For God and my Country. Oh Uganda!

A few days back, after the storm that destroyed lots of property in schools and people’s homes, an academic friend of mine asked me why this does happen to Uganda and argued that God did not love us. I told her that “shut up” because God loves us. We are a beautiful country, wonderful soils, wonderful climate but we have systematically destroyed it. God has given us the knowledge to manage our society and it is entirely upon us to decide how to use that knowledge. Resource poor Japan is today one of the wealthiest countries while America is rich. There are many people in the United States. When you meet Japanese, you see wealth around them. The way they speak, dress, even the civility by which they conduct themselves, you see society that is wealthy, organized and progressing. Japan is the peninsular that is susceptible to all kinds of natural disaster, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons name them. Japan has over 100 million people on this peninsular however 70% of its land is planted with forest. If there were not forests, the occurrence of these storms would be much higher and much more destroyed.

Many other countries have an afforestation programme. This is a plan to make sure that the countries forest endowment is replenished periodically. But what is happening to Uganda? We have cut all the trees down in most parts of Uganda and the rate at which we are planting are not sustaining our demand for timber.  It is not surprising therefore that when we have these minor storms since our land is exposed, we end up with these disasters that we see. Whoever is in charge of afforestation of the country needs to tell us what the problem is. But it may be surprising that we have all these wonderful plans and nothing happens on the ground.