Epidemics Return Uganda to its Truer Image

ELIAS BRYABAREMA


KAMPALA--When Uganda hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Chogm, the country was hardly mentioned in most of the American press, arguably the most influential section of the Western media.
The British media though did offer considerable coverage casting Uganda, momentarily, in global news pages, for better or worse. According to the government, the foremost justification for the colossal sums of money spent on organising Chogm2007 was because the event would present the country with something of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to showcase its supposed bountiful potential to the world.
As to whether that happened during the weeklong Chogm meetings (November 19th-25th) remains unclear.

But if Chogm did indeed market brand Uganda to the world, then President Museveni and his NRM government might already be banging their heads on the walls asking why a cruel misfortune had to strike so soon, instantly wiping out all the gloss newly put on the nation’s face.

Just in a flash, by an act of Nature, Uganda has been lunged back to its standard sub-Saharan African default image: disease, pain and suffering. As November ebbed and sunk on the horizon, Uganda started to hit global headlines as the hemorrhagic fever Ebola tightened its horrific grip on the nation, four days after the end of Chogm2007.

On December 5th that catastrophe was added on weight with Daily Monitor reporting an additional quadruple outbreak of bubonic plague which struck West Nile, Cholera in Hoima and Yellow Fever in Kitgum.

Since then, nearly all the news churned out of Uganda by the global newswires (AFP, Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg, Xinhua etc) has been on the Ebola epidemic and little else somehow cementing the traditional world perception of Uganda as just about that of any other sub-Saharan African backwater: nations still susceptible to outbreaks of diseases even as simple as Cholera.

The devastating impact of the current Ebola strike on Uganda’s image is boldly noticeable in the American press which in the first place never bothered to report anything substantially positive about the country’s hosting of Chogm. New York Times reported, “Ebola Kills 19 Ugandans,” on 4th December. Similar stories run in several others major US newspapers.

This is particularly distressing considering that president Museveni has made countless trips to the US to court investors there, only for them to be inundated with the terrifying news of health epidemics trumpeted in their press.

Museveni’s Media Advisor, Mr. John Nagenda ridiculed any derivation of contrasts between Chogm and the Ebola epidemic. “It’s the mindless that can start drawing any links between Ebola and Chogm. This is a natural epidemic that can hit any country.” he said yesterday.

The government, he said, was scrambling to marshal resources and respond adequately so that the epidemics can be blunted as quickly as possible. He was empathic in dismissing the notion that any image mileage that Uganda could have wrung out of successful (some say) hosting of Chogm has already been eroded by the epidemic.

Nagenda could be right that epidemics are natural and that it would possibly be sadistic to start throwing mean arguments around them as cynics are wont to do (are already doing!). But again, as is well known, health catastrophes like cholera are now only a preserve of countries that are trapped in primordial living conditions like those in parts of Uganda and most of sub-Saharan Africa. And even Ebola, which would seem to have no connection with the level of economic development: all its past eruptions have been confined to sub-Saharan Africa; Sudan, Uganda, D. R. Congo and Angola—countries that share just about the same living conditions.

At the end Chogm Museveni, newly energised and soaring from the Chogm success addressed journalists delighting in the success of Chogm and the new global power it had rendered Uganda’s “Gifted by Nature” brand.

Now, the same Nature has, unsympathetic to Museveni, turned malevolent and put everything asunder and dragged the country back to its melancholic existence.