steal for their children.

Some who access funding for managing their terminal illnesses choose to invest the funds for their children and face quicker death themselves. So how can such doting people choose to endanger their children’s health by denying them access to free vaccines?

Possibly doubts over the usefulness of vaccines in independent Uganda started around 2006 when some senior leaders were accused of massively abusing the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization programmes.

If leaders abuse the programme then it isn’t that important, is apparently the message some parents picked. Then more recently, there was this call for people to get immunised against Hepatitis. Then word went out that some of the Hepatitis vaccines were fake.

The word came from government, deepening some people’s mistrust for vaccines. So when the call came to have children vaccinated (again) for a couple of diseases, some parents were skeptical.

Vaccines have faced resistance in other countries, some of them developed, so Uganda is not the first one. But the problem in Uganda is that arguments are rarely based on facts, but suspicion.

In Kenya for example, civil society or the church will oppose a vaccination campaign after conducting research. With Uganda, we start with the argument and do no research.

Ugandans use circumstantial evidence and also tend to misread common corruption—a purely criminal matter—as a political scheme. But for God’s sake, if a criminal steals money meant for vaccines, it should not be assumed that he expressly wants kids to die or that he patriotically wants to sabotage a bad vaccine. He is just greedy.

The hero in this saga is one of the health ministers who publicly submitted her daughter to take the jab from a random health worker. But considering that we are still only enforcing vaccination for six or seven out of fifteen or so immunisable diseases, we still have a long way to go, and a few more bizarre anti-vaccination campaigns to overcome.

Joachim Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. Email:[email protected]