We bought the convoy and buried our own: How Uganda learned to love chrome and forget life
A country that chooses 17 Land Cruisers over one life-saving machine has not run out of money — it has run out of conscience
By Mukama Phillip Kahigiriza
He was not a poor man. He paid. That is the painful part. He paid at the best hospitals in Kampala. They took his money, ran their scans and told him: “We see nothing.” He was not dying of poverty. He was dying in a country that chose to buy 17 cars instead of one machine that could see.
I keep returning to that because my mind keeps searching for an easy excuse. Had he been poor, I might have understood. I would have told myself the story we use to sleep at night — blamed his empty pockets and moved on. But he was not poor. That is where the wound starts to bleed.
This son of Tooro, this leader, this man whose name we now speak in whispers — when his back began to ache, he did not retreat to the village. He walked into those hospitals in Kampala. The ones with cold air conditioning that hits you at the entrance. Glass doors that slide open on their own. Receptionists who speak soft English. Bills at the end that could give a man with hypertension a second condition.
He paid. Without complaint. He paid.
They laid him on a hard table and brought in the machines. The X-ray. The MRI. They hummed and beeped and photographed his insides. Then a doctor — a good Ugandan doctor who I am certain tried his best — looked at the images, looked at the man and said the words that now haunt this country: “We see nothing.”
Imagine that moment. You are in pain. It wakes you at 2am and sits on your spine like a stone. A man in a white coat, certificates framed on the wall behind him, tells you that your pain does not exist. That inside you, there is nothing. He was dying. And our Pearl of Africa, with all its flags and summits and anthems, could not see him dying.
Because he had money, he received something 45 million of us will never have: a second chance to learn the name of what was killing him. He bought a ticket to Nairobi. In Nairobi, there is a machine. It does not know whether you are a prince or a peasant. It does not speak Runyoro or Acholi or Luganda. It simply sees. Positron Emission Tomography. A PET scan.
That machine did not say “We see nothing.” It said: I see a thief. I see cancer eating your bones. One year later, he was dead. But he died knowing. His family could prepare. His death had a name.
How many Ugandans die every day without ever knowing what killed them? How many mothers in Bududa are told “It is just back pain” until they can no longer stand? How many fathers in Arua are given painkillers for what is actually cancer eating them alive?
The Observer captured it precisely in a line that deserves to be framed and nailed to the gate of every government office in this country: “A PET scan costs about $3m — approximately 17 Land Cruisers. If there was a meeting of government officials, you would run out of space to park them. That is how many we have in Uganda, but a PET scan is not something we have been able to buy and install yet.”
Seventeen Land Cruisers. Not a thousand. Not a hundred. Seventeen. Stop reading for a moment and picture them: white, shining, new, each one costing more than 650 million shillings, each one ready to carry one man from his large house to his large office.
Now picture one quiet room in Mulago. One machine inside it. A machine that costs the same as those 17 cars. A machine that works for 15 years, day and night, without a fuel allowance, without a per diem, without complaining — one that looks into the bodies of 45 million Ugandans and says: I see something. Let us save you early.
Seventeen cars against 45 million lives. We chose the cars.
The cold, analytical truth: a Land Cruiser serves one person for roughly four to five years on our roads, after which it is scrap. Factor in weekly fuel, a driver’s salary and servicing, and that single vehicle costs Uganda more than one billion shillings over its lifetime while producing nothing, curing nothing and teaching nothing. It is prestige — pure, empty prestige.
A PET scan serves an entire nation for 10 to 15 years. It catches cancer early. Early detection cuts treatment costs tenfold. It spares families financial ruin, keeps productive citizens alive and reduces the enormous bill the government incurs flying patients to India, Nairobi and beyond. That one machine pays for itself within two years from savings alone.
One serves vanity. One serves life. Why did we choose vanity?
Because in Uganda, power must be seen to be believed. Okot p’Bitek saw this coming. In Song of Lawino, Lawino weeps for her husband Ocol, who returns from education despising his own mother: “Ocol says he is a modern man, a progressive and civilised man. He says he has read many books. But he has forgotten how to carry his own mother who is sick.” We are Ocol. We speak fluently of Vision 2040 and middle-income status. We build houses of glass. But we have forgotten how to carry our sick.
The most painful truth is this: the man who signs the paper to buy 17 more Land Cruisers will never be a victim of his own decision. When his back begins to ache, his secretary calls Entebbe Airport. A business class ticket is printed. He flies to Nairobi, Johannesburg, London, Delhi. He lies in the machine his own government refused to buy for his own people. He returns and cuts a ribbon for another fleet.
They have privatised survival. They have made patriotism something for the poor to die for and treatment something for the rich to fly for. So when your father dies, they will arrive in their V8s, praise him loudly, press 500,000 shillings into your hand and drive away in the car that could have been the machine that saved him.
Our pumpkin — Okot p’Bitek’s pumpkin, the one that must never be uprooted — is compassion. Common sense. The capacity for shame. We have uprooted it and planted Land Cruisers where we should have planted life.
How many more sons of Tooro, daughters of Teso, children of Acholi must be told “We see nothing” before we, the people, finally open our eyes and see?
Until we look at a long convoy and feel anger, not awe. Until we look at a hospital without medicine and feel shame, not mere sympathy. Until we choose one machine that sees cancer over 17 cars that see nothing but our own foolishness — we will remain a nation that drives in first-class luxury to bury its own people in third-class graves.
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