Humanist

Is it me, or are brands increasingly marketed to promote individualism and to isolate us from extended familial ties and support systems?

I am feeling nostalgic and longing to be living in a village where everybody knows and looks out for thy neighbor. Where the divide between the haves and have-nots isn’t glaringly wide.

In answering today’s daily prompt, I am thinking of ideas brands and not necessarily material brands. But of course ideas inform material things.

Something as simple as the positioning of your home security light, for example. You can position it so that it lights up for your neighbor and the surrounding area or you can do so in a way that it lights up only your home.

This thought process, has particularly been triggered for me today because a post I authored nearly 15 years ago, “Cry Uganda’s children, our African extended family has broken down,” is trending.

I can only speculate why, but it could likely be because of the recent debate that was organised by the Female Lawyers Network for the three male candidates vying to be elected the next President of the Uganda Law Society.

Yes, that there are three men running for the presidency of Uganda Law Society is consistent with the realities that in “Uganda, women are under-represented in senior legal positions in law firms, IBA (International Bar Association) report reveals.”

It is no wonder that during the debate, the presidential candidates had insufficient understanding of how such disparity and historical injustice may be corrected. Here is my review of the debate.

For instance, when it came to proposals for ensuring that a female lawyer’s career does not suffer when she chooses to have children, the propositions by the candidates were befuddling.

For example, none of the candidates, clearly articulated their intentions to rectify the gaps in implementation of maternity leave. As in, even though the law provides for women to have 60 working days paid for maternity leave, many women are not accessing it for fear of loosing their jobs. Read more here.

The sad situation for Uganda, is that paternity leave is only two weeks. By law, a man cannot take extended paternity leave, for example, so as to allow his spouse to go back to work and become the bread winner. By beliefs, traditions and practices, it is unthinkable that he would do that. It does happen but it is so rare.

And since our extended African family has broken down, mothers wanting to return to work are often left on their own, struggling to find a caregiver for their babies that they can afford; which often case ends up being the unqualified one.

What am rambling on about, really, is I would like to associate with brands that revive and promote those good aspects of the idea of “it takes a village to raise a child” of ubuntu, of community.

As one of my blog followers, Connie, articulated it so well: “We need to sit down and think about what went wrong along the way. What happened to the old community support systems?. Where did we go wrong?. How can we re-build systems that can support working mothers and children?”

Yes, we need to analyse what we are calling ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘Africa Rising’, ‘liberation’, ’emancipation’ and many more such terminologies that we often throw around. When it comes to our children, have we not, in fact, regressed?