AS USUAL AT THE LAST MINUTE, everybody seems to be concerned that there is change coming our way. Umeme is leaving and handing over to the Uganda Electricity Development Company Limited – abbreviated to UEDCL.
The public conversation is focused on three of the most irritating parts of this:

ONE: the electricity outages that seem to have increased in frequency of recently; TWO: the cost of the transition as has been announced in the last two weeks, which I won’t repeat here because, and then you do what?: THREE: a general worry that we are going back to the UEB days of the 1980s and 90s nanti…”government.”

I personally understand the nausea because I’ve lived through the decades of UEB (Uganda Electricity Board) and UMEME and have been a pawn in the game.

One of my lessons as a parent came from watching my father keep us going in those days of darkness of the 1980s, including the times he’d distract us with fireplace stories.

https://www.newvision.co.ug/category/news/umeme-takeover-govt-in-advanced-stages-to-sec-NV_207187

Every so often, more frequently these days, I recall the night he was distracting us with a story linked to many social issues of the day, and as he was saying, “Come back! Come back!” in President Obote’s voice, electricity returned as if on cue.

I have used that one experience from him many a time, with success.

At the back of my mind I am disturbed that the experience of 40 years ago still works for me now and that I accept it. I did not even realise I was accepting it till a respectable senior citizen on our Residents’ WhatsApp group reminded us that this should not be normal.

See, in our neighborhood, we have very good relations with people who work at Umeme. We maintain close contact with them so that we report outages early and manage our expectations for restoration.

(I have colleagues in South Africa who do exactly the same there.)

Today some of us say, “I have an Umeme guy” and mean different from the ones we needed back in the 1990s and early 2000s when that phrase meant a ‘kamyufu’ who created illegal connections for us.

I was part of that change for a specific reason that is not relevant today. What is relevant is that our intention back then was to remove the need for any Ugandan to say, “I have an Umeme guy.”

The effort worked by making Umeme employees realise that, unlike their UEB predecessors, their salaries were going to come from the electricity bills paid by consumers.

That’s our worry about having to go back to the UEB days – putting utilities under the management of people who will be paid their salaries regardless of their service delivery.

This is why we need to quickly drop this idea that “Government” is taking over electricity distribution – in fact, President Museveni and the entire mechanism
of the NRM should adopt this position post-haste with everything, ahead of campaigns.

Let’s place the spotlight on the individuals themselves and the organisation.

Who is in charge at UEDCL? Who is the person we need to hold accountable when electricity goes off? THAT person, NOT the ambiguous ‘government’ in which all manner of inefficiency can be accommodated.

That’s going to be the only way we can get these people to Be Serious about their work.

Even now, we don’t see UEDCL stepping forward to take charge. UEDCL accountability in Uganda must be clear; who are the decision-makers, and how can we hold them responsible? We need to know their names directly so we can call them and call them out.

We are not going to be It’s not Government any more. Tell us your names, you people of UEDCL!

—

Simon Kaheru

www.skaheru.com
@skaheru