Nuwe Ben

I bumped into my old friend @ChrisObore1 while visiting Salongo @EriasLukwago at Murchison Bay Prison. Obore is visibly disturbed by his new public image. In utter disbelief, he said he can’t believe that we now think he is a national thief, he repeated the phrase "national thief" three times!

I'm wondering, do the contractors the Government gives such Road construction deals have Safety Supervisors and they're serious at work? How safe are road users at night or in rainy season along Nakawuka road in such a spot? @MoWT_Uganda

@ApolloBuregyeya @BenNuwe Just because your relatives and friends are being arrested and exposed you call it mob justice.Actually they deserve death.Thieves can't be rehabilitated

This is civic illiteracy masquerading as toughness, @BenNuwe. “Arrest them first; the innocent will be exonerated later” is not the rule of law. It is mob justice travelling in government vehicles. The State must investigate, establish reasonable grounds and then arrest, not destroy someone’s reputation before the cameras and tell them to spend years proving their innocence. When politicians reverse that order, cases collapse, taxpayers pay compensation, professionals are demoralised and the real thieves disappear behind the confusion. Citizens who cheer illegality simply because it is performed in the name of fighting corruption are not defending government; they are a poor quality that preserve backwardness. It's unfortunate that, you @BenNuwe now exhibit qualities of being a nonstrategic and a substandard thinker that narrows our chances of development as a country. Corruption is not defeated by temporarily suspending the Constitution for a TikTok clip.

The Politics of Kulabiisa: When Governance Becomes Performance. ======= Dear Hon. @BalaamBarugahar et al, let me begin fairly. Before joining politics, Balaam was a successful captain of industry. He built enterprises, created jobs, took risks and learnt that results come from work rather than slogans. He is not the familiar political gambler whose only enterprise is politics itself and whose greatest productive asset is a microphone. His instinct should therefore be to defend the legitimacy of hard work, lawful effort and democratic accountability. His concerns about corruption, waste and poor service delivery are real. But now comes the danger. The private-sector instinct to walk into a workplace, summon the responsible officer and demand immediate answers does not translate neatly into government. A company may have one captain. A state is supposed to have institutions, laws, budgets, contracts, auditors, technical professionals and chains of responsibility. When a minister becomes the investigator, auditor, engineer, prosecutor and public-relations officer in one roadside performance, governance has crossed into kulabiisa. The problems being “discovered” are hardly new. Five years of unaccounted money did not accumulate in a country without ministers, internal auditors, accounting officers, parliamentary committees and oversight agencies. Hospitals did not suddenly run out of medicine on the morning a minister entered the ward. Delayed road projects did not become distressed only when a convoy arrived. We are often watching government publicly rediscover what government has privately known for years. The construction sector exposes the contradiction most clearly. A minister visits a struggling project, rebukes the contractor and orders the Project Manager to deliver. Yet government may owe the same contractor, delay approvals, withhold possession of site, sit on variations and fail to resolve land or utility problems. A Project Manager cannot command performance into existence when the Employer has weakened the contract. Workers are not paid by speeches, suppliers do not release materials after watching TikTok, and machinery does not run on patriotic anger. This is where the principle of clean hands matters. Government must demand quality, accountability and value for money, but it must also account for its own obligations. Accountability that travels only downwards is not justice; it is power performing morality for an audience. Balaam is therefore not the problem, and neither is any one new minister. They are entering a political culture that rewards visibility more than institutional repair. Cameras make anger visible; they do not make systems functional. Years of frustration with corruption, poor service delivery and unfulfilled promises have understandably created a public appetite for visible accountability. Citizens who have suffered for so long naturally cheer public confrontations, arrests and humiliation because they feel, at last, that someone is acting. Politicians quickly learn that a dramatic inspection attracts more applause than a procurement reform, a forensic audit or a strengthened institution. The politics of kulabiisa is therefore sustained by both leaders and citizens: one side performs accountability, the other applauds the performance. Yet when the cameras leave, the hospital still needs medicines, the contractor still needs payment, the engineer still needs technical independence and the institution still needs reform. Real governance is quieter. It is paying on time, investigating competently, enforcing contracts fairly, strengthening institutions and correcting failure before a ministerial convoy is required. That is the harder work, and it produces far fewer dramatic videos. The test of leadership is not how many officials are humiliated on camera. It is how many problems no longer need a camera at all.