Print, broadcast and social media in Uganda is awash with commentary on operation Fika Salama (reach safe) being implemented along Kampala-Masaka-Mbarara highway.

Some of the comments are crediting the operation for reducing traffic accidents. However, other comments are decrying the highhandedness with which the police is implementing the operation.

As someone who was detained during the operation, I witnessed the detention of Dr Deo Kizito – a surgeon who was proceeding to operate a critically-ill patient. I also met a bereaved father who was transporting the body of his deceased son for burial.

Disturbingly, Dr Kizito was acquitted three days later at the magistrate’s court at Buwama, his crime having been driving past a minister’s convoy that was moving in a climbing lane. His patient died while he was in detention.

I also witnessed two other anomalies: the detention of an eight-year-old runaway girl and her ten-year-old sister in the same cell with women who were ‘high’ on drugs and hurling vulgarities; and the congestion of the cell I shared with some 28 inmates despite having been designed for a maximum of six occupants.

In each of these cases, pleas for humanistic consideration fell on deaf ears. The policemen said they did “not care”, including when I complained about the detention of juvenile girls with older women.

Although Fika Salama is credited for reducing accidents, the people who are complaining about it are infuriated by its implementers’ callous indifference that borders on sadistic disregard for our conventions on empathizing with and supporting the young, dying and bereaved.

Yet one is disappointed to realize that this chilling indifference to the tribulations of others is not peculiar to policemen. Over the 35 years I have lived in Uganda, I have observed the degeneration of our morals from that of a humanistic people who are famed for their kindness (even towards strangers) to that of a mostly egocentric people who throw around statements like nfunila wa (what is in it for me); tebinkwatako (it is none of my business); and saagala kumanya (I don’t care).

In the 1980s, I saw a lot of drivers who stopped to give lifts to pedestrians. Today, I see a lot of drivers who remorselessly drive past causalities of major accidents bleeding helplessly on the roadside.

Yet I have always found the real shocker at the reception of the hospitals where I take these causalities for first aid when the first thing the doctor does is ask “who will pay the bill”, with a coldness that is akin to saying “no money, no first aid!”

Similar unkindness is increasingly widespread in our society and I would like to implore each reader to do what they can to revive our spirit of humaneness. Thankfully, parts of our school curriculum derive from a humanistic philosophy of education.

However, an excessive obsession with passing examinations has produced a system of teaching in which delivery of this curriculum prepares only the mind.

Teachers should prepare the heart, too, so that our health workers do not only recite but actually observe their Hippocratic Oath. By their counsel and example, political, religious, cultural and institutional leaders should also encourage their followers to be humanistic. The parents/guardians of growing children should also do the same.

When this message of humanism builds a critical mass of humanistic people, policemen implementing operations such as Fika Salama will use the express penalty scheme in lieu of detaining all suspected drivers even when the cells are congested beyond the limit.

Hospitals will also establish/expand munificent schemes for emergency/needy patients and, indeed, decisions such as the one to close Makerere University will be implemented in ways that do not aggravate the conditions and deaths at Mulago national referral hospital.

However, our humaneness will not depend mainly on the actions of those in public offices as the harsh criticism we direct towards them appears to insinuate but, rather, on the things that we ordinary citizens do for/to one another.

The author is an associate professor of higher education at the East African School of Higher Education Studies and Development, Makerere University.