Ugandans,
1/11 This question of background checks is related to many other questions that we have debated here, including that of the tribulations of Uganda Police, the ubiquity of violence in Ugandan society, and broader questions related to our general capabilities across the board. Even when you look closely at the debate on political participation, the autocratic propensties of leadership/political elites at every level of society (not just in the state, a point we often refuse to acknowledge), the question of the capabilities of a pre-industrial, mediaeval society always catch up with us.
2/11 Now, background checks: what are these? What do they entail? Me, myself, Corporal Otto: I was born in a banana plantation at the back of our kitchen. My illiterate grandmother was the midwife. My dining table, the placenta, for the 9 month intrauterine phase of my life was eaten by our dog, Popi. There are no records anywhere in Uganda that I was ever born. In places where they carry out background checks, things start from there: you are born in a hospital, your DNA is harvested, your blood group is established, bottom line, you get onto some database. You are registered with a general practitioner in places where there is a national health system, and every ailment you get is placed somehwere on a database.
3/11 You will go to school and this is compulsory, lest your parents end up in jail, and that means you will end up on the national educational system database. You will be mistreated by your booze-loving Mzee and end up on the vulnerable children’s database. Your parents will be entitled to child benefits, that will place you on the revenue services database. Your parents may get you a passport, and you will end up on the Home Affairs database. Every trip you make abroad will be logged somewhere, right from your infancy. And they will automatically have your finger prints.
4/11 As soon as you clock 16 years, you will see a card coming through the post, telling you that you have a social security number (SSN) or national insurance (NI) number depending on the country. Because all your correspondence comes to you by post, it means that your physical address is known, by post code or zipcode. You don’t live at “ekikkilira, kumpi nekiyinja, noyita kumuyembe, kumpi nakavule”. No! If you are Otto, yours will be, 117 Coffin Grove; Death side, Warwickshire; CV40 10QT; United Kingdom (thanx Mr John Nsubuga). In other words, you are on some one’s radar.
5/11 As you advance in your education, you will be entitled to a student’s loan. You will open a bank account where monthly instalments of the loan will be deposited. Every time, and whereever you draw cash, and where ever you do shopping, that is logged somewhere on a database. You will take bus/train rides using a students swipe card. Where ever you swipe it, someone knows already which city or town you are visiting. You will own a mobile phone, and not pay-as-you-go, but contractual. Whenever and where ever you make or receive a call, that is logged somewhere by GPS.
6/11 You will have a login to use the computers in your local library or your campus. When ever you use those computers, that is logged somewhere. You will have an email address. What ever you do with that address and whenever you log in, that is captured somewhere. Some camera will even have already recorded some of your biomentrics like the character of your iris…without your knowledge.
7/11 If you live in a country like Britain, which has 1 CCTV for every 13 members of the population, the highest CCTV density in the world, everywhere you walk, you are advised to smile, because you are on camera, being recorded somewhere. If you acquire a driving permit, you are already on the database of the agency that licences drivers and vehicle owners, by address etc.
8/11 In other words, where ever you are, you are leaving a massive electronic footprint, and that is the real content of your “back ground” in that “back ground check” that you are wondering about in the Ugandan context. In countries where individuals have such a huge electronic footprint, by the time police come to you to arrest you, you know they have their data: you just ask with a smile, for the handcuffs to be put on your wrists, because in your heart, you know they have the data: wamenikamata, bankutte, bangemye!
9/11 The other day we were talking about safe houses and torture and so on. Where people undergo subtle surveillance like I have tried to describe above, there is not torture. It is not because of democracy, as some of us argue here simplistically, it is because you do not have to whip some one to get information from him. You have it by just one push of the button. In Uganda, you lack that background information, whether on criminals, prospective judges ( I heard of a Senior Justice Kalanda who was found to have used some one else’s papers to advance his education), MPs, presidents, let alone military recruits.
10/11 So, let us get real and understand what makes things work or fail to work, instead of spending all our time ridiculing ourselves, wishing that we were like others, and generally cursing the dark without ever lighting any candle.
11/11 The lack of such infrastructure as I describe above accounts for such proverbs as “Ente endhirugavu enakuleta”, in other words, I can’t catch you now but when darkness sets in, you will come back to roost……I think that is Lusoga, your language. In other settings, whether it is shining or not, they will get you. Why?
Lance Corporal (Rtd) Otto Patrick
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Comments
L_cpl Otto,
I have been digesting with interest your arguments above on background checks like a python. The conditions that we find ourselves in especially with events that are spatial or ones that require pinpoint accuracy of geographical locations, pose a rather interesting problem of algorithms and can be a bit mind boggling.
I understand your concern as a military man, and the load of problems where a non-village oriented law enforcement officer might have in carrying out their daily tasks in such a terrain demarcated by unique objects such as ant hills, Mituba trees, and Buwonvus. It seems like our way is more object oriented than the numeric system enjoyed here in the west; the only trouble I imagine is when such unique demarcating objects are removed from the terrain, one’s sense of reference is left dangling. However, with solid defining markers our archaic system can be just as competitive.
On the other hand, I still believe that even a bum on modern streets still has a location, where they tend to leave a ”necessity trail,” to employ the common mammalian need to mark their territory with their clothes,cardboard, etc. The same need is fated and surely applies to the homeless in a village as portrayed in your earlier article on “The difficulty to perform background checks in present day Uganda”. When the above is coupled with the need to sleep and eat, a habit pattern emerges, which can be used to trace non-nomadic people and thus solve the problem at hand; rural terrain and background checks of persons of interest.
It is hard to argue that a child or person can live in a village without leaving a trace or reference of habit. Therefore, the argument that one is born and grows to the age of twelve and beyond, without any traceable habit or referee, is definitely the exception to the rule. If I had not grown up in a village, I might buy it hook, line and sinker. Unless Uganda has changed so much due to the AIDS onslaught, to the point of eradicating all the nosey neighbors, it seems implausible in all our cultures to have children growing up without the good will of the village or some family members checking on them.
I have been contemplating a mechanism that can be used to fulfill this background check issue in the absence of a referee. I remember as a child, when the Gombolola chiefs charged a fee to keep track of all the newly born in Uganda. I’m not sure how they missed you my friends L-Cpl Otto, and others. I went to school with many well-documented “Kamuhandas” (those delivered on the roadside). This is a system albeit, archaic, but it worked well for our record keeping purposes.
That said, with the advent of on the spot checks such as urinalysis, hair samples and other batteries of personality profiling psychological tests; one can pretty much gauge and get an inkling as to the background or leaning of an individual candidate without relying solely upon the interview of the forth grade teacher or the referees in the neighborhood.
The key feature here is that each test contains a built in “Truthfulness Scale” that measures client truthfulness while being tested
I still marvel at the “voir dire process” (website below) that was used on the would be juror for the recent OJ Simpson’s trial(first). There was set of intense questions, which helped the defense to weed out biased jurors. These types of questions can be designed without modern equipment; just pencil and paper and an adept mind. I truly believe they can help out our police and any governmental organization that requires background checks to employ a trail-less individual.
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/simpson/jurypage.html#Sample%20Jury
Tendo Kaluma
Ugandan in Boston