ON THE MORNING of the day a few of us went out to vote in our local council leaders, I was at my front door shortly after 0700hrs. 

The schedule released by the Electoral Commission promised that we would be expected to verify our names against the voter register till 1000hrs.

I knew very well that the time would not be observed but pumped myself up with a positive attitude and went anyway.

My plan was to conduct my daily exercise and walk round the neighbourhood to make sensible use of time. 

I was not disappointed.

Our polling station was empty, as were most others in my area.

I did some light exercises right there and then went over to the nearby police station to make enquiries.

The pre-deployment parade was just ending as I arrived, so I had a whole range of police personnel to attend to my questions. 

One of them was the worse for wear.

I suspect he had spent the night on an undercover operation that involved infiltrating groups that deliberately misunderstood the purpose of the public holiday and had embedded themselves in neighbourhood bars.

I did not pay him much attention and went along my way with the advice from a much more alert colleague about what time I might best return for the voting exercise.

My LC 1 Chairperson (who won her seat back, end-of-day) was still abed, she said.

She believed some people might have already gathered at the polling station and pretended to be surprised by my update.

Some members of her campaign team were up and about, though.

They had clearly eluded the undercover police fellow’s attempts the night before to keep people in their beds so they could perform their civic duties with alert, clear minds.

Popping small plastic bottles of entertainingly named drinks, they were chanting various phrases and beginning to make their way around my village while brandishing banners that were certainly “campaign materials”.

I stopped them politely and explained briefly that they were not allowed to do this.

They were surprised by most of what I said but eventually believed me. They left the banners behind but still traipsed round with their drinks, to the amusement of very many of my neighbours who were out on their health walks and runs.

A couple of these neighbours confessed that they had no clue about the political process taking place around them.

Again, I was not disappointed.

Too many people have no clue about things that are important to us as a society.

I could not resist the urge to tell them to Be Serious.

Sadly, the message fell by the wayside because some asked me back: “Which serious when we are standing amidst all this garbage?”

At one point as I walked away from one of those conversations, holding my breath against another rancid wave that likely involved a carcass, I noticed a female charcoal trader step out of her shop with a small bucket.

She hopped over the drainage channel in front of her charcoal shed, crossed the road, and poured the water onto a specific spot where it started running off immediately.

I considered stopping to explain to her the depth of the problem she was creating, measured simply by the depth of the gulleys in the road, created over time by her and her neighbours pouring water there in that fashion.

It was obvious to me why she ignored the drainage trench – it was full of those plants that develop with years AND quite a lot of soil. 

Where had the soil come from? I recalled seeing a group of enthusiastic people on cleaning day digging up silt from the roadside and…pushing it into drainage channels.

“They will come to remove it,” one of them told me when I pointed out that this would later on cause larger problems.

“They” had not come to remove it.

There was a cycle here from the people cleaning up the filth around them only because the government had decreed it to the ones not bothering to go and elect the leaders closest to them and their day-to-day problems.

All the conversations I had had that day, including the high-spirited ones with people sipping from little plastic bottles, were held in clear English and some Luganda.

The English grammar involved told me there was education involved in the history of the neighbours I spoke to.

That education did not have enough to do with the tasks at hand. 

The government had Dedicated days for cleaning and voting, some people had been Motivated to do so, teams had been Activated to work officially and non-officially, some officials and workers had been Facilitated but … we were not fully Educated as a nation to do much of it correctly.

We never will be.

Not unless we put EDUCATE at the front of all the other ‘…ates’ out there, so that we are logical about all these things we set out to do as a nation.