The mind, especially the untrained mind, is always going to infer a cause-and-effect relationship between two moments. If you want to build a harmonious society, you have to satisfy this natural tendency of the mind by creating social processes that are predictable to some extent. Signs of a decaying society, like a failed state, start within the minds of the people in that society. When no single action can guarantee a result, people are either going to get paralyzed, or the strong ones are going to fall back on superstition.
Uganda is a very clear case study of this situation. The few people in Uganda who have not resorted to alcohol, drugs, petty trading, or offering themselves up for slavery in Arabia and the West are indulging in heavy superstition. The churches are open 24/7, and they are always full. TikTok is littered with educated people claiming to be victims of witchcraft. The incompetence of the people leading Ugandan society is sad. Most people have been miseducated into this weird assumption that natural resources are only supposed to be dug out of the ground, or tied to tourism or what-not, and they have squandered the most valuable natural resource of any society, which is its people. So, a society that could have been positive-sum if it had invested in a productive people has been reduced to a zero-sum one, with a huge number of people competing for so-called natural resources and ignoring their god-like ability to create.
The worst kind of person is the incompetent and entitled kind. Point at any politician in this country, and I will show you an incompetent and entitled Ugandan. You see, if you are entitled to your station as a leader but don't have the competence required to lead, you force yourself to rule. A ruler is just a delusional puppet. Ruling is a weak man's game. A bad ruler will go out of his way to handicap and incapacitate his subjects, burn societies to the ground, and even sell his entire society into servitude if such an action can distract them from the thought that they are more capable of leading it than he is.
In Uganda's case, the path to decay has been the dismantling of any sort of predictability within society. The institutions have all been castrated. Service delivery is a joke. Shameless lying is a qualification for a public communications role. There are so many parallel points of authority that no one knows who is in charge. We see people with other titles commanding those the constitution claims are their bosses. There is that one idiot with no formal position in government communicating like he owns part of the country. It is all a pile of confusion.
We always wondered how stupid our great-grandparents were to be forced into slavery. But we've seen 64 years of the British and their bosses using people who look like us to break Ugandan society into a confused mess they can enslave. Aren't we as stupid as our ancestors? How long are we going to sit back and hope for someone to save us before we learn that the work is ours to do? There is no second coming of Jesus. That is just a story in a book. If we want this fiction we call Uganda to persist, we have to take it from the British. We have to tune out the promises. We have to forget about messiahs. We have to take on the mantle to build for ourselves based on what we know. This is as deep as we can fall. There is no mistake we can make while building that will put us in a worse place than where we are right now.
If the British gods, rulers, institutions, and structures are just tools to subjugate the Ugandan mind, then we have to start building parallel institutions. We have to give up on the British project entirely and start from scratch to build something for our children and their children. There is no way around it. We can keep postponing this burden to our children and their children, but the truth is that someone has to do it. Otherwise, the British will come, using money they print, and take our homes, chase us off our lands, turn us into refugees, and make up stories that condemn us to eternal victimhood.
Soon, the West will stop accepting non-native citizens; you can see that clearly from what is happening in America. It is already extremely hard, if not impossible, to become a citizen in most Eastern countries. When the incompetence of our rulers has pushed them into selling off Africa, we shall have no home. Our children and their children will be foreigners forever.
According to the Torah, a terrible famine in Canaan forced Jacob and his family to look for food. Joseph, who was Jacob's son and a powerful ruler in Egypt, invited his family to live there safely. They settled in the fertile region of Goshen, also called the land of Rameses. Your siblings are calling you to settle or study in Europe and America. It all seems like a non-decision right now. "Searching for greener pastures," we say. But the famine in Canaan is colonialism in Africa. We all know what happened to the Israelites. These stories persist not because this shit really happened, but because they capture a timeless truth about the nature of societies and the identities of peoples within those societies. They're not meant to be believed; the wisdom in the stories is meant to be ingested so that a similar pattern can easily be predicted. And so, I come to you from the future to tell you that it is not inevitable yet. Africans are not yet Israelites. We can still do something to avoid the journey to Egypt.
The colonialist is farming us into becoming Israelites, and if we don't wake ourselves out of this trance, we are going to condemn our children and their children to slavery.
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