Develop clean energy? Support fossil fuel? Imagine sugar cane
Chewing a sugarcane while leaning on it to walk may sound like a dumb thing to do, but unfortunately, it is the way many people do business in our communities.
Chewing sugar cane is hard, very hard! If sugar canes were talking persons, they would ceaselessly proclaim that being chewed is very hard, and very painful.
In return for his hard work (so hard that some nutritionist claimed that the energy a sugar cane consumer spends chewing it is less than what he derives from the liquid ‘meal’) the chewer is rewarded with the sweetness that the cane surrenders to him as he chews it.
Now from a legal precedent set in Kampala last week, a chewer must not demand another function from the poor sugar cane which he is chewing without the written consent of that what is being chewed.
This wisdom has been dispensed by a High Court judge in Kampala while throwing out a suit seeking financial remedies by a UK-based gentleman who had sued his Uganda-based ex-girlfriend for defrauding him of Ush422 million (88,000 British Pounds).
The court relied on the law to determine that ‘Mr Disappointed’ had no justified claim against the woman in absence of contractual evidence as to what the money he used to give her was intended for.
But apparently for the sake of us the majority without legal training, the learned judge threw in a local analogy to educate us about the need for clarity and specificity when conducting multipurpose relations.
The judge said that the man had chosen to embark on a journey using a sugar cane as a walking stick but then along the way, he had started eating (the walking stick-turned-sugarcane).
Chewing a sugarcane while leaning on it to walk may sound like a dumb thing to do, but unfortunately, it is the way many people do business in our communities.
So, the judge apparently used the analogy to implore people and entities in a ‘situationship’ to be fair to their partners and get from them only the agreed purpose of the affair instead of smuggling in another purpose without explicitly first securing consent for introducing a new deliverable in the ‘relationship’.
In writing. Apparently, the gentleman would fly to Uganda for varying periods of time, enjoy the sugar cane, before something we may never know happened, and then tried to use court to get a refund for the cane not serving as a walking stick, or vice versa.
After eating half of the walking stick, how do you expect it to serve you when it can no longer reach the ground? It just wants to rest in your pocket and be pampered!
As we approach the impending United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change in Azerbaijan, our dear planet, national treasuries and our individual pockets are looking like the sugar cane being used as a walking stick and vice versa.
In the aggressor’s corner, the big businesses and some governments, unfortunately including those of poor countries, are the ones looking like a guy who chews the walking stick.
For why on earth should a state government use the limited resources available to energy for both fuel consumption and electricity-based developments?
Why do authorities tax people or contract loans on their behalf, to finance development of clean, renewable energy and then make the same people pay exorbitantly for fuels, made more expensive by taxation?
The taxpayers don’t want to be used as walking sticks while being chewed at the same time; you either use their money for developing clean energy or for supporting dirty energy – not both.
In this regard, the Uganda government deserves to be commended for its recent decisive move to develop an electric-powered railway system.
A few bolder African states like Tanzania and Ethiopia have already started travelling using that route. Tanzania launched the clean transport system a year or so back while Ethiopia has been at it (railway electrification) for almost a decade. Yes, and Ethiopia recently banned the importation of fuel powered vehicles altogether.
It would indeed be sad when the cheaper-to-operate electric railways become dominant and yet some poor countries wouldn’t have finished paying the colossal debts they are accumulating in building railway systems based on diesel-burning locomotives.
It would be equally sad if as countries accumulate debts to develop infrastructure for supporting transport systems based on “dirty” fuel, they are also borrowing to develop clean transport systems. My people call it washing white linen clean and spreading it on the mud to dry.
