November 16, 2015
By Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire
Republished from Daily Monitor
In Summary
Some of you arguing that Shs1 m monthly pay is unrealistic actually wouldn’t survive on the same. Do you think you are more human, have more needs?
The campaigns for the 2016 presidential election are now in high gear and candidates’ propaganda machines are taking positions. It is not an easy task, to find honest and genuine conversations amid the propaganda noise, especially on social media. Most of the propaganda is coming from the moneyed camps in the race, but once in a while, it is possible to tell what informs the positions and responses given to issues being raised by the candidates.
One of the many issues that led to heated conversations online is the promise to primary school teachers by Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) candidate Mr Warren Kizza Besigye that in his government, he will pay them a monthly salary of Sh1 million. To understand the responses to the promise, we must go personal, because the personal is always political, just as the political is always personal, and as this election shows us, partisan as well.
Most of, if not all criticisms and take-down of this promise are from people who do not have any lived experience of a primary teacher’s life. We must look at this issue through a class lens. We must look at the class backgrounds of the people commenting to understand why they are dismissing the promise. Quite naturally, I took to Twitter to directly engage. And sent out the following tweets:
1. Why should primary school teachers be the worst paid public servants? Why should workers in the education sector be the least paid?
2. My mother is a primary school teacher. I am an only child. But she had to take loans to pay her university fees and my secondary school fees at the same time.
3. What about those primary school teachers with more than one child? The argument that the teachers’ level of education is low, is stupid and not based on fact.
4. Some primary school teachers have university degrees. To argue that they do not deserve Shs1 m monthly is not only elitist but sadist.
5. The real issue regarding primary school teachers’ salaries is inequality and classism. Why must the gap in salaries be so big? Can we have reasonable salary ceilings and floors?
6. How many loans were my mother (with only one child) expected to take up to pay our fees, did I not get a bursary for A-Level and a Mujilibhai Madhivani scholarship for university?
7. Middle and upper class types need to stop playing with people’s welfare and futures with their empty talk of GDP and econometrics.
8. Some of you arguing that Shs1 m monthly pay is unrealistic actually wouldn’t survive on the same. Do you think you are more human, have more needs?
9. Like many of the middle and upper class types arguing against the said pay for teachers, my mother has a university degree.
10. For many of us, these are not mere online debates to show how strong our candidates are. These are issues that have made or broken us.
After tweeting thus, I was reminded of Mr John Patrick Amama Mbabazi’s directive, as Prime Minister in 2011, when primary school teachers were on strike for higher pay. I quote. “All teachers who abscond from duty shall not be allowed within the premises of schools and should also not be paid any allowances.” In other words, teachers who were on strike for higher pay, by this directive were supposed to have been dismissed. How do you think that made the teachers feel? How did the children of those teachers feel? How did I feel? This is not about dead white men spewing economic theories. This is not about stinking privileged conversations about economic growth in hotels.
It looks to me that the Ugandan middle and upper classes, comfortable with the status quo, but embarrassed by the crass primitive ways with which Museveni’s regime goes about things, are interested in having Mbabazi replace the former, as a re-branding exercise. Museveni and Mbabazi do not threaten their privileges, and Mbabazi even looks trendy as a president. It is not about the fundamental issues of inequality in our society.
The core problem of the country, from my vantage point and my lived experience of course, is inequality and classism. Besigye has confronted this monster in the room directly every time he has gone on one of those impassioned attacks of the ‘elite’. This issue is not of interest to the rugby and cricket-following, middle/upper class Ugandan. The reality in which primary school teachers and their families live is far from the imagination of these types. And so, whenever issues of concern to me, a son of a primary school teacher are immediately rubbished by these middle and upper class types, I will remember that they are not on my side anyway. Their interest in this election is to maintain the status quo, at best, to re-brand it by installing one of them and there are no prizes or guessing who it is.
Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire is a Fellow at the African Leadership Centre, Kings College, London.
