Sometime in 2008, Prof George Kakoma, the man who composed the Uganda national anthem, sued government for unpaid royalties.
With President Museveni’s support, Kakoma was successful and earned Shs 50 million in compensation. Two years later, Semei Matia Nyai, the man who designed the national flag, also sued government demanding payment for his work.
While Kakoma had received some token payment for winning the anthem competition in 1962, Nyai had received nothing. Nyai’s suit was low-key, and it quietly died down.
That these claims would be made almost five decades later should help us illuminate debates in our present politics and public service – especially as regards compensation and rewarding. Without seeking to question the veracity of these claims, why did these men realize, over forty years later, that they had to claim payment for their contribution to the country? What had changed?
In the 1960s – anyone in their seventies will tell you – people were proud of contributing to their country in whichever way they could, de gratis. Community service such as clearing a drainage channel, cleaning a water well or helping the elderly were things men and women engaged in with national pride.
Stories abound of ordinary individuals brandishing their graduated tax pay slips at drinking joints and market squares as statement of their patriotism. Their love for the country was spontaneous, authentic and selfless.
These gallant Ugandans needed not patriotic prompting, say through patriotism classes! Then came the rains, and the entire house came down. It was in the mid-2000s that Uganda witnessed a key shift in the country’s public service imagery. Compensation took the place of national pride.
A number of events could explain this key shift: the year 2005 saw the removal of presidential term limits, and legislators were treated to generous bonuses or pay-ups (or bribes, if you like) to change the Constitution.
Surely, the nobility of a job like legislating for the country should have attracted the most pride de gratis. Around the same time, President Museveni figuratively responded to pleas to leave power, saying he had hunted his animal and was being asked to leave even before the feast could start.
A year later, in 2006, responding to accusations of egregious corruption, one minister asked, rather rhetorically: “Where were you when we were fighting?” signaling to his right to eat since he had participated in the National Resistance Army (NRA) war, claimed to have liberated Uganda.
In these and several other cases, contributing to Uganda ceased being an issue of selfless nationalistic pride – with minimal or no reward – but as an open-ended license to self-righteous accumulation, often by dispossession.
I want to place Prof George Kakoma and Semei Matia Nyai in this context. They were lucky to be living and witness the change in national sentiment – from patriotism to feasting. They could not afford to be left behind.
Indeed, this country is only lucky that many other gallant Ugandans with permanent imprints in history had passed on by the time the shift happened.
Otherwise, the man of the coat of arms; the man of the independence monument; the man who designed the Ugandan parliamentary building; the men who drafted the first Constitution; our innumerable anti-colonial heroes; the men who built the Uganda railway, etc, had legitimate claims with precedents in recent events.
We are witnessing another dimension of this key shift. Instead of waiting to ask for royalties, the present breed of public servants has opted for handshakes.
Instead of going to the media to announce a job well done, and have their names chanted and crammed by schoolchildren preparing for national exams, today’s gallant servicemen are hiding from their compatriots, and stealthily receiving multi-million shillings presidential handshakes!
There’s one problem, though. If all public service – health, military, education, politics, communication, finance, natural resource exploitation – is considered absolutely necessary to the country, and all our different contributions are part of one single project that is growing Uganda, who then does, and who doesn’t deserve a firm millions-worth-presidential handshake?
The simple progressive answer is that everybody does. But the president is not accessible to all public servants to extend the handshake. This could mean; no president, no handshake!
However, since we execute our public service duties every day with a mindset that the president is watching, the same principle applies. Give thyself a handshake for a job well done; just make sure your compatriots are not watching.
The author is a PhD fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR).