Reflections on 'Building the Nation'
Many east Africans hold Poems from East Africa close to their hearts. I am not an exception. It is this anthology of poems that introduced me to Building the Nation, a poem by Henry Barlow that stars a Permanent Secretary and his driver – two citizens who build the same nation in their own different ways.
The poem is an exemplary juxtaposition of the two faces of the civil service. On the first face, one will find the patriotic, diligent, efficient and disciplined workforce. This is the group in whose likeness the driver or persona, if you may, is moulded. Then there is the ugly face – it is in this quarter that corrupt, deceitful and unpatriotic public servants sit. The Permanent Secretary is the embodiment of this lot.
The persona’s mastery of verbal irony cannot be gainsaid. Of what good to the nation is it to have a driver rush a PS to an ‘important’ and ‘urgent’ function – a luncheon at the Vic? How beneficial to the citizenry is a luncheon during which the attendees have cold beer amid small talk, fried chicken with niceties, wine to fill the hollowness, ice-cream to cover their stereotype jokes and coffee to keep them awake on the return journey?
The PS’ belated expression of interest in the welfare of his driver is as laughable as it is ironical. Oblivious of his driver’s consciousness of his insincerity, the PS attributes the intermittent yawns he lets out during their return journey to his failure to have any lunch.
The PS amuses his driver when he attributes his failure to have lunch to the delicate diplomatic duties to which he had dedicated his attention. The PS further mischievously laments over the ‘pains’ his lot suffers while building the nation.
I would not have revisited Building the Nation had I not chanced upon a poem titled, The VIP Room. This poem arrested my attention when I saw its persona announce the death of the nation builder at the beginning of each stanza.
Well, let me cut the chase. The author of this poem is Philippa Namutebi Kabali – Kagwa, Poet Christopher Henry Muwanga Barlow’s lastborn daughter.
Through the persona of the poem, Kabali reveals how the nation let down her father –the builder of the nation – in his hour of need. The builder of the nation dies helplessly in the VIP Room on the 6th floor of a national flagship hospital.
To exonerate themselves from blame, medics attribute his death to his advanced age. They make no mention of how the builder of the nation had endured a three day wait before the physician showed up and gave his heart a clean bill of health so that the surgeon could fix his broken hip. And they see nothing wrong in the surgeon’s disappearance to a ‘conference’ just when the builder of the nation had been lined up for an operation!
Let’s consider the fate that befell the builder of the nation vis-à-vis the goings on in our nation.
It is undeniable that majority of Kenyans are diligent, efficient and dedicated workers. This notwithstanding, have they, like the builder of the nation, never been let down by the state? Are our systems and institutions operating at their optimal capacities? Do we have a civil service that puts the citizenry before its interests? Is our health system so functional that patients do not die helplessly when medics abandon them due to remuneration related impasses? And what of our education system? Are all children offered equally thick ends of the stick insofar as quality education is concerned? I refuse to ask any questions about our national heroes and how kind the state has been to them.
In his lifetime, Henry Barlow dedicated a lot of his time to two things – civil service and writing poetry. He rose through civil service rank and file to serve as the Permanent Secretary in a number of post-independence Uganda ministries. This, coupled with the critical lessons he teaches in Building the Nation, validates the builder of the nation honorary title that his daughter confers on him in her poem, The VIP Room.
In Building the Nation we should find encouragement to deeply reflect on how we want to build our nation henceforth. What we need are prudent builders of the nation who will help resuscitate our economy. We need visionary builders of the nation who will help scale down the national debt burden and lead from the front in matters pertaining to environmental conservation.
Don’t you agree that we need selfless builders of the nation who will stop at nothing to safeguard public coffers? Such builders of the nation will certainly cut down unnecessary tax-payer funded foreign trips. It’s such builders who will give us first-rate roads, hospitals and schools.
The time for a complete about turn is right now. Like the Permanent Secretary’s driver, citizens should eke their living through justified and legal means. Further, they should emulate the driver’s ability to pick out the PS’ deceit and, as they say out there, beat the political class at its own game.
We are the builders of the nation! We should submit to integrity and turn it into a universal national value. We must vehemently condemn corruption, state wastage and opulence. If we do this our public health, school and transport systems shall be the future models against which the rest of the world will benchmark. There is hope that we can make Kenya a better nation, don’t you agree?