By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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According to a report by the NBS TV channel, this otherwise sensible public accountability tool has run into an unexpected problem — poverty.

School teachers are among the public servants who have to declare their wealth. However, they are easily the worst paid professionals in the country.

One teacher is shown in his homestead, surveying the property he must declare: three small grass-thatched houses, a radio, five chickens and some crops in a garden. His view is that there is nothing there to declare, and they should be exempt.

Another teacher, very eloquent and polemical — he probably teaches literature or history — saw a sinister motive. He suggested that “they just want to laugh at us. We have no wealth to declare. They should just be honest and ask us to declare our poverty.”

Proponents of the wealth declaration could argue that it is like a Nil tax return. The value of that would be that if you move from nothing to a millionaire in a year, then you probably stole and probably sold off the school iron sheets meant for the new classroom block, or sold examination papers.

However, over 90 percent of the teachers in the country, like elsewhere in East Africa, aren’t in a position to steal anything from a school (that’s the preserve of the headmaster or headmistress) and don’t set the national examinations.

The result of making all teachers file wealth declarations is the cost of administration of the returns would far outweigh any benefits.

Uganda has been there with the poll tax, known as graduated tax, which was levied on every adult (mostly men), without regard to their income or resources. Unpopular, too costly to collect, and a source of conflict, it was abolished in 2005. Kenya abolished it much earlier in 1974, and Tanzania got rid of it in 2003.

Lately, though, voices for its return are increasing, apparently because, without the incentive to work that it provided, men in the villages have turned into zombies.

It was a common sight after the deadline had passed to see a long queue of men who had defaulted, tied together with ropes at their waists like slaves, being led by a chief and a local policeman with a rusty rifle, to prison.

The cost of the chief rounding them up, of keeping them in prison even just for a week, exceeded several times the incomes of the defaulters.

In a country where poorly paid teachers get their salaries months late and are paid in potatoes and chicken that poor students whose parents can’t afford fees pay in lieu to the school, a cutoff point for wealth declaration might be good policy.

That said, NBS quoted a stern education official warning of the consequences for failure to declare. The government could seize undeclared assets, he said.

So, if our first teacher declared his three huts and crops, but left out the chicken, the government would seize those, presumably. Stay tuned, the law of unintended consequences is about to take a weird turn in Kampala.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3