Africa-Press – Uganda. If you are plugged into any newsy stuff, you must have come across the stories coming out of India – the guys supposed to be bailing us out with the Covid-19 vaccine. But if for some reason you have decided that ignorance is bliss, let me spoil it for you. It is bad, unprecedented bad. People are dying on the streets, because the health system is overwhelmed, from a new variant of the coronavirus.
You probably don’t remember but around this time last year, the lockdown was starting to bite. Forced to stay home for a couple of weeks, we were starting to get jittery from the experience. Those who often suffer anxieties or for whom home isn’t a safe abode were going through the pits, while the rest of us hobbled on the best way we could.
We looked on in amazement and confusion, sometimes enviously, as Burundi and Tanzania moved on with life as usual – going through the rituals of staging pretend-democratic elections and frolicking around in large gatherings.
We even said that it would be madness to go into our own charade – but somehow still did, probably because our elections are more an economic answer than they are a political one. We hadn’t even registered any Covid-19 related deaths and were wondering why truck drivers weren’t getting banned from our borders.
A year later, nobody cares that they didn’t get their plate of government-served posho and beans. We have families with empty spaces where their loved ones used to sit, businesses reeling and workers reeling from the impact of Covid-19, and the unraveling of thievery and misuse of recovery funds. All these seem to have pushed us to get back to how things used to be – how things need to be.
A friend recently arrived in Uganda, from Canada, and she was flabbergasted by what she saw on our streets. Having spent the last year under lockdown, she couldn’t explain to herself – or to her people at home – how nothing had visibly changed about Kampala life as she had always known it.
I joked that we probably had, without knowing or intending to, achieved herd immunity – because there seemed to be no explanation why we were behaving the way we are, seemingly oblivious of the consequences. So much that even those who had been identified as high-risk groups were spending more time indulging in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories than they were in the queues to get jabs.
I am probably committing a bit of literary appropriating here but I couldn’t find a better quote to capture the folly of our indulgencies, better crafted than how the American feminist writer, Audre Lorde, did, when she said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
She obviously was talking about things different, and yet I find that for people who would be described as engaged in socioeconomic and political warfare, there is little investment in self-preservation. The contradiction for Uganda is that where you have a young population for whom – from the evidence of it – the biggest threat is not necessarily the pandemic, but economic survival, self-preservation and caution become luxury items.
Which then brings us to our approach to the safety protocols we are using for the vaccine rollout. Two months into the exercise, we only just crossed the 300,000 people mark and there is still no explanation why or concerted strategy for mitigation – only suppositions from here and there. Would we, for example have achieved more success if our approach hadn’t been ‘cut and paste’ from the global rollout template, but instead been more cognizant of our demographic context.
Would our numbers have been higher, if young people (25-40 years), who form a core demographic – and are breadwinners and providers for their families, had been actively targeted for vaccination, and therefore served as influencers for their older relations? We probably will never know, because we approached this with such tunnel vision, and those same young people don’t seem to care much as well.
Looking at how young people have moved on from the kind of self-preservation that’s required to survive whatever struggle they are engaged in, and government’s near-predictable bungling you worry what might happen if this thing doesn’t go away – or if anybody is working behind the scenes to stave off an India-like situation.
Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. [email protected]
