In 2006, I was an administrative officer at Luweero Industries Limited (LIL), Ministry of Defence. One of my first initiatives in that office was to partner LIL with a United States Agency for Development (USAID) drive called Health Initiatives for the Private Sector (HIPS) project. Thereafter, HIPS was training LIL personnel on how to avoid the scourge of HIV/Aids. Being strapped for cash, however, LIL strictly provided its space for training peer educators and accommodation for HIPS facilitators.
During one HIV/Aids drive at Kisenyi Village in Kalungi Sub-county, Nakasongola Barracks, we were asked by HIPS to provide fuel. We didn’t have any. So, I liaised with Air Defence and they gave me 300 litres for this effort. After the successful completion of that initiative, the general manager LIL, Ms Jacquelyn Susan Mbabazi, asked me how I got the fuel, and I told her. She then replied, ‘Good, life is about managing scarcity.’
With furrowed brow, I ostensibly accepted this as flawed logic. I took it for a scarcity mentality. It’s only years later, after I left LIL, that I finally cottoned onto this threaded thought, as it were. I was watching the bout where Muhammad Ali broke his jaw in the fight against Ken Norton on March 31, 1973, in the first round. Ali went on to fight 14 more rounds before being defeated by unanimous decision. The pain Ali suffered must have been excruciating. But Ali shrugged it off. After all, he was the man who said, ‘I don’t count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting, because that’s when it really counts.’
He seemed to revel in his own suffering.
Then I heard basketballer Kobe Bryant make a famous statement during his 2013 Achilles tendon injury recovery, captured in the documentary Kobe Bryant’s Muse, saying, “I love the pain.’ That’s when it struck me. Accomplishment was born in the furnace of suffering. The club-footed cousin of suffering is deprivation, scarcity. The less we have, the more we ache for more. How we manage this, Ms Mbabazi said, is what life is about. Even on a spiritual plane, this made sense. Jesus Christ suffered and died on the cross for our salvation.
Suddenly, everywhere I looked, suffering and scarcity were indwelt with great accomplishment. And the reverse proved to be true. Abundance seemed to be the cause of Africa’s colonisation, in part. We had so much on the continent that we didn’t require that much innovation. Necessity being the mother of invention, we didn’t need to mother invention because we were blessed with abundance. Furthermore, in postcolonial Africa, the “resource curse” is an economic phenomenon where African nations heavily reliant on natural resource exports often experience slower economic growth and development.
On balance, human beings fight for what they lack. So a lack of rights, economic progress and life abundant have made us warriors for democracy, economic and political. Our demand for democratic standards being driven by necessity and the need to leapfrog traditional stages in political development to attain this. In other words, we are fighting for democracy and progress because we do not have it. Scarcity, in this sense, has breathed life into our yearning for better times.
However, how we manage this will determine the future of our country, nay, continent. Do we adapt our ingenuity to our political environment or allow our adaptation to eternal political realties spur our political culture? It’s a Hamletian dilemma we must navigate with the mindset that embraces scarcity and suffering as prerequisites to greatness. As Sir Winston Churchill once said, when you’re going through hell, keep going.