UGANDA: Senior Citizens Deserve Better Deal, says Editorial

KAMPALA (The Monitor), August 4, 2007: An editorial in The Monitor of Kampala today focusses on the injustice to senior citizens, including elder statesmen. EDITORIAL: The Presidential Emoluments and Benefits Act in its Third Schedule is definite in describing the benefits due to former presidents at taxpayers cost. Therefore, in ideal conditions, there would not have been any need for elder statesman and former president, Godfrey Lukongwa Binaisa to run to Daily Monitor last month and cry about having no transportation. It is appalling that the matter of former president's means of transportation can only be addressed after some amount of hullabaloo in the newspapers. We have the necessary law in place to ensure that past leaders, at least those who did not commit prosecutable crimes while in office, should be treated decently. It is, therfore, wrong for the government to continue with this irritating habit of playing hide and seek with senior citizens who have served this country in various capacities. Only the criminal types can be arraigned before a court of competent jurisdiction and charged with their alleged crimes as and if the case may be. Our law-abiding retired citizens deserve better than this casual and almost reckless manner in which the Ministry of Public Service carries out its function of taking good care of the interests of this category of people. On top of being a former leader, Binaisa is of considerably advanced age -- a personage deserving of traditional African respect. It will not do for him to suffer the embarassment of running to media houses to lament about his apparently unhappy circumstances. Gen. Mustapha Adrisi, the former vice president during the times of dictator Idi Amin, is a man of some age too though he might not be the type to make public the fact that government has not been keeping its end of the bargain -- in total conformity with the law in this particular respect. This official tendency not to take these things seriously exhibits itself with even much greater pain to those who suffer the injustice in the matter of pension and gratuity payment to retired former civil servants. The queues of old and fast-aging Ugandans, who have done their time in the public service, is disheartening. Many of these people die before reaping the benefits of their sweat. Others are forced to live a miserable life because they are no longer strong enough to carry on in gainful employment, and so have no means to afford basic necessities of life. The culture of respect for our elders must be inculcated in the hearts and minds of those who run public office because in a few years time they too could find themselves at the receiving end of this mischievous treatment they are handing out to fellow Ugandans today. Copyright © 2007 The Monitor. All rights reserved.