This quick phrase rolls off our tongues without a doubt in our minds that it’s true.
But, do we?
A reckless driver who knocked Bruno dead.
A mother who walks by the roadside, holding her child by the hand. The child walks in the middle of the road.
A young man hurling stones at the village dog.
That drunken guy who started a fight with his fisherman friend come enemy, and over that woman who has fifteen kids from eighteen fathers, whose drunken eyes look up to the sky as she is saying “take me” and you wonder if she’s asking the man or God.
That businessman who poured the debris from his construction site onto the road.
A boda who rides with the guy who snatches ladies’ handbags.
A beggar lady who borrows kids from her slum to take them to Kampala road for work.
A fat and ugly woman who stole the kid in the village and gave it to the omuroogo to slaughter and sprinkle her with blood so she can look beautiful and attractive to her man, who has two teenage side dishes he both infected with HIV.
That employee you fired with a termination letter on five pages, listing just a fraction of incidents where money wasn’t properly managed.
That politician who wants to be in power now because it is his turn.
That lady who wakes up every day married to a wrong guy for the wrong reasons, trying so hard to justify the mess she’s in and yet all she wants is to cuddle by her lover’s side.
That woman who brings men home to earn 5,000 while her kids are sleeping on a mat under her bed.
That man who asks that woman to go live for 10,000.
That man who sleeps with every woman in his office and sometimes calls in two of them at the same time. And them who go to his office and thereafter have tea in the pantry, plotting how to fire that single mother who’s not been tasted yet.
A woman who spits in her boss’s tea.
Boss’s wife who belittles that tea-lady.
And so many others, pointless to try to list them all because every day, there will be another disappointment and another reason for God to turn the deaf ear to Uganda.
What have we done for each other to say “we deserve better” with such entitlement? What is our human contribution to another human being – when we fail at “Good morning”?
Until we ask hard questions and give some good answers, we don’t deserve even this much that we got. We are just lucky we are not at each others’ throats because the way we are building, the way we are giving is just not good enough.
We deserve to wake up and begin working towards creating better.
