Black Monday

Every Monday is Black Monday in Uganda. It’s a day where citizens wear black to visibly demonstrate their "discontent at the theft of public funds". Today I’m wearing black as well even though I’m not Ugandan, because I can empathize. The US government may not rank high on the corruption indices as Uganda does but I think we have the same problem of greed – where the demands of the privileged few are met at the expense of public good. The principles that keep greed in check, namely accountability, transparency and civic responsibility have been eroded, and the result is corruption. 

From Transparency International:


A colleague of mine at CDRN said something to me that I thought was very profound. He said that every citizen in a society has rights, but rights do not necessarily equate to entitlement – members of society establish these rights and thereby have an obligation to defend them when they are at risk of being eroded or lost. In the US have we abdicated that responsibility to proxy organizations?

We have established government agencies that are meant to enforce laws provided for the common good....the Environmental Protection Agency for example, but in any given political term these agencies can either be powerful enforcement bodies or puppets of the party agenda. In addition, non-profits and unions advocate for society, but as these organizations embed themselves in political and corporate systems are they not susceptible to corruption and greed as well?

In a recent article for the Black Monday movement, Arthur Larok of ActionAid Uganda said, “Many have argued that corruption is not just a political institution, but a social one as well”. Perhaps it is because of this that in Uganda there is a more grassroots approach to ensuring a fair and just society - Civil Society Organizations.

CDRN is one such organization. Its mission is: “To contribute to the growth of a vibrant and self determined civil society that defends the rights of the poor and promotes peace, justice, democracy and social equity“. CDRN goes into communities in rural Uganda and facilitates a process whereby the community’s needs are identified and prioritized, then assessed against the actual social services provided, improvements are negotiated with service providers, and then a sustainment plan is put in place to ensure that the newly improved services to not revert back to the previous state. CDRN works with communities in a way that improves governance through shared accountability, and in doing so, they reduce the power imbalance I spoke of in an earlier post. They also promote the responsibilities that citizens have in holding governments accountable. And they do this with a collaborative approach that works through official government channels.

Sometimes though, change cannot occur entirely within the system and so in Uganda there are activist groups that seek to give members of society a voice as well - the Black Monday Movement is one example. The primary goals of Black Monday are to “put an end to corruption, to streamline government bureaucracy, and to end tax holidays and instead invest tax money in infrastructure”. They ask citizens to wear black on Monday, to reject all acts of corruption, and to isolate and boycott those who are known to be corrupt. 

The challenge in a country as large and dispersed as Uganda though, is to reach everyone with this message. To that end Black Monday has produced monthly paper newsletters to be distributed across the country, they also use social media, hold public meetings, and use radio to reach to the furthest edges of Uganda. For many Ugandans outside of Kampala, radio is the primary means of obtaining information. Here is a clip from one of their audiocasts.

Black Monday and CDRN have very different means of achieving the same end - advocacy. "At its core, advocacy is about ordinary citizens doing ordinary things of extraordinary importance to change their lives." There are thousands of civil society organizations in Uganda that are united by a common belief, as stated in CDRN's 2012 Annual Report, founded on "people being the drivers of their own change".