The Cost of Looking Away: How Tolerance and the Erosion of Punishment Are Undoing Uganda

I still hold true to the teachings of my childhood: that theft is bad, that morality is what is communally acceptable, telling the truth is essential for trust and justice, and that we should feel for others because empathy forms the basis of community and social responsibility. These are generally proclaimed norms of social relations; they are by and large seen as introductory lessons for children—perhaps due to habituation. As we grow older, our behavioral patterns take a sudden shift. We start to treat those lessons not as moral guide maps, but as the idealism of childhood. Slowly but surely, decadence sets in. The traffic policeman starts taking bribes freely offered by drivers; passengers start throwing garbage out of car windows; the pastor starts deceiving the congregation with miracles; the Human Resource Officer creates ghost workers on a payroll; teachers start cheating exams for their students—slowly but surely, then suddenly, all at once: this is the story of decay.

Today, we find our society in this mess, not by accident but by design. And then one day, the light dawns on us—our Solzhenitsyn moment occurs—moments of confrontation with ourselves, of how we aided in building the walls around us through our small daily choices. The erosion begins quietly, not with grand acts, but with small transgressions that we let pass as minor. The magma boils quietly for decades, and then the volcano suddenly erupts—once again, Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius.

If a broken window in a house is left unrepaired, all the windows will sooner or later be broken. Every ignored transgression creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop with the message that the said act is permissible. A minor bribe left unpunished, a small, seemingly harmless lie—all these set the groundwork for bigger transgressions. It is like a tumour that, when left untreated, spreads to other organs that sooner or later will cease to function normally. This is the current physiognomy of Uganda, and by extension, a lot of different societies in Africa.

The undoing of Uganda, then, is not simply a result of corruption or a case of mismanagement, but rather the erosion of consequence, both at the micro level and at the institutional level. We suffer both under enforcement and selective enforcement. It is a result of the disruption of that feedback loop whose function is to maintain moral equilibrium in a society that continuously provides incentives for altering the scales. In classical game theory, when the payoff matrix changes so that defection (corruption, cheating, transgressions) yields higher rewards than cooperation (moral behavior), punishment becomes the only tool to restore the Nash equilibrium. Take the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma: cooperation only survives if there is a tangible threat of punishment for defection. The situation we find ourselves in today is a ‘multiple-equilibrium problem,’ with the scales skewed in favor of corrupt norms.

A society that does not punish moral transgressions soon loses memory of what is right and wrong. Like the proclamation of Dostoevsky’s tragic hero, Ivan Karamazov, who pronounced that “if there is no God, then everything is permissible,” it follows that if there is no clear moral guide map, then everything is permissible. The result being that Smerdyakov, the lackey, commits parricide and later informs Ivan, “You commanded; I obeyed.” In the story, Smerdyakov was the literal embodiment of Ivan’s ideas. This text is very instructive, for it shows that in the absence of societal taboos, moral chaos ensues.

If a society stands for nothing, then it stands for everything; and if it stands for everything in the name of tolerance or whatever, then it stands for nothing—the result: mimetic contagion. Punishment, then, at its best, is not cruelty; it is not a failure to “turn the other cheek”; it is moral restoration. It is the way that a society says, “We still believe in right and wrong.”

In precolonial African societies, justice was rarely a private matter. An injustice was perceived as a disruption of communal harmony. Among the Dinka of South Sudan, a man who killed another’s family member did not simply face death as an act of vengeance to level the field; he offered cattle in restitution as a moral act to restore harmony between the affected families. Among the Baganda, conflicts like disputes over farmland were solved through public hearings where a compromise was often reached, thereby preserving communal harmony. In Chinua Achebe's landmark work Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo, the respected village warrior and farmer of Umuofia, unintentionally kills Ezeudu's son during a funeral. And while the unintentionality of the act was established, the action still violated a sacred law—that of not spilling the blood of a clansman. The result was that Okonkwo and his family were exiled from the village for seven years. The significance of Okonkwo's exile, properly understood, was not revenge but ritualized punishment aimed at preserving moral and social order. It served to restore the social imbalance created by Okonkwo's actions; it was symbolic, educational, and preventative. This was how punishment and justice were understood back then among the Igbo people of Nigeria.

To further illustrate the point, in 1973, Singapore, as a small developing nation under Lee Kuan Yew, adopted one of the toughest drug laws in the world, with punishments going as far as the death penalty for trafficking small quantities, such as 15 g of heroin or 30 g of cocaine. At the time, the law was seen as unfair and a violation of human rights, and human rights defenders often bashed it for its radical stance. In later interviews reflecting on the drug policy, Lee remarked, “If we had not been strict on drugs, we would have been destroyed by now.” But here is the thing: to the small developing nation with minimal prospects, drug abuse was not merely a criminal issue; it presented an existential threat to societal cohesion and national survival. The result was that drug addiction rates fell sharply from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, and Singapore became a regional model for drug deterrence. Singapore’s logic was quite simple: by refusing to overlook simple transgressions, the cracks could not widen; punishment was not cruelty—it was moral restoration. It was a pre-emptive restoration.

The current Ugandan justice system is neither symbolic, educational, nor preventative. It selectively administers punishments as a tool of injustice and retribution and rewards the powerful in positions of authority. It lets the small cracks widen into fractures. Where punishment once served a definitive purpose of affirming a community’s shared values, it now beckons as a spectacle of inequality. A petty theft of a few hundred thousand shillings is punished disproportionately, but a government official embezzling billions of taxpayer money is left to walk free, and even becomes an aspirational character. Schools owned by government bureaucrats are left to cheat freely with public knowledge, but a village school suspected of cheating on national exams has its results withheld, as if to create the illusion of law and order. Singapore’s success was not in the severity of punishment alone, but in its predictability. When everyone knows that punishments apply equally and consistently, the broken windows stay fixed.

And then that common lamentation: “How did we get here?” Well, this is how we got here. What started as ‘lunch facilitation’ and ‘appreciation’ for public officials who sped up paperwork became full-blown bribery. Today, one can hardly process a permit or land title without paying a bribe. This culture has spread upwards, from the clerks to the commissioners and ministers. Ministers now collude with contractors to inflate contract sizes to get even larger kickbacks. A few forged names on a public payroll to “help someone’s relatives” have morphed into full-scale ghost workers costing taxpayers billions. Occasional audits uncover these schemes, but nothing has deterred them; they are seen as the norm. What started as small tokens during election campaigns has turned into full-scale voter bribery—the result: politics turned transactional. Voters expect gifts, and leaders expect returns on their investments through embezzlement. Politics has become a dance of the fevered. Members of Parliament are bribed to pass laws that favor a certain political class. That infamous shout of Chris Obore, the Clerk to Parliament, “We are in things,” captures our whole political predicament.

If we then recognize that the role of punishment is affirmation of our shared values, that to punish is to say, “we still have boundaries,” that not everything is negotiable, Uganda’s tragedy then is not excessive punishment but rather its arbitrary application, especially its absence where it is needed the most.

The lessons of my childhood were not naive after all. They were a map of survival for a society that cared about its soul. A society that believed in justice, fairness, truth, and consequence. Perhaps our greatest task then is to return to what was, and how it ought to have always been—that punishment is not vengeance when fair and visible. It is how the community's soul is preserved. The restoration of the social fabric is then neither a government project nor an individual one —it is both, simultaneously. It requires us to hold the government responsible while at the same time refusing to participate in the small moral corruptions that enable the big ones. It begins at the top and at the bottom, with the minister and the clerk, the traffic officer and the driver, with the headteachers and the students, with you and me, all at once and everywhere. Only then will we live by the wisdom of Candide — that each of us must cultivate our own garden.