It bothers me that people sometimes refer to a good policy and say that the government was sober when it made the policy. As far as I know, governments do not drink. Good or bad policy, governments are always sober. Indeed, when it comes to bad policies, these people do not say that the government was drunk when it tabled the policy.
However, in the intense political campaigns ahead of the 2026 General Election, I fear that some Opposition politicians might use the d-word when describing the government’s under-the-influence-like condition at the time it hiked science teachers’ salaries and left the arts teachers looking rather foolish. Ah! You can already see why science teachers are paid four times as much as the arts teachers. The teachers of the arts make us incurable idiots.
To wit: I am trying to describe the condition of a patient, the Government of Uganda, and I am fishing around for words that have absolutely no meaning. What does ‘under-the-influence-of-whatever’ mean?
Is it under the influence of Australian mushrooms or voodoo zombies? Instead of this garbage, a scientist would go directly to the point and express himself with precision, describing the condition of our government as a psychotic disorder characterised by sudden episodes of disconnection from reality. Where I was thinking of analogies with the effects of wine, the scientist is thinking of the arrangement of cells, the movement of chemicals and the electrical activity in different regions of the afflicted government brain.
The scientist will order that an electroencephalograph be hooked onto the scalp of the patient. He wants regular measurements of brain activity that his computer will help him to analyse before he recommends medication, not breakfast prayers. Meanwhile, as of writing this article on Wednesday, many teachers of arts subjects in government schools who are on strike to protest the salary inequality have refused to end their action.
Parents are in a dilemma. Most of them understand the strike action following the most humiliating policy the government could have thrown at the teachers, but they also desperately want their children to be taught and do their exams. For its part, the government, which staggered into the policy sideways, is too proud to admit that it made a footwork mistake and would sit down and soberly design another approach.
Instead, it instructs the teachers to be patriotic and call off the strike with neither a pay rise now nor a written commitment for a later date. Or it threatens to sack them and hire new teachers. Apparently, science teachers need not be patriotic. No special appeal is made to them to be patriots. They are paid fairly well for their labour. Big politicians, judges, senior security officers and various (government) institutional managers also have no use for patriotism. They are paid well, sometimes very highly. They also usually enjoy impunity to steal public resources.
But every revolutionary country needs patriots. If the big shots and the science teachers cannot make it, then the low-rated workers must fill the gap. If they refuse, conditions should be arranged for them to starve. Sack them. The winning slogan for 2026, therefore, should be: To spread patriotism, promote slavery. And to make teachers take their position as the most natural role models, they should be the first in line, happily matching forward as slaves and patriots. The school children who fail are not a problem. They will be added to the stock of Uganda’s slaves. Suddenly, a disease in government and a weird salary policy have produced a dividend. Who needs a cure?