By Richard Byamukama
Hello, Dr. Spire! Greetings from a fellow Ugandan scholar! I have been reading and analyzing your article about ‘corruption’ published by the Observer on December 13, 2023, but many questions are still lingering in my head.
I totally agree with you on the fact that many philosophers have contended that it is happiness and the avoidance of pain that we are all looking for in life, and they clearly contend that man’s desire is well motivated towards the avoidance of pain at all costs.
I concede that you acknowledge that there is rampant corruption in Uganda. In fact, even at the 2023 NRM end-of-year party, held at the party headquarters in Kyadondo, the NRM party Secretary General, Rt Hon. Richard Todwong, clearly lamented about the spike of corruption in almost each and every government department. However, I’m completely puzzled, and I’m still puzzled that your call didn’t acknowledge the dangers of corruption to a society and ended up being a sadist.
Under paragraph 3 of your philosophical write-up, you called upon every Ugandan to embrace corruption and thus be happy.
”Dear fellow Ugandans, stop looking on as everyone is getting corrupt and happier; join the corruption wagon and claim your happiness,” Spire said.
You go ahead and quote a Norwegian proverb that goes, There is hope as long as your finishing line is in water.’
However, I would like to remind you about ‘the pain pleasure principle’, developed by Sigmund Freud, which suggests that people make choices to avoid or decrease pain or make choices that create or increase pleasure.
The pain-pleasure principle is at the core of all the decisions we make. Beliefs, values, actions, and decisions are built upon this principle. The pain-pleasure principle suggests that while seeking pleasure, people will also seek to avoid pain. For those individuals where conflict is painful, they will do anything to avoid it. Allowing a negative situation to continue might be unhealthy and painful, but the thought of dealing with the conflict is far more painful.
In a simple breakdown of the principle, allowing a negative situation like corruption is very unhealthy, and in Uganda, where corruption is the order of the day, the citizens are living in pain and thus should do everything to avoid or fight corruption.
According to Sigmund, allowing a negative situation to continue might be unhealthy and painful (indeed, it is). This simply means that students will be stupid (they will learn nothing from school) and unemployed if the education system collapses, people will die like insects when the health sector completely goes into limbo, the economy will be left at a free-fall, Kampala roads will be like they are today due to inflated costs per kilometer between the contractors and KCCA, likewise the roads that take me back to Kagadi if UNRA becomes KCCA, President Museveni’s most loved PDM cash will be eaten, and the parishes won’t develop either.
Dr. PhD, you give all the reasons as to why a corrupt life will be the best for Ugandans. You quote an old proverb about a man who farts in church and sits alone on his pew. I believe you should have gone by that proverb, which could help us isolate the corrupt or foster accountability of public funds. In Security Sector Reforms (SSR) that I studied at my postgraduate degree in Security Studies, I was taught that having a vibrant civil society, an active parliament, an empowered CID to carry out investigations, and a transparent judiciary where the Benches are fully composed by Justices, and Magistrate Courts full of Magistrates, these people who fart in public or church will be extinguished from the public. They will either start to fear farting or be taken to my other friend, Major Tom Magambo, who will find where to hide them from the church.
We (me and you) shouldn’t simply relegate ourselves to the unfortunate role of twisting our noses in discomfort as others get lighter. Let’s all get lighter by instituting a strict isolation policy for those who “fart in church” and also empowering our isolation facilities so that we ensure the correct morals of transparency, accountability, fairness, and public trust. Good morals can be taught to the child or forced in cases of resistance.
Spire, have you come across the ‘survival for the fittest’ theory of Charles Darwin? Do you really think that my grandmother in Kyenzige-Kagadi will be among the fittest or the disabled? The theory emphasizes that animals suited to the conditions they live in are more likely to stay alive and produce other animals and plants than those that are not suited. This simply means the corrupt will fart more and more as they steal more and more and will become lighter and lighter as me and my grandmother go extinct, live under the stress of bad roads, break down the health system, collapse the education sector, and collapse the economy, to mention but a few.
In my opinion, I, Spire, and Ugandans should adopt Sigmund Freud’s ‘the pain pleasure principle’ so that we decrease the pain, not just create an acceleration of pain. We find ways to deal with the corrupt and the entire vice of corruption. Tolerance to corruption puts both the social and economic lives of the majority of the citizens of Uganda at a free fall, and the future lies in the doldrums. In the end, we will have a bruised and embattled social economy.
Lastly, dear Spire, I would like to hear back from you in a short time as you retract the early position that was calling upon all Ugandans to adopt gassing in public or church as a new way of life and come to a consensus with the later position. I will be exceedingly humbled when you kindly help and suggest some of the various ways we can decrease the pain we are going through, according to a fellow scholar, Sigmund Freud!(nexus)