“Capitalists and politicians are still doing whatever they can to further frustrate the muntu wa wansi (ordinary person) at the Nyege Nyege Festival 2023. Empty promises, grabbing opportunities they had promised locals.” Agather Atuhaire on X
Agather appropriately decries how capitalist behind the Nyege Nyege Festival 2023 are reneging on their promises of corporate social responsibility for the benefit of the festival host village, Nalufenya in Jinja.
Agather decries how the residents of Nalufenya are deliberately not being given priority to benefit economically, through service provision.
Instead, the organizers have struck deals with external service providers to provide services.
The locals have strictly been forbidden the business opportunities associated with the event.
Case in point, apparently, “Boda boda people of Nalufenya have been kicked to the curb and they (organizers) have brought in SafeBoda from Kampala.”
Agather’s indignation reminded me of the book: “Neoliberal Moral Economy in Africa” by Dr. Jorg Wiegratz (PhD) and the NTV interview he gave on his book.
I was moved to write a blog post titled: “The cause of poverty in Uganda.” It seems relevant still and so I am editing and re-posting it.
Here is what I wrote then and it remains relevant now, five years later:
The Cause of Poverty in Uganda
Dr Jörg Wiegratz interviewed live on NTV
Insightful is Dr. Wiegratz’s analysis of how “economic deception” has become routine and has been institutionalized in Uganda.
And how such institutionalization of “economic deception” has normalised and intensified fraud, economic crime and trickery in doing business.
Our morals, in particular, have been ‘engineered’ and altered to the extent that our moral strength has been so weakened that we do not resist the evil that is unchecked liberal capitalism.
So weakened is our moral strength to the extent that when the “servants of capitalism” speak of promoting investors, of modernization, of industrialization, of liberalization, of free trade, of blah, blah, we cheer them.
We are subconscious of how those very “servants of capitalism”, the investors that they promote and the ideologies that they promote – modernization, industrialization, liberalization, free trade, blah and blah – are the very root source of our poverty.
Instead, the “servants of capitalism” call us backward and we accept.
They blame us for our poverty and we accept that we are the problem.
Through deceit they seduce us to accept that our heritage, the wisdom and the knowledge systems that our ancestors bequeathed us, are the cause of our poverty.
And the master stroke of the “servants of capitalism” is their considerable success in brainwashing us to accept that, in order to be ‘better’, we need to ethnocide the culture of our ancestors.
They cox us to adopt a culture that is exogenous in origin. How so culturally dislocated we have become.
I do not deceive myself. I cannot single-handedly change the tide, but I have a choice to resist it. Resist all of the tide at once. I may not be able to. But resist some of it that I can. I will surely do.
I can and I will buy Dr. Wiegratz’s book.
I can and I will read Dr. Wiegratz’s book.
I can and I will, with my new awakening from Dr. Wiegratz’s book, better critique neoliberal capitalism and its negative consequences in Uganda.
I can and I will, starting with this blog post, encourage all Ugandans with means and good intention to buy and read Dr. Wiegratz’s book.
And from the understanding that they derive from it, begin to ask and answer the question:
Who really is the root source of our poverty in Uganda?
The revolution begins.
First published on 25th April 2018; revised and published on 10th November 2023.
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